Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “I tried to make this work, but your mother’s a goddamn hopeless case.” All five of us stand on the front lawn for a while, knowing the only thing we can be certain will come next is chaos. When Cookie finally goes off the deep end, we’re not sure if it’s thanks to Karl’s departure or Elvis Presley’s death. When she hears on the news that the King died in his bathroom, she locks herself in ours. For the next week she consumes jars of peanut butter, known to be one of Elvis’s favorites, while sending us out to buy all of his albums, which she plays through the house on full blast. Shortly after I start sixth grade at Nesaquake Middle School, Cookie stops paying rent. I hold Rosie as I walk into Ms. Van Dover’s classroom. “We’re moving again,” I inform her. “Be safe,” she tells me, crouching down to sweep my long bangs out of my eyes. “And if you ever feel scared, look back at what I wrote to you in last year’s yearbook, where I told you that you were a bright girl with lots of talent and that you should never stop your quest for knowledge. I meant every word.” And just like I thought, Ms. Van Dover goes on to tell me how special I am to her. “The only thing that will get you out of your situation is to stay in school, Regina,” she says. Then she looks at my hand clasped tight around Rosie’s, and tells me, “Make sure you teach Rosie what you’ve learned—she needs a teacher who cares about her as much as I care about you.” This time I just smile. Then Rosie reaches up to be held . . . and again, we’re gone. 7 Keeping Pact 1977 to Summer 1980 THE FIFTH WEEK of my sixth-grade year, the temperature reaches ninety-eight degrees, which feels even more suffocating in the back of Cookie’s station wagon. I wish Long Island’s scorcher Indian summer were our only source of discomfort. In the driver’s seat, with a beer between her legs, Cookie stays mum about our new destination, only directing us to smoosh ourselves and all of our belongings into the car: garbage bags stuffed with clothes, our black transistor radio, towels, sheets, cups, silverware, pots, coffee, beer, sugar, vodka, peanut butter, whiskey, jelly, flour, five kids, and one Cookie. We know the drill. With all the bedding, housewares, and food, this is by far the most crowded our car has ever been . . . and this brings me to wonder whether Cookie ever thanked Karl for being such a good provider for us. She made me leave my phonograph, records, and books behind, but inside my shirt I hid my two Jesuses and my fifth-grade autograph book, plus some picture books for Rosie. I also grabbed a deck of cards for Cherie, Camille, Norm, and me to play with.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  I answer that, As we have stated, when treating of the defects assumed by Christ ([4234]Q[15], AA[5],6), there was true and sensible pain in the suffering Christ, which is caused by something hurtful to the body: also, there was internal pain, which is caused from the apprehension of something hurtful, and this is termed “sadness.” And in Christ each of these was the greatest in this present life. This arose from four causes. First of all, from the sources of His pain. For the cause of the sensitive pain was the wounding of His body; and this wounding had its bitterness, both from the extent of the suffering already mentioned (A[5] ) and from the kind of suffering, since the death of the crucified is most bitter, because they are pierced in nervous and highly sensitive parts—to wit, the hands and feet; moreover, the weight of the suspended body intensifies the agony. and besides this there is the duration of the suffering because they do not die at once like those slain by the sword. The cause of the interior pain was, first of all, all the sins of the human race, for which He made satisfaction by suffering; hence He ascribes them, so to speak, to Himself, saying (Ps. 21:2): “The words of my sins.” Secondly, especially the fall of the Jews and of the others who sinned in His death chiefly of the apostles, who were scandalized at His Passion. Thirdly, the loss of His bodily life, which is naturally horrible to human nature. The magnitude of His suffering may be considered, secondly, from the susceptibility of the sufferer as to both soul and body. For His body was endowed with a most perfect constitution, since it was fashioned miraculously by the operation of the Holy Ghost; just as some other things made by miracles are better than others, as Chrysostom says (Hom. xxii in Joan.) respecting the wine into which Christ changed the water at the wedding-feast. And, consequently, Christ’s sense of touch, the sensitiveness of which is the reason for our feeling pain, was most acute. His soul likewise, from its interior powers, apprehended most vehemently all the causes of sadness. Thirdly, the magnitude of Christ’s suffering can be estimated from the singleness of His pain and sadness. In other sufferers the interior sadness is mitigated, and even the exterior suffering, from some consideration of reason, by some derivation or redundance from the higher powers into the lower; but it was not so with the suffering Christ, because “He permitted each one of His powers to exercise its proper function,” as Damascene says (De Fide Orth. iii). Fourthly, the magnitude of the pain of Christ’s suffering can be reckoned by this, that the pain and sorrow were accepted voluntarily, to the end of men’s deliverance from sin; and consequently He embraced the amount of pain proportionate to the magnitude of the fruit which resulted therefrom.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  BEDE. It is customary to mourn over the death of friends; and thus the Jews explained our Lord’s weeping: Then said the Jews, Behold how He loved him. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. xlix. 21) Loved him. Our Lord came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. And some of them said, Could not this Man which opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died? He was about to do more than this, to raise him from death. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxiii. 1) It was His enemies who said this. The very works, which should have evidenced His power, they turn against Him, as if He had not really done them. This is the way that they speak of the miracle of opening the eyes of the man that was born blind. They even prejudge Christ before He has come to the grave, and have not the patience to wait for the issue of the matter. Jesus therefore again groaning in Himself, cometh to the grave. That He wept, and He groaned, are mentioned to shew us the reality of His human nature. John who enters into higher statements as to His nature than any of the other Evangelists, also descends lower than any in describing His bodily affections. