The Long Goodbye: What Is It Like To Recover From Grief?

I began to notice it around Easter, the season of resurrection, the season of regeneration. The daffodils were peeking up out of the seemingly still-frozen ground. The magnolias had come into bloom, their spoon-size petals opening wide. And I started feeling … better. Not "recovered," the way one feels after a flu. But … better. I suppose this isn't a surprise. I simply conform to the clinical norm: Studies show many mourners begin to feel less depressed around four months after the death. Knowing this makes me feel annoyed and truculent. I don't want to conform to a grief scale. I want to be an extremity. A master of grief. Or do I mean a slave to it, a supplicant? But in practical terms, it feels like a relief. I have begun to roll the rock back from this cave, at least.

Mainly, I have more energy. I can crack a joke now and then. (Though I can still detect a kind of heaviness in my reactions, the artificiality of trying to act "normal.") When I'm sad, the pangs are just as painful—perhaps even more so, since it has been longer now since I've seen my mother, and the reality of her death is beginning to intrude on me in new ways. So "better" doesn't mean I'm any less shocked by the odd enormity of loss. It just means it's easier to get out of bed.

Easter itself was painful. I spent the day being reminded of the ghosts of Easters past: the many times my mother would hide eggs for us to "hunt" and then forget where she had put that last one. A week later, moldy and soft, it would turn up in someone's shoe. (At the time, I couldn't understand how she could forget: those precious eggs! So hard to find!) I walked around in my neighborhood, a mix of old Italian-Catholic families and bourgeois arrivistes, and found it difficult to watch kids and their parents saunter about in the lazy togetherness.

The day put my superstitious magical thinking and my intellect at odds. I am not religious, and I don't quite believe that Jesus rose from the tomb. But the truth is that even now, nearly four months after my mother's death, I still go about privately believing she's coming back. Deep down, I feel that—like Dr. Manhattan in The Watchmen—she will, through some effort of mind, reconstitute herself and appear to me, even as a flickering ghostly form. A friend sent me a wonderful poem by Stephen Edgar, "Nocturnal," which captures this disbelief. The poet describes listening to a cassette play the voice of a lost loved one:

Who ever thought they would not hear the dead?
Who ever thought that they could quarantine
******Those who are not, who once had been?
******At that old station on North Head
************Inmates still tread the boards,
Or something does …
***********************Undeleted,
What happened is embedded and repeated.

That Thursday—one of those fabulously warm spring days that come and vanish—I went for a run in Prospect Park in the late afternoon. I went all the way around the park, which I don't often do, finishing the loop after a long hill near the entrance. At the top of the rise, there is a stand of magnolias and a view of what's called "Long Meadow." Exhausted, salty with sweat, I plopped down on the grass and granted myself 10 minutes to put aside the to-do lists invading my head and just … contemplate. (One downside of feeling better has been that it's become easier to let time pass without noticing how I'm really feeling.) I felt the sun on my face. The grass tickled my hands. An ant crossed my pinkie. The spring sun was warm but not yet hot.

As I relaxed, I was flooded with first one memory, then another, and then, like a BlackBerry tuning in to its signal after a plane trip, a dozen or so distinct memories of being with my mother in this park. First I remembered that one summer day in 1994 she and I met her friend (then-assistant) Diana to sit in lawn chairs and catch up while I read Joan Didion's After Henry. I remembered the many mornings my mother and I would go running together in the park before school. We'd listen to cheesy mixes we made and traded on our Walkmans, or we'd just talk. Running in the cool morning air, discussing our lives, I felt like her friend as well as her daughter.