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 Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “In the last few weeks her mother hardly opened her eyes. When she did, it seemed like she was staring into space, not really able to see anything. My mother wasn’t sure if her mother even knew she was lying next to her anymore. Her skin became yellow and her mouth was a little open all the time, as if she couldn’t hold it closed. As toxins from the liver went into her brain she became confused and once in a while whispered something that didn’t make any sense, for instance, that they needed to feed the dogs, but they never had dogs. My mother wondered if she was referring to a dog she’d had as a child, but she never knew if that dog existed. “I don’t think she ever got over her mother’s death,” Eve says. “She told me about the last days of her mother’s life many times, as if telling me would help her process it better or as if she needed me to know every detail so she wouldn’t feel so alone.” In the last few days of her mother’s life, Sara didn’t go to school. She would crawl into bed with her mother and try to listen to her breathing. It comforted her to know that her mother was still alive, that her mother could hear her. But Sara knew she couldn’t touch her mother anymore; her body had become so sensitive, even a gentle touch could hurt her. A nurse from the hospital came to visit their house every day, and one day she called Sara to the other room and told her that her mother was going to die soon, in weeks or maybe days. She gave her a little green book that described what to expect. But Sara didn’t really believe it. She thought that if she stayed in bed with her mother, she could keep her alive; that if she made sure she synchronized her breaths with her mother’s, they would breathe together forever. On Sara’s fourteenth birthday, her mother took seven deep breaths, each of them sounding like a sigh, and then one last breath. She had a little smile on her face, but she wasn’t alive anymore. Eve tells me this as if she is telling me about her own dead mother. I have tears in my eyes but she doesn’t. She looks at me and takes a deep breath herself. Is she making sure she is still alive? She moves uncomfortably. “You mentioned before that my mother was twelve years old when her mother got sick, and my daughter was twelve years old when I started seeing Josh. I never made that connection. When we have sex I always cry. Once in a while I ask him to save my life, to take me somewhere, drive me far away.” “It is not unusual for sex to become a desperate attempt to heal our wounded parents and ourselves,” I say, and Eve starts to cry.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  I realized after a year or two that the tree had been a higher power for me when I could not accept the idea of a god. It remains a powerful symbol for me, but I now have God in my life as well. Many thoughts and quotations have kept me going over the years. This poem has become a favorite: [image file=img/page0250_0000.svg] A friend arrived in my town just after she had left the Emissaries. We spent many long hours together as she began her exit and the restoration of her life. We remain the best of friends. I know she has breathed better as a result, so by the poem's definition, I have succeeded. Anything else I do is gravy. I can sum up the positive aspects of this horrible cult experience by saying that I've had the chance to reinvent myself. Few people ever have such a thorough opportunity as those of us who have been through a cult experience. Blinded by the Lightby Rosanne Henry Rosanne Henry and her husband joined a New Age/Eastern-style cult known as Kashi Ranch. Rosanne was persuaded by the group to give her newborn child to the leader, and later Rosanne left the group. She writes about the pain of losing her daughter and the joy ofgoing back to reclaim custody of her. Rosanne is a licensed professional counselor who specializes in cult recovery. Harry and I had been married three years. Due to various confusions and tensions in our lives, we decided to try therapy. To save money, we went to the Free University and signed up with so-called art therapists (who turned out to have journalism degrees). After six months of therapy, they referred us to Joya, their new spiritual teacher. Within two weeks of the referral, Harry took emergency leave from his medical residency and flew two thousand miles to Florida to meet Joya. She was perceptive, shrewd, and charismatic. She immediately began breaking Harry down and indoctrinating him. Concerned about Harry's welfare and our marriage, I followed him to Kashi Ranch, the ashram where Joya and her followers lived. Because of the vulnerable state we were in, it took only a few months of concentrated efforts to indoctrinate us into the cult. We moved from Colorado to Florida. Harry found a job with a health maintenance organization while I began developing a business that would serve as the economic base for the Ranch. Within a year, Macho Products was in operation, manufacturing and distributing protective equipment for the martial arts. Joya, whose name was now Joyce Cho, was trying to have a child. She had recently married a Tae-Kwon-Do master, and had two grown children and a teenager from her first marriage; but at age forty, she wanted more. For months, we heard about her miscarriages and her relentless desire to get pregnant. She then devised a plan, and whoever was pregnant on the Ranch became a target.