The long goodbye

Summary: From one of America's young literary voices, this is a portrait of the unbearable anguish of grief and the enduring power of familial love. What does it mean to mourn today, in a culture that has largely set aside rituals that acknowledge grief? After her mother died of cancer at the age of fifty-five, the author found that nothing had prepared her for the intensity of her sorrow. In the first anguished days, she began to create a record of her interior life as a mourner, trying to capture the paradox of grief, its monumental agony and microscopic intimacies, an endeavor that ultimately bloomed into a profound look at how caring for her mother during her illness changed and strengthened their bond. Her story is one of a life gone off the rails, of how watching her mother's illness, and separating from her husband, left her fundamentally altered. But it is also one of resilience, as she observes her family persevere even in the face of immeasurable loss. This work conveys the fleeting moments of joy that make up a life, and the way memory can lead us out of the jagged darkness of loss. Blending research and reflection, the personal and the universal, this memoir about the death of her mother and grieving aftermath, the author, both a poet and journalist, ponders the eternal human question: how do we live with the knowledge that we will one day die?