The Long Goodbye

Meghan O'Rourke was thirty-two when her mother died of cancer on Christmas Day 2008. As a writer even in the depths of her grief she was fascinated by what she observed of herself in the aftermath: the rage she felt not only at what had happened to her mother but also at the inability of people to acknowledge her pain; her sense that the meaning of her life had changed fundamentally with the loss of a parent; the way that the reassuringly familiar often became somehow completely new and strange. The Long Goodbye interleaves personal recollections of her much-loved mother with an examination of what it means to grieve in a society which no longer has the rituals - or even most of the time the desire - to engage with grief to understand it and to let it do both its worst - and its best.>