The Long Goodbye by Meghan O'Rourke Page A

their wisdom, experience, and sore feet. I was the model relative, slipping out along the linoleum hallway in my thick stay-over socks, delicately catching the attention of the receptionist and saying, “I see that my mother’s morphine is about to run out. I wonder if someone could change it before it starts beeping and wakes her—I know,” leaning in confidingly, like a student bowing her head to a good teacher, “that we need to stay ahead of the pain.” I would pause a beat. “I know you’re all so busy, I just don’t want my mother”—a slight stress on the word, another pause, almost imperceptible, so that the nurse could think my mother my mother and remember her own mother, who perhaps had cradled her and nursed her, the only relationship like that we have, mysterious, impenetrable, luxurious— “to suffer.” And I’d exhale. And the strapped receptionist wouldn’t smile, but she would say, “I’ll try to signal the floor nurse for you, honey.”
    Doctors and nurses are the family members’ priests: we supplicate them, please let us go, just let us go home, we recite their catechism, we assure them we will not blame them, we just want her to be at home, we will not sue you. These nurses were our benefactors. They were the ones who did all the work. The doctors knew things but Had to Get On. The nurses administered the morphine. They adjusted the bed. They washed my mother and helped her take a shower. They were a sorority, eager, optimistic, burned-out. I liked the receptionist. She was tough, and she saw through my wheedling show, but she helped me anyway, because she understood that underneath the performance lay not manipulation but desperation. In these moments, sliding back to my mother’s room, past the room of another woman dying of cancer whose daughter, about my age, much taller, elegant and thin, showed up regularly with her two young children, and irregularly with her husband, and who caused, in me, a flicker of envy, of what-might-have-been, a whiff of the perennial outsider, so that even here, even now, where I knew we were facing the Real Deal, where I was being changed, altered, every day by it, I would experience the exact same twinge I used to feel in eighth grade at the sight of a peer who was put together and clean-limbed in all the ways I never felt, and here she was, yet again, taunting me with her family, her two ten-fingered and ten-toed children, as she, like me, bent, adjusted pillows, brought flowers, cajoled nurses. Your grief is not like mine, I thought spitefully. You’re going home to your family. I am newly divorced. I have no family. All I have is this: I have devoted myself to understanding death so that afterward I can say that I was there, fully there. And in this perverse manner I somehow believed, and still do, sitting here with my books and my words, using my mind to scavenge every last scrap of meaning from the bones of these old ways, that I could lift the window in that dim, grimy Bridgeport hospital room and take my mother’s bony hand and slip out, out into the street, past the hospital awning into the royal purple evening and then out into the sea, the dark green sea.
    And then the noises would return. I could hear the coughing man whose family talked about sports and sitcoms every time they visited, sitting politely around his bed as if you couldn’t see the death knobs that were his knees poking through the blanket, but as they left they would hug him and say, We love you, and We’ll be back soon, and in their voices and in mine and in the nurse who was so gentle with my mother, tucking cool white sheets over her with a twist of her wrist, I could hear love, love that sounded like a rope, and I began to see a flickering electric current everywhere I looked as I went up and down the halls, flagging nurses, little flecks of light dotting the air in sinewy lines, and I leaned on