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. xlix) And do thou too groan in thyself, if thou wouldest rise to new life. To every man is this said, who is weighed down by any vicious habit. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it. The dead under the stone is the guilty under the Law. For the Law, which was given to the Jews, was graven on stone. And all the guilty are under the Law, for the Law was not made for a righteous man. BEDE. A cave is a hollow in a rock. It is called a monument, because it reminds us of the dead. Jesus said, Take ye away the stone. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxiii. 2) But why did He not raise him without taking away the stone? Could not He who moved a dead body by His voice, much more have moved a stone? He purposely did not do so, in order that the miracle might take place in the sight of all; to give no room for saying, as they had said in the case of the blind man, This is not he. Now they might go into the grave, and feel and see that this was the man. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. xlix. c. 22) Take ye away the stone; mystically, Take away the burden of the law, proclaim grace. AUGUSTINE. (lib. 83. Quæst. qu. 61) Perhaps those are signified who wished to impose the rite of circumcision on the Gentile converts; or men in the Church of corrupt life, who offend believers.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  But in the end, there was nothing she could do to hang on to me when our mother, the social workers, and the County of Suffolk all decided I’d be better off without my siblings. This story is about the missing years when my sisters weren’t there to save me. These were the years I had to walk the lonesome road. And you can bet that as soon as I was upright and strong enough, I walked that road straight back to the people who loved me. 1 Foster things Gi told me we were moving again. If you count foster homes and living in cars, where I, as the youngest, slept in the footwell, we’d moved at least fifteen times already. And I was only eight years old. This move was worse, though. In this move, I was losing my sisters. The oldest of us, Cherie, had already left to live on her own. The rest of us had found ourselves, once again, to be wards of the state: Camille at seventeen, Gi, almost fourteen, Norm, twelve, and me. We were in an upstairs bedroom of a house we called the Toad House, because it was drab gray with big front windows that looked like hooded eyes. My clothes were in this room but I’d never slept here. Gi, Norm, and I were like a litter of pups, curling up every night in the living room together where we felt safe. Months ago, our mother, Cookie, had abandoned the four of us in the Toad House. Later that same day, Camille moved into her best friend’s house. She didn’t want to leave us behind, but she thought maybe if she had a real home and didn’t have to worry about food, she could get a few odd jobs and make enough money to buy food for us. When Cookie finally returned two nights ago, she beat Gi so violently that there were raised bruises like purple walnuts running from her brow to her cheek. Around Gi’s swollen and now-lopsided lips were craggy lines of scabs. Gi thought it was probably her social studies teacher, Mr. Brown, who called Social Services the next day. Gi told me she hadn’t realized how bad she looked until she saw Mr. Brown’s face turn white at the sight of her. It’s always harder to ignore the truth when you see that truth in someone else’s eyes. Now Cookie was in the kitchen with a silver-haired social worker, and another social worker sat in the living room. She was a pretty blond-haired lady who looked just like Mrs. Brady from The Brady Bunch . “Why can’t I go with you?” I asked Gi. We were looking out the window at the two gray cars parked on the gravel driveway. One was waiting to take Norm and me away; the other was for Gi and Camille. After Gi learned that Social Services was snooping around, she called Camille at her friend’s house.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  It is, of course, hard to know how often divorce is precipitated by factors outside the marriage. I have seen a good number of such instances. Indeed, it is one of the common causes—or more precisely, final triggers—of divorce, yet few people seem to recognize its importance. Whenever people are shaken by a serious loss in their lives—be it the termination of a job, death of a parent, serious illness in a child, or any grievous event that can evoke powerful and primitive passions—the bereaved person will turn to their spouse for comfort. If the partner responds with understanding and tenderness, the marriage can be forever enriched. But the tragedy can also split people apart when the bereaved person is deeply disappointed in the partner’s response and feels rejected in his or her hour of greatest need. Grief turns to rage as the two people end up irrationally blaming the other—one for not having empathy, the other for making insatiable demands. The initial loss is soon compounded, anger and accusations take over, and the marriage cascades downward. Mrs. James followed this script to the letter. It’s especially tragic when divorce occurs as the sequel to a serious life crisis. The suffering person loses whatever support there was in the marriage and confronts the transition from marriage to singlehood in a depleted state. The children are badly frightened and apprehensive about what lies ahead. It’s as if the entire family at its weakest point is expected to deal with an earthquake and its aftershocks. What happened to this family is instructive. Many people, including lawyers, judges, and mediators, don’t understand how often in divorce seemingly rational complaints cloak powerful, irrational feelings. Or they assume that the complaints always reflect anger at the spouse and not some other deep sadness. However familiar Mrs. James’s marital troubles sounded to her attorney, her anger did not arise from the marriage per se but from a secondary loss that fueled her rage. Ideally, her grief over her mother’s sudden death and her inability to mourn should have been addressed before she moved ahead to make thoughtful decisions about her divorce and her children. This is the kind of rage that can last for decades after divorce and it is the kind of anger that leaves lasting residue on a child’s personality. As an adult, Karen is terrified of conflict because it’s so dangerous. But we’re getting ahead of our story.