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  The party went off to perfection, and a dinner invitation from Nessim threw the old diplomat into a transport of pleasure which was not feigned. It was well known that the King was a frequent guest at Nessim’s table and the old man was already writing a despatch in his mind which began with the words: ‘Dining with the King last week I brought the conversation round to the question of.… He said … I replied.…’ His lips began to move, his eyes to unfocus themselves, as he retired into one of those public trances for which he was famous, and from which he would awake with a start to astonish his interlocutors with a silly cod’s smile of apology. For my part I found it strange to revisit the little tank-like flat where I had passed nearly two years of my life; to recall that it was here, in this very room, that I had first encountered Melissa. It had undergone a great transformation at the hands of Pombal’s latest mistress. She had insisted upon its being panelled and painted off-white with a maroon skirting-board. The old arm-chairs whose stuffing used to leak slowly out of the rents in their sides had been re-upholstered in some heavy damask material with a pattern of fleur-de-lis while the three ancient sofas had been banished completely to make floor-space. No doubt they had been sold or broken up. ‘Somewhere’ I thought in quotation from a poem by the old poet, ‘somewhere those wretched old things must still be knocking about.’ How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work. Pombal’s gaunt bedroom had become vaguely fin de siécle and was as clean as a new pin. Oscar Wilde might have admitted it as a set for the first act of a play. My own room had reverted once more to a box-room, but the bed was still there standing against the wall by the iron sink. The yellow curtain had of course disappeared and had been replaced by a drab piece of white cloth. I put my hand to the rusted frame of the old bed and was stabbed to the heart by the memory of Melissa turning her candid eyes upon me in the dusky half-light of the little room. I was ashamed and surprised by my grief. And when Justine came into the room behind me I kicked the door shut and immediately began to kiss her lips and hair and forehead, squeezing her almost breathless in my arms lest she should surprise the tears in my eyes. But she knew at once, and returning my kisses with that wonderful ardour that only friendship can give to our actions, she murmured: ‘I know. I know.’

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I can feel my heart beat as he continues. “She was the love of my life, but strangely, ever since she died I find myself thinking I just made her up, that she never actually existed. Do you know what I mean?” He looks at me, and I can see the tears in his eyes—and feel tears building up in my own. “Love needs a witness,” I say. “I know what you mean.” I’m thinking about Naomi and her devoted witnessing of Isabella’s life. I’m thinking of everything I know that this man doesn’t realize. I’m thinking of the major role this man played in Isabella’s life and of his painful loss. So many invisible characters, so many secrets. I decide to refer him to another therapist. He deserves his own separate treatment, and Naomi deserves my loyalty. I want to cherish her Isabella and not confuse her with the Isabella of the man I’ve just met. I am left stunned to process my own feelings, holding more secrets than ever. Is this the secret Isabella wanted to share with Naomi, or did Naomi know this and keep it as a secret from me? I may never know. I’m reminded of the enigma of the human mind, questioning whether we can ever fully know another person’s pain. 10THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCEOne snowy day, Guy, a man in his mid-forties, walks into my office for the first time. Wearing a heavy gray coat, he nods and says softly, “Like you, I am not used to this weather.” I am not sure exactly what he is referring to, and I wait for an explanation. “I was born in the same city you were born in,” he continues, almost whispering. We switch to speaking our mother tongue, Hebrew, but very quickly I come to understand that we are speaking different languages—one innocent, the other dangerous. “So,” Guy says slowly, as he tries to find a comfortable position in the armchair. “How come you chose to become a psychoanalyst when no one else in your family is in the mental health profession?” That is strange, I think to myself. How does he know no one in my family is a therapist? And if he doesn’t know, why would he make those assumptions? But I don’t have to speculate long, as Guy goes on: “Your sister, she is an architect, and her kids seem pretty sweet.” He doesn’t assume, I realize with fright. He knows. “It looks like you know a thing or two about me,” I say, inviting him to clarify, maybe to confess that indeed we met many years ago in Tel Aviv, or that we have mutual friends who referred him to me. Guy smiles. “I’m sure I know more about you than you want me to know,” he says. He pauses and then adds, “I hope you enjoyed your summer vacation in Italy.”

