The Long Goodbye Read Free

is universal. Nor do I write about it because I think it was more extreme, more unusual, more special than anyone else’s. On the contrary: I believe that my grief was an everyday one.
    When we talk about love, we go back to the start, to pinpoint the moment of free fall. But this story is the story of an ending, of death, and it has no beginning. A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That’s what makes her a mother: you cannot start the story.
    But, oh hell, you keep trying.
    Â 
    Â 
    O NE SATURDAY in May 2006, I took the train to Connecticut to visit my mother. We lived only a couple hours apart, but we hadn’t seen each other in months—both of us too busy with work—and I had become vaguely concerned about her. She was having trouble with her knee—suffering from the arthritis that had plagued her mother before her—and her blood pressure was dangerously high. She retained much of the beauty she’d had as a young woman, a beauty particular for its expression of a serenity of soul and a charged wit palpable below her calm surface. But she had gained weight after the birth of my youngest brother, Eamon, when she was thirty-four, and the doctor had asked her to start taking her blood pressure regularly. I worried that she might have a heart attack; she was unusually anxious because she and my father were selling their apartment and leaving behind their old lives in Brooklyn, where they had worked for decades at Saint Ann’s, an idiosyncratic private school my brothers and I had all attended; they were moving to Westport to work at a new private school, where my mother had become headmaster and my father, who taught Greek and Latin, was running the language program.
    It was a big change. My parents had both worked at Saint Ann’s since I was young (my father liked to tell stories of being hired as a barefoot hippie), first as teachers and later as administrators, too. My mother was a person with a strong sense of justice, which made children and teachers alike trust her, and over the years she had been promoted first to principal of the middle school, then to dean of academics; the headmaster had told her that he wanted her to be his successor. Instead, she had made the choice to go to Pierrepont, a school founded a few years earlier by a woman named Isabel, who was ardently devoted to children’s education. Charismatic and funny, Isabel had a visionary intensity that my mother found alluring, and she became one of my mother’s closest friends. Helping build a new school stimulated my mother’s mind as nothing had in years. But it was a stressful job. The logistical challenges—and the sense of responsibility—were enormous, and she and Isabel had to learn how to make decisions together and trust each other. These things weighed on her at times, and inwardly she worried about the future.
    You have to try to relax, I would say, when we talked.
    That May afternoon was unusually warm. My mother and I went out into the yard of the house my parents were renting and sat by the pool, rolling up our pants and dangling our feet in the cool blue water. Leaning back, she pushed her sunglasses over her hair and turned her face up to the sun. She suddenly looked girlish. As we gazed across the pool at the horses from the farm next door, she talked about the pressures of school and of selling the apartment where she and my dad had lived for twenty years. But mostly she was quiet, content to sit in silence as the early dragonflies skimmed the water. The two golden retrievers, Ringo and Huck, nosed through the grass. Stillness radiated around us. I was happy just to be near her.
    A few days later, I felt sick to my stomach and left work early. (I was an editor and writer at Slate , an online magazine.) I’d just lain down in bed when the phone rang. It was my mother. “Meg?” her voice rose. “You’re home? There’s something I want to tell