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I regretted that she didn’t have many friends but was pleased to hear she had at least this one oasis. I remember Karen years later telling me, “My grandmother saved my life.” There’s no way for a sensitive child to see her mother cry or her father fall into depression without worrying that she’s the cause of it— and so she takes full responsibility for her mother’s tears and father’s moods. I watched Karen with a feeling of great helplessness, realizing there was nothing I could do to alleviate her pain or slake her thirst for protection. I remember once asking her, “What will you be when you grow up, Karen?” She blushed. “I want to work with children who are blind or retarded or who can’t speak.” I thought of Karen’s mother who sat alone and cried, of her brother who was afraid of the dark, of all the sorrowful people in this family, including herself, whom this amazing child wanted to rescue and I almost cried. When a child forfeits her childhood and adolescence to take on responsibilities for a parent, her capacity to enjoy her life as a young person, develop close friendships, and cultivate shared interests is sacrificed. Beyond this loss, there is a major psychological hazard if the upside-down dependence goes on too long. The child may become trapped into feeling that she alone must rescue the troubled parent. When she attends to her own needs and wishes, she feels guilty and undeserving. This happens if the parent’s unhappiness continues for years and the parent comes to rely on the child for comfort or when the child herself assumes the role and won’t give it up. Whatever its origins, the child feels obliged to care for the parent in whatever capacity is needed—as caregiver, companion, mentor, or the person who keeps depression at bay. Karen said, “My mom has no one. Only me.” As strange as this sounds, many of these youngsters believe that it’s their duty to keep their parent alive. Without them, the parent would die. This is an awesome responsibility, especially for a child who has no one to confide in. It is far beyond the kind of help a devoted child gives to a parent in a temporary crisis, divorce or otherwise. It is an overburdening that seriously inhibits the child’s freedom to separate normally and to lead a healthy adolescence. Bound to the troubled parent by unbreakable strands of love, compassion, guilt, and self-sacrifice, the child is not free to leave home emotionally or to follow her heart in love or marriage. In fact, the parents and siblings may not feel able to function without her. They may cling to her and block her exit. As I was to learn later, many of these child caregivers reinstalled the rescue relationship that they had with their parents into their adult relationships with the opposite sex.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Witnesses to the execution could see his “wide open, tearful eyes and saliva dripping from his mouth.” Eighty-one days after being approached by two young girls about where flowers might be found, George Stinney was pronounced dead. Years later, rumors surfaced that a white man from a prominent family confessed on his deathbed to killing the girls. Recently, an effort has been launched to exonerate George Stinney. The Stinney execution was horrific and heartbreaking, but it reflected the racial politics of the South more than the way children accused of crimes were generally treated. It was an example of how policies and norms once directed exclusively at controlling and punishing the black population have filtered their way into our general criminal justice system. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the politics of fear and anger sweeping the country and fueling mass incarceration was turning its attention to children. Influential criminologists predicted a coming wave of “super-predators” with whom the juvenile justice system would be unable to cope. Sometimes expressly focusing on black and brown children, theorists suggested that America would soon be overcome by “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” and who “have absolutely no respect for human life.” Panic over the impending crime wave expected from these “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless” children led nearly every state to enact legislation that increased the exposure of children to adult prosecution. Many states lowered or eliminated the minimum age for trying children as adults, leaving children as young as eight vulnerable to adult prosecution and imprisonment. Some states also initiated mandatory transfer rules, which took away any discretion from prosecutors and judges over whether a child should be kept in the juvenile system. Tens of thousands of children who had previously been managed by the juvenile justice system, with its well-developed protections and requirements for children, were now thrown into an increasingly overcrowded, violent, and desperate adult prison system. The predictions of “super-predators” proved wildly inaccurate. The juvenile population in America increased from 1994 to 2000, but the juvenile crime rate declined, leading academics who had originally supported the “super-predator” theory to disclaim it. In 2001, the surgeon general of the United States released a report labeling the “super-predator” theory a myth and stated that “[t]here is no evidence that young people involved in violence during the peak years of the early 1990s were more frequent or more vicious offenders than youths in earlier years.” This admission came too late for kids like Trina, Ian, and Antonio. Their death-in-prison sentences were insulated from legal challenges or appeals by a maze of procedural rules, statutes of limitations, and legal barricades designed to make successful postconviction challenges almost impossible. — When I met Trina, Ian, and Antonio years later, they had each been broken by years of hopeless confinement. They were legally condemned children hidden away in adult prisons, largely unknown and forgotten, preoccupied with surviving in dangerous, terrifying environments with little family support or outside help. They weren’t exceptional.