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  All I could think was that I needed to leave the Mission, the Swami, and my friends-again. I needed room to think. I had to leave, had to separate myself. It was hot in New York City on August 13, 1988, the day I finally made my decision to leave the Swami. At age thirty-three, I was confronted with the reality that I was without a career, financial stability, or a home. I was in a spiritual crisis that sent my mind, reeling. I felt a part of me die that hot summer day. The innocent part of me that I reserved for my relationship with God was crushed. As I made my decision, I knew I would lose my devotee family, just as I had lost my TM family. I made the decision. Then my recovery began. The first night away from the Mission was one of the most difficult. Involuntary, constant chanting played in my head, a reminder of where I had been. Thoughts of the Swami, God, Hell, and my mortality rushed through my head. It took months for these thoughts to pass. I constantly questioned myself: Was I making the right choice? Am I going to have to descend into lower animal forms? Will I spend many lifetimes searching for God before I am given another chance at a human birth? Over time I began to realize that these thoughts were phobias induced by the group. I felt deeply depressed over the realization that I had lost many years devoting my energy to. the whims of gurus. I was emotionally regressed and spiritually spent, and knew I needed to get out of the quagmire of unhealthy spirituality. I wanted help, but whom could I trust? Both groups had discredited the value of therapy. Maharishi said therapy was "just stirring up the mud." The Swami taught that all problems were spiritual. I was confused about what I might gain in therapy, so I didn't seek therapy right away. Speaking with exit counselors helped me understand the persuasion techniques I had been subjected to in the two cults. In my fourteen years as a devotee, I had spent more than ten thousand hours engaged in hypnotic, trance- inducingtechniques. That leaves a legacy. The meditation practices left me with an inability to focus or concentrate. I had difficulty maintaining logical thought, reading, even carrying on a conversation. I was suffering from a dissociative disorder that had me feeling as though I wasn't in my own body. This sensation undermined my sense of self. I spaced out easily, most notably during stressful situations. To regain my self-confidence, I worked with my brother-in-law at a fairly physical job. Physical work helped me regain my ability to focus, and regular exercise helped me combat my tendency to dissociate.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  For a few weeks that woman cooked every day,” she says. “She packed all the meals in boxes, and labeled them with dates, and stored them in a big freezer.” Naomi takes a deep breath. “Isabella said she regretted that she was never a good cook. ‘Can you believe I might force them to eat my cooking for years?’ she joked, and I pretended it was funny.” They laughed together, and Isabella shared with Naomi her idea of leaving something for the children, letters and gifts for important events she would miss. They both knew that like that mother she read about, Isabella couldn’t imagine separating from her children. Naomi doesn’t look at me. “Many people recover from cancer and she could be one of them,” she says. I realize that she is trying to calm herself, to make sense of everything, to feel less helpless. She continues. “‘Don’t think about it,’ I told Isabella. ‘You are about to start a new experimental treatment. There is still hope.’ I held her hand as tightly as I could. ‘Isy, you are a fighter. It’s not over,’ I said. “Isabella didn’t answer. I could see that she was irritated, but she kept silent and just handed me four big blue boxes. She asked me to go over her directions, to make sure I understood what to do with them. “‘Open on your eighth birthday,’ she wrote to her daughter on a big square envelope. On another, ‘Open on the first day of school.’ “There were good luck notes, gifts, and letters for birthdays and graduations. She left each of the girls a book on puberty, the same book she and I used to read together when we were twelve years old. It was so painful that at some point I stopped and couldn’t go on. ‘Isy, why?’ I wanted to ask, but she was determined and I knew that I should do what she wanted me to do; that if she could handle it I should be able to handle it too.” Naomi and I sit in silence. There is no real way to escape the pain, and words cannot capture it. “Before I left her house Isabella seemed restless. I felt like she was trying to tell me something but couldn’t, and I have to admit, I’m not sure I wanted to know. It was already a lot.” Naomi shakes her head. “I feel like such a bad friend,” she says. “Isabella needed me to imagine with her how it feels to say goodbye to her children and know that she will never see them again. She needed me to know that they will need her and that she won’t be there for them. And I just couldn’t. I wish I could put my selfish pain aside and help her.