recovering from loss

I was not prepared for the shock of it. It was an event I’d feared since my father’s heart attack when I was 12 and had thought about frequently as he aged. But the notion of the stroke-out death of my 88-year-old father in the year 2000 would be a surprise — would catch me up-short — was not anticipated, despite all the people I counseled in their grieving. It was the difference between knowing about a thing and living it.

Nor could I have imagined the almost animal-like pain, the inarticulate state of being words can’t describe, and the feeling of emptiness following; something like an ache at the cellular level, a kind of psychic moan.

And then fatigue, for months, as if, in his death my father had taken my life’s energy with him. My children eventually asked my wife, “When will dad be himself again?”

And even when you do recover you are never quite the same person you were before. One’s life becomes “before and after:” before you went to school and after, before you learned to drive and after, before you married and after, before you had children and after.

And yet, the event itself, the death of a parent before the death of his child, is a commonplace. It is the way things are supposed to work. Beyond a certain age, we all know it will almost certainly happen. We see it happen to others. But this observational experience does not bring it home, make it real.

I can still tell you the name of the first person I knew to lose a parent. My classmate Marilyn Levin, some time around sixth grade. The event made an impression, a scary impression. And then, in high school, Michael Karsen’s mother died. You note these things with a shudder and don’t know what to say to your classmate. Perhaps you say you’re sorry or say nothing or ignore the person — avoid eye contact. All because it is so terrible and, you think, “It could have happened to me. It still could.”

And finally, if you’re lucky, it happens only much later. By which time, again “if you are lucky,” you have gotten old enough that your children recognize you are aging; that at some point you too will die. And now you have another reason to stay alive: to spare your children the pain of your demise.

No, spare is not the right word. Postpone is.

Life is like a relay race, batons passing from parent to child, to their children, and on and on. It has been going on since the beginning. It is the least remarkable thing about life, that it ends. And yet, it is the most serious and dreaded thing, as well.

If you live long enough, then you realize life eventually becomes a series of goodbyes, departures. Not the life of your childhood, which was a constant flow of hellos, arrivals.

But what if you lose your spouse at a very early age? That is not “supposed” to happen. The third President of the United States knew about this. When he was 39, Thomas Jefferson’s 33-year-old wife Martha died. The couple had been married just 10 years.

Both of the Jeffersons enjoyed reading aloud to each other. One of their favorite books was The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. Martha was trying to read a portion to her husband as she lay dying, trying to convey her feelings about the separation soon coming. When she became too weak to speak the words, she began to write them:

Time wastes too fast: every letter
I trace tells me with what rapidity
life follows my pen. The days and hours
of it are flying over our heads like
clouds of windy day never to return–
more. Every thing presses on —

When even this became too difficult, her husband picked up the pen and completed the passage from memory (see the image just above):

and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make!

Jefferson is reported to have fainted when his spouse died. He was carried from her bed. For three weeks he didn’t speak or leave his room. Only his daughter Patsy was finally able to bring him out of himself. She later wrote:

He walked almost incessantly night and day, lying down only when nature was completely exhausted on a palette that had been brought in during his long fainting fit. When at last he left his room, he rode out, and from that time he was incessantly on horseback, rambling about on the least frequented roads and just as often through the woods, and those melancholy rambles. I was his constant companion, a solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief.

For the rest of his life, Jefferson kept the small piece of paper on which he and his wife had their last literary dialogue. The paper and a lock of his wife’s hair, captured in an engraved locket he had made for the purpose, remained in a secret drawer next to his bed. Jefferson never remarried, although there is evidence that he did have a sexual relationship with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings.

Thomas Jefferson became President 19-years after Martha’s death. He would die on July 4, 1826, the same day as his friend John Adams, the nation’s second President. It was precisely 50 years after these men signed the Declaration of Independence, a document drafted by Jefferson.

Thus, the nation lost two of its founding fathers in 24 hours. But that is a different kind of loss and a different kind of story.

Some patients haunt your memory.

I recall treating a teenager who had lost her father suddenly. It had actually been many years since he died, but she remained cut-off from the world and her family.

Friends were kept at a distance, her mother was pushed away, and her stepfather was never permitted to come close to her, try us he might.

Never ever.

Her mother and mom’s second husband worried about her self-isolation, so they brought her in to see me.

As the treatment progressed, I discovered that this young woman thought about her father a lot.

Every day.

She would review the memories that she still retained of his kindness and warmth.

Of course, I’d never met him, but I got the sense that she had idealized him — fashioned her memory so as to make him a vision of perfection that no flesh and blood mortal can hope to achieve.

And the recollected reproduction of her father, almost like a ghost, remained the most intimate connection of her life.

Not just historically, but even while I was treating her.

In fact, sometimes she would talk to him; one way, naturally, since she was not psychotic. And that provided her with a kind of closeness that was the best she could do to recreate the comfort that her dad had provided when this young woman was little.

As the protagonist states in Robert Anderson’s play I Never Sang For My Father, sometimes “death ends a life, but not a relationship.”

The people — the real people who reached out to my patient — found her unresponsive. They could not compare — could not compete — with the vanished flawlessness of her dad; an excellence that, after all, probably never existed in the first place, however dedicated and fine a man he might have been.

Moreover, her “relationship” with her father was safe: the dead cannot die on you; or reject you; or move away. They are utterly reliable and totally benign, unlike the rest of us.

As most of us do, my patient had been trying to protect herself from the injuries that life delivers from without, but left unguarded those equally tender places that are open to the wounds that come from within.

—

When a child loses a parent early on, she often loses the surviving parent, as well.

No, not to death, but to grief. Having lost a spouse, the surviving despondent parent (more often than not) is unavailable to aid the children. She is too bereft herself to be able to be the life-giving, supportive, attentive, omnipresent presence that children sometimes need a parent to be.

Worst of all, it is precisely at this time of loss that the child needs the surviving parent most desperately. And, it is at precisely this time that the remaining parent is least available and least capable of giving what he or she might wish to give, if only he or she could.

The result is a double-loss: one dead parent and another who is, for a time at least, a dead man walking, the half-alive state that we all know from the shock and privation and emptiness of a broken heart; a heart that one cannot imagine will ever heal.

It is no one’s fault, certainly not that of the grieving adult. Rather, this is just one of those dreadful ironies of the human condition: in the moment of loss and for some time after, the now-single parent has no capacity to do what must be done.

But the child needs that impossible thing, all the same.

—

Once I came to understand that my patient was still in a relationship with her father, her therapeutic needs became clear.

She needed to grieve the loss of her father to a satisfactory conclusion — a grieving that had been prevented by her fear of bringing up her own loss with her mother as much as her mother’s inability to console her child.

She needed to realize that she had put her life on hold by clinging to a ghost who, of course, could only provide so much warmth.

She needed to open herself to a stepfather who longed to engage her, even if he could not be the plaster saint her father had become; and the peers who were ready to provide their own rewards, even if they could not replace her dad.

—

The therapy worked out well.

My patient did not so much lose her relationship to her deceased father as let him go to a different place in her memory and in her heart.

It helped for her to answer the question, “What would your father want for you if only he could tell you?” Because the only answer he would have given (and she knew this) was that the beloved father of her dreams would want the best for her; and for her to reattach to life and to the people who could give her something that he could not.

After all, he was dead.

And so, she said goodbye to him. At last, she let him die.

So that, finally, she could live.

—

The photo above is of ectoplasmic mist at Union Cemetary, CT on 10/29/2004 by 2112guy, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

Dr. Gerald Stein

Blogging About Psychotherapy from Chicago

Thomas Jefferson and the Loss of Someone You Love

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