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 2: Further, the Philosopher says (Ethic. vii) that, if sadness be vehement, it not only checks the contrary delight, but every delight; and conversely. But the grief of Christ’s Passion was the greatest, as shown above [4239](A[6]); and likewise the enjoyment of fruition is also the greatest, as was laid down in the first volume of the [4240]FS, Q[34], A[3]. Consequently, it was not possible for Christ’s whole soul to be suffering and rejoicing at the one time. Objection 3: Further, beatific “fruition” comes of the knowledge and love of Divine things, as Augustine says (Doctr. Christ. i). But all the soul’s powers do not extend to the knowledge and love of God. Therefore Christ’s whole soul did not enjoy fruition. On the contrary, Damascene says (De Fide Orth. iii): Christ’s Godhead “permitted His flesh to do and to suffer what was proper to it.” In like fashion, since it belonged to Christ’s soul, inasmuch as it was blessed, to enjoy fruition, His Passion did not impede fruition. I answer that, As stated above [4241](A[7]), the whole soul can be understood both according to its essence and according to all its faculties. If it be understood according to its essence, then His whole soul did enjoy fruition, inasmuch as it is the subject of the higher part of the soul, to which it belongs, to enjoy the Godhead: so that as passion, by reason of the essence, is attributed to the higher part of the soul, so, on the other hand, by reason of the superior part of the soul, fruition is attributed to the essence. But if we take the whole soul as comprising all its faculties, thus His entire soul did not enjoy fruition: not directly, indeed, because fruition is not the act of any one part of the soul; nor by any overflow of glory, because, since Christ was still upon earth, there was no overflowing of glory from the higher part into the lower, nor from the soul into the body. But since, on the contrary, the soul’s higher part was not hindered in its proper acts by the lower, it follows that the higher part of His soul enjoyed fruition perfectly while Christ was suffering. Reply to Objection 1: The joy of fruition is not opposed directly to the grief of the Passion, because they have not the same object. Now nothing prevents contraries from being in the same subject, but not according to the same. And so the joy of fruition can appertain to the higher part of reason by its proper act; but grief of the Passion according to the subject. Grief of the Passion belongs to the essence of the soul by reason of the body, whose form the soul is; whereas the joy of fruition (belongs to the soul) by reason of the faculty in which it is subjected.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Whether God became incarnate in order to take away actual sin, rather than to take away original sin?Objection 1: It would seem that God became incarnate as a remedy for actual sins rather than for original sin. For the more grievous the sin, the more it runs counter to man’s salvation, for which God became incarnate. But actual sin is more grievous than original sin; for the lightest punishment is due to original sin, as Augustine says (Contra Julian. v, 11). Therefore the Incarnation of Christ is chiefly directed to taking away actual sins. Objection 2: Further, pain of sense is not due to original sin, but merely pain of loss, as has been shown ([3853]FS, Q[87], A[5]). But Christ came to suffer the pain of sense on the Cross in satisfaction for sins—and not the pain of loss, for He had no defect of either the beatific vision or fruition. Therefore He came in order to take away actual sin rather than original sin. Objection 3: Further, as Chrysostom says (De Compunctione Cordis ii, 3): “This must be the mind of the faithful servant, to account the benefits of his Lord, which have been bestowed on all alike, as though they were bestowed on himself alone. For as if speaking of himself alone, Paul writes to the Galatians 2:20: ‘Christ . . . loved me and delivered Himself for me.’” But our individual sins are actual sins; for original sin is the common sin. Therefore we ought to have this conviction, so as to believe that He has come chiefly for actual sins. On the contrary, It is written (Jn. 1:29): “Behold the Lamb of God, behold Him Who taketh away the sins [Vulg.: ‘sin’] of the world.” I answer that, It is certain that Christ came into this world not only to take away that sin which is handed on originally to posterity, but also in order to take away all sins subsequently added to it; not that all are taken away (and this is from men’s fault, inasmuch as they do not adhere to Christ, according to Jn. 3:19: “The light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than the light”), but because He offered what was sufficient for blotting out all sins. Hence it is written (Rom. 5:15–16): “But not as the offense, so also the gift . . . For judgment indeed was by one unto condemnation, but grace is of many offenses unto justification.”

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The immortality of the race was supposed to make up in some way for each individual death, but it was hardly consoling to me that whole generations of Bithynians would succeed each other to the end of time along the banks of the Sangarius. We speak of glory, that fine word which swells the heart, but there is willful confusion between it and immortality, as if the mere trace of a person were the same thing as his presence. They would have had me see the resplendent god in place of the corpse, but I had created that god; I believed in him, in my way, but a brilliant posthumous destiny in the midst of the stellar spheres failed to compensate for so brief a life; the god did not take the place of the living being I had lost. I was incensed by man's mania for clinging to hypotheses while ignoring facts, for mistaking his dreams for more than dreams. I felt otherwise about my obligations as the survivor. That death would be in vain if I lacked the courage to look straight at it, keeping in mind those realities of cold and silence, of coagulated blood and inert members which men cover up so quickly with earth, and with hypocrisy; I chose to grope my way in the dark without recourse to such weak lamps. I could feel that those around me began to take offence at a grief of such duration; furthermore, the violence of my sorrow scandalized them more than its cause. If I had given way to the same tears for the death of a brother or a son I should have been equally reproached for crying like a woman. The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their neglect. We came back down the river to the point where Antinoöpolis was beginning to rise. There were fewer boats in our party than before; Lucius, whom I had seen but little again, had returned to Rome, where his young wife was newly delivered of a son. His departure freed me of a goodly number of curious and troublesome onlookers. The work already started was altering the line of the shore; the plan of buildings-to-be became visible in the clearings between mounds of earth dug up everywhere for foundations; but I no longer recognized the exact place of the sacrifice. The embalmers delivered their handiwork; the slender coffin of cedar was placed inside a porphyry sarcophagus standing upright within the innermost room of the temple. I approached the dead boy timidly.