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The only faces I saw were those of Mrs Best, and Mary - the little skivvy who had opened the door to me, who changed my pot and brought me coal and water, and who I sometimes sent on errands to buy me cigarettes and food. Her expression as she handed me my packages showed me how strange I had become; but to her fear and her wonder alike, I was indifferent. I was indifferent to everything except my own grief - and this I indulged with a strange and horrible passion. I believe I barely washed in all those weeks - and certainly I did not change my dress, for I had no other. Very early on I gave off wearing my false chignon, too, and let my hair straggle greasily about my ears. I smoked, endlessly - my fingers grew brown, from the nail to the knuckle; but I ate hardly at all. For all that I liked to watch the carcases being towed about at Smithfield, the thought of meat upon my tongue made me nauseous, and I had stomach for none but the blandest of foods. Like a woman quickening with child I developed a curious appetite: I longed only for sweet, white bread. I gave Mary shilling after shilling, and sent her to Camden Town and Whitechapel, Limehouse and Soho, for bagels, brioches and flat Greek loaves, and buns from the Chinese bakeries. These I would eat dipped in mugs of tea, which I brewed, ferociously strong, in a pot on the hearth, and sweetened with condensed milk. It was the drink I had used to make for Kitty, in our first days together at the Canterbury Palace. The taste of it was like the taste of her; and a comfort, and a frightful torment, all at once. The weeks, for all my carelessness to their passing, passed by anyway. There is little to say about them, except that they were dreadful. The tenant in the room above my own moved out, and was replaced by a poor couple with a baby: the baby was colicky, and cried in the night. Mrs Best’s son found a sweetheart, and brought her to the house: she was given tea and sandwiches in the downstairs parlour; she sang songs, while someone played on the piano. Mary broke a window with a broom, and shrieked - then shrieked again when Mrs Best rolled up her sleeve and slapped her. Such were the sounds I caught, in my grim chamber. They might have solaced me, except that I was beyond solace. They only kept me mindful of the things - all the ordinary things! the smack of a kiss, the lilt of a voice lifted in pleasure or anger - that I had left behind me.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “‘But, Mom’—I started to cry—‘I can’t. The puppy doesn’t have parents; she doesn’t have anyone to take care of her. I promise you, you won’t have to do anything. I will do everything. I’ll take care of it myself. Please, Mom, please.’ “My mother opened her eyes. “‘Eve, don’t make me angry,’ she said. ‘Did you hear what I just said? Bring it back to where you found it. We won’t have dogs in this house.’” Eve looks devastated. She starts to sob. “I had no choice and took the dog outside and left it on the street. The next day I found the puppy dead across the street from our building. Someone told me that she was hit by a car. I thought it was all because she tried to follow me back home.” Eve is weeping and I try to hold back my own tears. I feel her anger and helplessness as she identifies with the abandoned puppy, who, like her mother, doesn’t have a mother, doesn’t have anyone to take care of her. That dog, which was thrown back to the street, was also like herself as a child, abandoned again and again, walking alone in the world, and hoping that someone would adopt her and transform her life. The dead dog represented all the deadness Eve carried inside her: her dead grandmother, her traumatized and emotionally dead mother, and her dead self. The French psychoanalyst André Green coined the term “dead mother,” referring to an unavailable, usually depressed, and emotionally absent mother. Green described a traumatized mother who is distanced and emotionally dead. He explained that it was usually loss that caused the mother to die emotionally, and that the child then became invested for the rest of her life in trying to connect to the mother, in an attempt to revive and bring her back to life. Any child whose most devastating fear is abandonment will insist on connecting with their mother and do anything to feel close to her, including compromising parts of themselves. When they give up on bringing her back to life, they will try to restore the connection through the renunciation of their own aliveness. They will meet the mother in her deadness and thus will develop their own emotional deadness. The intergenerational aspect of deadness is everywhere in Eve’s psyche. She carries that emotional inheritance and identifies with her dead mother. Deep inside she, too, feels broken, deadened, ashamed. As a child, she tried to transform that feeling in the moments when she dreamed about creating life, about becoming a mother, having a hundred children. She calculated that if she gave birth ten times and each time she had ten babies, then a hundred kids could be a pretty realistic number of children. They would be like a family of puppies, snuggling together. She fantasized about a life filled with love, as she was struggling with layers of death.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I understand that the ongoing pain makes him wish he could erase the past and never look back. He feels haunted by the past. But it is not yet clear to either of us why. “I don’t love Milo anymore, and still, I feel like I have lost a part of myself, and now I’m supposed to function without it. And it hurts so much,” he says. “How do people ever recover from a loss without feeling that a part of them is gone forever? Do they ever fully recover?” he asks, diving right into the riddle of grief. Freud went back and forth in framing and reframing his thinking on loss. One of the questions he kept investigating was how much people can let go of their loved ones, or whether they always keep a part of themselves connected to the love object. Freud’s thinking was influenced by his wish to understand his own grief. He suffered painful losses, including the death of his daughter Sophie from complications of the Spanish flu and the tragic death of his beloved four-and-a-half-year-old grandson, Heinele. According to his biographers, the death of his grandson was the only occasion in Freud’s life when he shed tears and described himself as depressed. At first, Freud explained that the grief process was about letting go and breaking the tie to the one we have lost. From that perspective, a healthy process is when the drive to live is stronger than the wish to reunite with the dead (what he called “the death instinct”), and so we slowly detach and loosen our “cathexis,” the energy invested in the lost person. Later, Freud developed his thinking to differentiate between mourning and melancholia. He described that in mourning the world feels poor and empty, while in melancholia, the person herself feels poor and empty. She loses interest in the outside world, she loses the capacity to love, and her self-esteem is diminished. That melancholia, according to Freud, is an unconscious process in which, instead of detaching and withdrawing the emotional investment from the lost person, the melancholic preserves and keeps that person alive inside them through identification with the dead. If the person is me and I am them, then there is no loss. Keeping the lost person caged inside denies the loss, but at the same time it holds the melancholic person forever captive to it. As a result, she loses parts of her own investment in life and vitality.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  She is frozen in place, a ten-year-old girl who has just lost her brother. After her brother’s death, both her parents became depressed and were unable to function. Her father had to leave his job, and her mother couldn’t get out of bed. As is typical with loss, Dana didn’t only lose her brother; she in fact lost everything—her family and her life as she knew it. She couldn’t bother her parents with her own confusing and overwhelming pain. She tried to make believe everything was as usual and focused on her schoolwork. But she couldn’t concentrate, and she failed in every class. “I am stupid,” she concluded. WALKING INTO MY office was frightening and unfamiliar for Dana. Her friend’s therapist had referred her to me. She had kept my phone number in her bag for almost a year before she called. For so many years she had tried not to think, not to know; she had disconnected when she felt too much. It was as if she had been locked in a dark basement, and now we are trying to slowly turn on the lights without blinding her eyes. It is hard not to feel alone when it comes to pain. To some extent all feelings are isolated, enigmatic, and we transform them, through words, into a form that we can share with others. But words do not always capture the essence of our feelings, and in that sense, we are always alone. This is especially true when it comes to trauma and loss. In order to survive, we disconnect not only from others but also from ourselves. And we cry for the losses—of the people we love, of the life we used to have, of our old self. Mourning is a private, lonely experience. It doesn’t necessarily unify people; it often splits them apart so that they are isolated in their pain, feeling unrecognized, misunderstood, or invisible. We need another mind to help us know our own mind, to feel and digest our loss and everything that we are too anxious to connect to: our shame, rage, identification with the dead, guilt, and even envy. Dana needs me to know her suffering from the inside, unaware, though perhaps she senses, that in fact I know her feelings better than both of us realize. I don’t need to remember my own history; I am living it. I am her therapist, I am my mother’s daughter, and I am a mother myself with a daughter and a son.