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘I got in a fight.’ He looked at me crossly but sorrily. ‘I wouldn’t have come back here, only I didn’t know where else to go. I didn’t see why you should get mixed up with all this.’ ‘Who did you get in a fight with?’ ‘My brother—Harold. My big brother. He got this knife, he cut me with it—the fucking bastard cut me with it.’ He looked at me with a kind of tired outrage. ‘I can’t go back there no more, my brother’ll murder me. Only he don’t know where I am, ’ere. I’ll have to stay ’ere—for a bit, Will.’ He splashed his hands down in the water. Blood was seeping out again through the lint of his dressing. He looked lop-sided and comical, and intensely distressed. Tears ran freely down his face and over the waterproof pink of the Band-Aids. I dabbed at them with the sponge, and he shook his head, and winced, and winced again at the twisting of his wound that wincing caused. In my other hand, under the water, in spite of himself and his misery, his cock was hard. I wanked him slowly, the ripples slapping rhythmically against the side of the tub. ‘Will,’ he said, as if he must get it out before succumbing, ‘I killed my brother’s mate.’ 2I finished my fifty lengths and sat for a while at the shallow end with my feet in the water, my goggles pushed back on my head like a smoky second pair of eyes. Phil had come down from the gym and put on a brief and laborious display of butterfly: giving up towards the end of his last length he made some perfunctory strokes, then stood up and waded to the edge. I nodded and smiled at him. ‘All right?’ he said, as if he did not want to talk to me, or did not know how. I watched him in profile: a strong pleasant face which might barely change between leaving school and middle age, an incurious, dependable look. But he was coming on well. His tits now bulged out impressively; and as he raised his hands to his temples and pushed back his wet hair, his biceps doubled smoothly, sleek as coupling animals. He was the sort of boy who might be in the army, except that his weight-training suggested a labour towards some private image of himself, a solitary perfection. As often happens when I know someone else fancies a person I might otherwise have ignored, I realised that Bill’s taste for him had made me want the boy too, and I looked at him lustfully and competitively.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The Olympieion of Athens, built on the plain, had to be in exact counterpoise to the Parthenon on its hill, vastness opposed to perfection, ardor kneeling before calm, splendor at the feet of beauty. The chapels of Antinous and his temples were magic chambers, commemorating a mysterious passage between life and death; these shrines to an overpowering joy and grief were places of prayer and evocation of the dead; there I gave myself over to my sorrow. My tomb on the bank of the Tiber reproduces, on a gigantic scale, the ancient vaults of the Appian Way, but its very proportions transform it, recalling Ctesiphon and Babylon with their terraces and towers by which man seeks to climb nearer the stars. Sepulchral Egypt provided the plan for the obelisks and rows of sphinxes of that cenotaph which forces upon a vaguely hostile Rome the memory of the friend forever mourned. The Villa was the tomb of my travels, the last encampment of the nomad, the equivalent, though in marble, of the tents and pavilions of the princes of Asia. Almost everything that appeals to our taste has already been tried in the world of forms; I turned toward the realm of color: jasper as green as the depths of the sea, porphyry dense as flesh, basalt and somber obsidian. The crimson of the hangings was adorned with more and more intricate embroideries; the mosaics of the walls or pavements were never too golden, too white, or too dark. Each building-stone was the strange concretion of a will, a memory, and sometimes a challenge. Each structure was the chart of a dream. Plotinopolis, Hadrianopolis, Antino�polis, Hadrianotherae. ... I have multiplied these human beehives as much as possible. Plumber and mason, engineer and architect preside at the births of cities; the operation also requires certain magical gifts. In a world still largely made up of woods, desert, and uncultivated plain, a city is indeed a fine sight, with its paved streets, its temple to some god or other, its public baths and toilets, a shop where the barber discusses with his clients the news from Rome, its pastry shop, shoestore, and perhaps a bookshop, its doctor's sign, and a theatre, where from time to time a comedy of Terence is played. Our men of fashion complain of the uniformity of our cities; they suffer in seeing everywhere the same statue of the emperor, and the same water pipes. They are wrong: the beauty of N�mes is wholly different from that of Arles. But that very uniformity, to be found now on three continents, reassures the traveler as does the sight of a milestone; even the dullest of our towns have their comforting significance as shelters and posting stops.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Th e sack of Rome by a Visigothic army in AD 410 was a profound moral and mental shock; in its aftermath, confusion and recrimination quickly followed. Among the most visceral horrors of the experience was that the immemorial adjunct of war, sexual violence against women, was visited on the eternal city. Th e rape of wives and virgin daughters was a bitter tragedy; the rape of nuns was, for many, unambiguous proof that the Christian God was uninterested in Roman fortunes. Such a dark insult to Roman honor demanded a reckoning. Th e crisis of AD 410 was the proximate cause for the composition of Augustine’s magnum opus, Th e City of God. Th e issue of sexual violence called forth some of the most astonishing, and indelicate, passages of the entire Augustinian oeuvre. In the defense of his religion, the bishop of Hippo put on trial a whole cluster of deep and usually implicit assumptions about the nature of female sexual honor, as old as the hills of Rome. He insisted that female purity was a mental, intentional, and not an objective, physical state. “One can only assent