• From Wild (2012)

  Inhaling it now, I didn’t so much smell the sharp, earthy scent of the desert sage as I did the potent memory of my mother. I looked up at the blue sky, feeling, in fact, a burst of energy, but mostly feeling my mother’s presence, remembering why it was that I’d thought I could hike this trail. Of all the things that convinced me that I should not be afraid while on this journey, of all the things I’d made myself believe so I could hike the PCT, the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had. I stood and let the wind blow the sage leaves from my hands and walked to the edge of the flat area I was occupying. The land beyond gave way to a rocky outcropping below. I could see the mountains that surrounded me for miles, sloping gently down into a wide desert valley. White, angular wind turbines lined the ridges in the distance. My guidebook told me that they generated electricity for the residents of the cities and towns below, but I was far from that now. From cities and towns. From electricity. From California, it even seemed, though I was squarely in the heart of it, of the real California, with its relentless wind and Joshua trees and rattlesnakes lurking in places I had yet to find. As I stood there, I knew I was done for the day, though when I’d stopped I’d intended to push on. Too tired to light my stove and too exhausted to be hungry in any case, I pitched my tent, though it was only four in the afternoon. I took things from my pack and tossed them into the tent to keep it from blowing away, then pushed the pack in too and crawled in behind it. I was immediately relieved to be inside, even though inside meant only a cramped green nylon cave. I set up my little camp chair and sat in the small portal where the tent’s ceiling was high enough to accommodate my head. Then I rummaged through my things to find a book: not The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California, which I should have been reading to see what lay ahead the next day, and not Staying Found, which I should have read before starting the trail, but Adrienne Rich’s book of poems, The Dream of a Common Language.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Sara was fourteen years old when her mother died. “My mother, like me, was the oldest of four children and the only girl. She was her mother’s main caretaker and a responsible and devoted daughter. She told me that for months her mother would lie in bed all day with a high fever, and she would try to help, bringing her ice and wet towels to control the fever. But nothing worked. As time passed the fevers started earlier in the day and lasted all night. My grandfather moved to sleep in the living room; my mother would wake up in the middle of the night to check on her mother and would run home after school to see if she needed anything. “In the last few weeks her mother hardly opened her eyes. When she did, it seemed like she was staring into space, not really able to see anything. My mother wasn’t sure if her mother even knew she was lying next to her anymore. Her skin became yellow and her mouth was a little open all the time, as if she couldn’t hold it closed. As toxins from the liver went into her brain she became confused and once in a while whispered something that didn’t make any sense, for instance, that they needed to feed the dogs, but they never had dogs. My mother wondered if she was referring to a dog she’d had as a child, but she never knew if that dog existed. “I don’t think she ever got over her mother’s death,” Eve says. “She told me about the last days of her mother’s life many times, as if telling me would help her process it better or as if she needed me to know every detail so she wouldn’t feel so alone.” In the last few days of her mother’s life, Sara didn’t go to school. She would crawl into bed with her mother and try to listen to her breathing. It comforted her to know that her mother was still alive, that her mother could hear her. But Sara knew she couldn’t touch her mother anymore; her body had become so sensitive, even a gentle touch could hurt her. A nurse from the hospital came to visit their house every day, and one day she called Sara to the other room and told her that her mother was going to die soon, in weeks or maybe days. She gave her a little green book that described what to expect. But Sara didn’t really believe it. She thought that if she stayed in bed with her mother, she could keep her alive; that if she made sure she synchronized her breaths with her mother’s, they would breathe together forever. On Sara’s fourteenth birthday, her mother took seven deep breaths, each of them sounding like a sigh, and then one last breath.