or refuse with his mind. Who of sound sense would believe that someone who has been seized and forced to use his fl esh to slake the lust of someone else has lost his sexual honor?” To console the wounded pride of Rome in the aftermath of defeat, he attacked Roman values at their core. He insisted, in short, that sin, rather than shame, provided the only real scale of sexual values. Th e Romans were not accustomed to blaming rape victims. For centuries the law had recognized the innocence of women subjected to sexual violence. But a primitive sensibility toward physical violation abided in ancient Mediterranean societies; rape was a social, as well as a personal, trauma. Certainly the social rehabilitation of abused bodies was something that was strictly beyond the limits of comfortable discussion. Augustine was deliberately, and brashly, scraping against some of the most primitive strata of belief about a woman’s body. Th e lust of another, he defi antly claimed, could not “pollute” one’s purity. Intent was all that hung in the scales. A woman whose body was forced into sex “but who off ered no consent with her will” kept her chastity intact. With his unfailing instinct for drama, Augustine hailed before the tribunal of sexual justice the legendary Roman matron Lucretia. It was a savvy choice. In a culture that had long valued the moral exemplum, Lucretia was the example of examples. She preferred death over dishonor, and her suicide made her the unquestioned paragon of female C H U R C H , S O C I E T Y, A N D S E X I N T H E A G E O F T R I U M P H 

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Before that night, the Litrovski family had all lived in a green clapboard house in a middle-class section of Monterey, California, where Larry’s father, who had learned four languages from his parents, taught Russian at the Monterey Language Institute. He was a disturbed, angry man whose violent outbursts stemmed from early life experiences that neither he nor anyone close to him knew much about. Larry’s mother taught Spanish at the public high school, speaking so softly that her students often had to strain to hear her. Like many abused women, Larry’s mother was ambivalent about her decision to file for divorce. “Children need a father,” she said, with tears falling down both cheeks. “I gave him children and a purpose, it was a shared dream.” Her voice faltered as she struggled to explain herself: “I hope I was important to him at one time.” With that, she began to cry openly. Larry’s mother was heartbroken but her children were furious. Like most young children in the abusive families that I have seen, they made no connection between the violence and the decision to divorce. Their mother told them that she was ending the marriage because their father “drank too much,” but this explanation made absolutely no sense to them. Drinking what? Milk? Soda? Orange juice? How could they know what “drinking” meant or how it affected their father’s behavior? Nor did they link the drinking with his violence. They were aware that their father hurt their mother, and they were very distressed at her pain, but they did not understand his taunts or the depth of her humiliation. Larry was especially enraged at what he considered his mother’s outrageous decision. Shortly after the divorce, he told me that his father always said that women and girls were stupid and worthless. In his view, he had been left with an inferior being. Whenever Larry’s father visited, he told the boy, “You are my favorite.” He pointedly ignored his little daughter who tagged behind hoping, as she later told me, that she would at least be allowed to pet her father’s dog, Ivan. After the separation, Larry donned his father’s tie and marched around the house shouting obscene insults at his mother. He threw himself into the role of filling his absent father’s shoes, representing his father in the household and identifying with his attitudes and behavior. Years later Larry confessed to me, “I was infuriated with my mother and I wanted my dad to return home. I would regularly compile a list of my grievances against her and call up my dad on the phone and tell him what she had done wrong. He would then call her and yell at her and she would cry.” Larry continued to lead the charge against his mother for all kinds of real or imagined misdeeds, with his father acting as silent partner and sometimes coach. Sometimes Larry took the lead.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Many LossesWHEN MOST PEOPLE hear the word “divorce,” they think it means one failed marriage. The child of divorce is thought to experience one huge loss of the intact family after which stability and a second, happier marriage comes along. But this is not what happens to most children of divorce. They experience not one, not two, but many more losses as their parents go in search of new lovers or partners. Each of these “transitions” (as demographers call them) throws the child’s life into turmoil and brings back painful reminders of the first loss. National studies show that the more transitions there are, the more the child is harmed because the impact of repeated loss is cumulative.1 The prevalence of this instability in the lives of these children hasn’t been properly weighed or even recognized by most people. While we do have legal records of second, third, and fourth remarriages and divorces, we have no reliable count of how many live-in or long-term lovers a child of divorce will typically encounter. Children observe each of their parents’ courtships with a mixture of excitement and anxiety. For adolescents, the erotic stimulation of seeing their parents with changing partners can be difficult to contain. Several young teenage girls in the study began their own sexual activity when they observed a parent’s involvement in a passionate affair. Children and adolescents watch their parents’ lovers, with everything from love to resentment, hoping for some clue about the future. They participate actively as helper, critic, and audience and are not afraid to intervene. One mother returning home from a date found her school-age children asleep in her bed. Since they’d told her earlier that they didn’t like her boyfriend, she took the hint. Many new lovers are attentive to the children, regularly bringing little gifts. But even the most charming lovers can disappear overnight. Second marriages with children are much more likely to end in divorce than first marriages. Thus the child’s typical experience is not one marriage followed by one divorce, but several or sometimes many relationships for both their mother and father followed by loss or by eventual stability.2 Karen’s experience is typical of many that I have seen. Her father’s second wife, who was nice to the children, left without warning three years into the marriage. After she was gone, her father had four more girlfriends who caused him a great deal of suffering when they also left. Karen’s mother had three unhappy love affairs prior to her remarriage, which ended after five years. Obviously Karen and her siblings experienced more than “one divorce.” Their childhoods were filled with a history of new attachments followed by losses and consequent distress for both parents. Karen’s brother, at age thirty, told me: “What is marriage? Only a piece of paper and a piece of metal. If you love someone, it breaks your heart.”

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Whether a religious sins more grievously than a secular by the same kind of sin?Objection 1: It would seem that a religious does not sin more grievously than a secular by the same kind of sin. For it is written (2 Paralip 30:18,19): “The Lord Who is good will show mercy to all them who with their whole heart seek the Lord the God of their fathers, and will not impute it to them that they are not sanctified.” Now religious apparently follow the Lord the God of their fathers with their whole heart rather than seculars, who partly give themselves and their possessions to God and reserve part for themselves, as Gregory says (Hom. xx in Ezech.). Therefore it would seem that it is less imputed to them if they fall short somewhat of their sanctification. Objection 2: Further, God is less angered at a man’s sins if he does some good deeds, according to 2 Paralip 19:2,3, “Thou helpest the ungodly, and thou art joined in friendship with them that hate the Lord, and therefore thou didst deserve indeed the wrath of the Lord: but good works are found in thee.” Now religious do more good works than seculars. Therefore if they commit any sins, God is less angry with them. Objection 3: Further, this present life is not carried through without sin, according to James 3:2, “In many things we all offend.” Therefore if the sins of religious were more grievous than those of seculars it would follow that religious are worse off than seculars: and consequently it would not be a wholesome counsel to enter religion. On the contrary, The greater the evil the more it would seem to be deplored. But seemingly the sins of those who are in the state of holiness and perfection are the most deplorable, for it is written (Jer. 23:9): “My heart is broken within me,” and afterwards (Jer. 23:11): “For the prophet and the priest are defiled; and in My house I have found their wickedness.” Therefore religious and others who are in the state of perfection, other things being equal, sin more grievously.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I try now to observe my own ending: this series of experiments conducted upon myself continues the long study begun in Satyrus' clinic. So far the modifications are as external as those to which time and inclement weather subject any edifice, leaving its architecture and basic material unaltered; I sometimes think that through the crevices I see and touch upon the indestructible foundation, the rock eternal. I am what I always was; I am dying without essential change. At first view the robust child of the gardens in Spain and the ambitious officer regaining his tent and shaking the snowflakes from his shoulders seem both as thoroughly obliterated as I shall be when I shall have gone through the funeral fire; but they are still there; I am inseparable from those parts of myself. The man who howled his grief upon a dead body has not ceased to wail in some corner of my being, in spite of the superhuman, or perhaps subhuman calm into which I am entering already; the voyager immured within the ever sedentary invalid is curious about death because it spells departure. That force which once was I seems still capable of actuating several more lives, or of raising up whole worlds. If by miracle some centuries were suddenly to be added to the few days now left to me I would do the same things over again, even to committing the same errors; I would frequent the same Olympian heights and even the same Infernos. Such a conclusion is an excellent argument in favor of the utility of death, but at the same time it inspires certain doubts as to death's total efficacity. In certain periods of my life I have noted down my dreams; I have discussed their significance with priests and philosophers, and with astrologers. That faculty for dreaming, though deadened for many years, has been restored to me in the course of these months of agony; the incidents of my waking hours seem less real, and sometimes less irksome, than those of dream. If this larval and spectral world, where the platitudinous and the absurd swarm in even greater abundance than on earth, affords us some notion of the state of the soul when separated from the body, then I shall doubtless pass my eternity in regretting the exquisite control which our senses now provide, and the adjusted perspectives offered by human reason. And nevertheless I sink back with a certain relief into those insubstantial regions of dream; there I possess for a moment some secrets which soon escape me again; there I drink at the sacred springs.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Camille rushed home to take care of us. “There are too many of us to fit in the same car, love bug.” Gi was as skinny as a piece of licorice, losing her hair from malnutrition and the stress of having to steal food just to make sure Norm and I would keep growing. “But we always fit in one car!” “Not this time,” Gi said. Tears streaked down her face. I grabbed Gi’s licorice leg and said, “But you always said that we are so skinny we can all be folded up to fit anywhere. And we are really skinny now. We can fit in the same car!” “Well, maybe we can, but the home that you’re going to prefers little kids like you and Norm because you’re cuter, sweeter, and easier to hug.” Gi picked me up and squished me in her arms. I could feel her bones and muscles and all her love coming out at me. Cookie, our mother, had arms as big as my belly. All that bubbling flesh, and she never used any of it to love us. There were boyfriends, however, men who got a charming, purring version of Cookie reserved just for them. Sometimes Cookie paid the rent with her flesh. Watching Cookie, I absorbed a quick lesson, barely understood at the time but later fully digested, of just how much utility the female form can hold. “I’m not a baby,” I told Gi. She brushed my hair with her darting fingers and said, “You will always be my baby, mia bambina .” Gi stopped talking for a minute, as if something were stuck in her throat. Her lumpy face was wet with tears. And then finally she said, “I’m so sorry, mia bambina . I’m so, so sorry.” “But you didn’t do anything wrong! You were protecting me!” I started to touch my sister’s face but pulled my hand away when I remembered how much those walnut bruises had hurt when I’d touched them last. “I was supposed to take care of you forever,” Gi said, and she began crying again. With everything we’d endured, and everything we’d seen, you’d think we’d also seen a lot of crying. But we were scrappy, willful, and driven. We knew how to get a loaf of bread out of a grocery store with no cash in less than sixty seconds. We knew how to manage landlords, bill collectors, our mother’s old boyfriends, enraged wives (whose husbands had slept with Cookie), and nosy neighbors as they hunted down Cookie. We could convince an entire school system that we had a mother and a house—the only two things that could prevent us from getting split up and placed in separate foster homes. And we knew how to run from our mother when she was drunk as a rabid raccoon and ready to focus her heft and her misery on any one of us who got in her way. Especially Gi.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  He told them he was not going to turn over his niece and her two sisters to complete strangers so you all could end up in an orphanage. All we needed was food stamps, no money. The county refused.” She leans back in her chair, resigned. “That’s when it all became a big mess.” Julia explains that she and Frank hurried out of the social services’ office, and the social workers asked when they were bringing us back. “Frank hollered over his shoulder, ‘Never!’ I thought he’d have a heart attack. A couple of days later, three social workers and the police showed up on our doorstep and demanded we turn you over. Frank clutched you so tight that it took two social workers to tear one arm at a time off of you, while the third took you from him. “Your Uncle Frank never saw you again after that,” Julia says. “He was devastated. He always wondered what happened to you and your sisters, and finally he came to accept that he was never going to see you again. Then—out of the blue—you wrote him in 1983. When we got your letter, he opened it, thinking it was for him, then he realized you wanted him to hand it off to Pauly. He called Pauly and read it to him. ‘You son of a bitch,’ Frank says, ‘you get over here and talk about this. I am your brother. Let me help you do the right thing.’ When Pauly arrived, Frank told him that he knew full well that you were his daughter, that he had to take responsibility for you and get you out of that foster home.” “So what did Paul do?” “Pauly? Not a thing, honey. Such a shame. My Frank . . . a decade he’s been gone and I just could not bring myself to go through his papers. Finally, before last Christmas, I knew it was time to go through them. That’s when I found the envelope. Pauly took that letter”—my stomach flips in excitement to hear Paul had cared to keep that much—“but your uncle Frank held on to the envelope all this time. He refused to throw it out. So when I found it, I knew he held on to it so that one day he could contact you . . . let you know the truth. I guess you could say it was for him that I reached out to you. Frank always wanted to right this somehow.” She looks at me softly, almost apologetically. “I was worried. It’s been sixteen years since you wrote that letter. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to find you, but when the letter didn’t come back, I knew you must have gotten it.” Julia goes on to tell me that she’ll answer any questions I have under one condition: No one in the Accerbi family can know who I really am.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Norm meets us with a grin and his arms held wide to help when he sees we’re toting food. I take out the dishes I’d found earlier in the afternoon—a few pots, mismatched plastic plates, a few forks, and a spoon—and rinse them in the sink as Camille searches for matches to light the pilot on the gas stove to boil macaroni and cheese. “How long you think this hot water’s going to last?” I ask her. “Gi, I need to have a serious talk with you,” she says. I still myself and look at her, but she’s avoiding my eyes by busying herself with drying the dishes. Her voice is low: always a sure sign or trouble. “What is it?” “I want to stay at Kathy’s for the summer.” “For the summer ?” “Yes. I think Doug’s parents will let me stay on their couch for a night or two until Kathy convinces her mom to let me stay at their house.” My heart sinks into my flip-flops. “It’s not forever —” “I thought you would be here more!” I tell her. “Camille, you can’t leave me alone with the kids again—you lived at Kathy’s the whole last year!” Cherie and Camille have known Kathy since Cherie was in second grade and Camille was in first. Since my sisters are so close in age, they shared everything, including friends. One afternoon during recess at Saint James Elementary School, Cherie got hit in the head with a baseball. Kathy scooped her up, carried her off the field, and stayed with her until the school nurse came. From that moment, Cherie and Kathy—and Camille—became inseparable. Kathy had a big family and a mother who worked a lot, so Cherie and Camille would just hang out at her house for days, or sometimes weeks. It was during this time that I became the little mom to Rosie and Norman. I kept hoping Cherie and Camille would walk through the door together, but when Camille finally came back, she was alone. Cherie got married and moved into her in-laws’ basement in Brentwood. Kathy and Camille stayed close friends, and Camille lived almost all of last year with Kathy’s family after we were kicked out of our last apartment. There was nowhere for the rest of us to go, so we lived out of Cookie’s car in a supermarket parking lot on Hawkins Avenue in Ronkonkoma. When I’d see Kathy’s younger siblings at school, I’d avoid them. They already had tons of siblings, so why did they get to have mine, too? I pictured Kathy’s whole giant family gathered around the table for dinner, my sisters clearing the dishes and helping with homework, when they should have been at home helping me! “How do you expect me to do this on my own?” By now I’m sobbing muffled words into Camille’s embrace. “Huh?” “Shhh,” she says, hugging me again. “Does Cherie know?” “Gi,” she says, “I need you to understand.