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  In my mind’s eye I could see the jogging night train with its interminable stoppings and startings in dust-blown towns and villages — the dirt and the heat. It would take all night. I turned to Gaudier and asked his permission to absent myself for the whole week-end. ‘In exceptional cases we do grant permission’ he said thoughtfully. ‘If you were going to be married, for example, or if someone was seriously ill.’ I swear that the idea of marrying Melissa had not entered my head until he spoke the words. There was another memory, too, which visited me now as I packed my cheap suitcase. The rings, Cohen’s rings, were still in my stud-box wrapped in brown paper. I stood for a while looking at them and wondering if inanimate objects also had a destiny as human beings have. These wretched rings, I thought — why, it was as if they had been anxiously waiting here all the time like human beings; waiting for some shabby fulfilment on the finger of someone trapped into a mariage de convenance. I put the poor things in my pocket. Far off events, transformed by memory, acquire a burnished brilliance because they are seen in isolation, divorced from the details of before and after, the fibres and wrappings of time. The actors, too, suffer a transformation; they sink slowly deeper and deeper into the ocean of memory like weighted bodies, finding at every level a new assessment, a new evaluation in the human heart. It was not anguish I felt so much at Melissa’s defection, it was rage, a purposeless fury based, I imagine, in contrition. The enormous vistas of the future which in all my vagueness I had nevertheless peopled with images of her had gone by default now; and it was only now that I realized to what an extent I had been nourishing myself on them. It had all been there like a huge trust fund, an account upon which I would one day draw. Now I was suddenly bankrupt. Balthazar was waiting for me at the station in his little car. He pressed my hand with rough and ready sympathy as he said, in a matter-of-fact voice: ‘She died last night poor girl. I gave her morphia to help her away. Well.’ He sighed and glanced sideways at me. ‘A pity you are not in the habit of shedding tears. Ça aurait été un soulagement.’ ‘Soulagement grotesque.’ ‘Approfondir les émotions … les purger.’ ‘Tais-toi, Balthazar, shut up.’ ‘She loved you, I suppose.’ ‘je le sais.’ ‘Elle parlait de vous sans cesse. Cléa a été avec elle toute la semaine.’ ‘Assez.’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  One day in January I came across my old tin trunk with its yellow enamel inscription. I lifted the lid - and found Davy’s map of Kent pasted on the underside, with Whitstable marked with a faded arrow, ‘To show me where home was, in case I forgot.’ He had meant it as a joke; they had none of them thought I really would forget them. Now, however, it must seem to them that I had. I closed the trunk with a bang; I had felt my eyes begin to smart. When Kitty came running to see what the noise was, I was weeping. ‘Hey,’ she said, and put her arm about me. ‘What’s this? Not tears?’ ‘I thought of home,’ I said, between my sobs, ‘and wanted to go there, suddenly.’ She touched my cheek, then put her fingers to her lips and licked them. ‘Pure brine,’ she said. ‘That’s why you miss it. I’m amazed you have managed to survive this long away from the sea, without shrivelling up like a bit of old seaweed. I should never have taken you away from Whitstable Bay. Miss Mermaid ...’ I smiled, at last, to hear her use a name I thought she had forgotten; then I sighed. ‘I would like to go back,’ I said, ‘for a day or two ...’ ‘A day or two! I shall die without you!’ She laughed, and looked away; and I guessed that she was only partly joking, for in all the months that we had spent together, we had not been separated for so much as a night. I felt that old queer tightness in my breast, and quickly kissed her. She raised her hands to hold my face; but again she turned her gaze away. ‘You must go,’ she said, ‘if it makes you sad like this. I shall manage.’ ‘I shall hate it too,’ I said. My tears had dried; it was I, now, who was doing the consoling. ‘And anyway, I shan’t be able to go until we close at Hoxton - and that is weeks away.’ She nodded, and looked thoughtful. It was weeks away, for Cinderella was not due to finish until Easter; in the middle of February, however, I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly at liberty. There was a fire at the Britannia. There were always fires in theatres in those days - halls were regularly being burned to the ground, then built up again, better than before, and no one thought anything of it; and the fire at the Brit had been small enough, and no one got injured. But the theatre had had to be evacuated, and there had been problems with the exits; afterwards an inspector came, looked at the building, and said a new escape door must be added. He closed the theatre while the work was done: tickets were returned, apologies pasted up; and for a whole half-week we found ourselves on holiday.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  We look at each other and Leonardo shrugs and smiles. “They’ve been waiting all these years for their loved ones to come back.” 4 THE RADIOACTIVITY OF TRAUMA IN ISRAEL, HOLOCAUST Remembrance Day, Yom Ha’Shoah, is a national holiday. Each year, in mid-April, everyone observes two minutes of silence. By 10 a.m. all children are standing in a circle in the schoolyard waiting for the sound of the air-raid siren, signaling that the silence is to begin. Everyone pauses whatever they are doing. Pedestrians stop walking, diners in restaurants stop eating and stand up, and on the busiest highway, every single car pulls to the side and people step out to stand still. It is time to remember the six million who were murdered during the Holocaust. As children, we learned that terrible things can happen to people. This wasn’t an explicit statement but a fact that—like a hot spice added to our food— had become a regular ingredient in our lives. In almost every apartment building there was someone from “there,” the Europe of World War II, a Holocaust survivor. We usually knew who those people were, even if we didn’t know their history, even if we didn’t see the numbers tattooed on their arms, even if we were often afraid of them, devastated by their life stories. In the schoolyard, when the siren began, we tried not to catch each other’s eyes, imitating the teachers, who kept their heads down. We tried as hard as we could to stay serious, to feel sad, to think about the concentration camps, the gas chambers, to imagine our own families being there. It was important, we learned, never to forget. But as hard as we tried, inevitably as the siren began one of the kids would start giggling, and we would cover our faces, trying not to burst into laughter. Nervous laughter during the Holocaust Day siren is a familiar childhood memory of people who grew up in Israel, where horror stories shape part of the national identity and a special form of dark humor characterizes the younger generations. Years later, in New York City, far from my homeland, I am surprised by how many of my patients are second- and third-generation descendants of Holocaust survivors. These high-functioning, successful, and productive people all have something in common: the ghosts of persecution who show themselves in unpredictable ways and at unexpected times. Under the surface they carry the trauma and guilt of the survivors. I learn that from childhood, images and daydreams of the Holocaust have been frequent visitors in their minds, even and especially for those whose parents never talked about what happened to their families during the war.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  The secrets of others become our own enigmas, and our secrets will inevitably find shelter and hide in the minds of others. The more concealed these secrets are, the more we become strangers to ourselves, held in captivity, afraid of the freedom to know and be known. The ghosts of the past are alive in our unconscious. To some degree, we are all gatekeepers of the unspeakable. The scars of our inherited trauma take their own unique shape. Our awareness, like detective work, follows the traces those ghosts leave in our minds. This awareness slowly sheds light on the ways the past affects and controls our present being. In ways that often feel mysterious, emotional material left unprocessed tends to appear and reappear in our lives. The unexamined life repeats itself and reverberates through the generations. The untold stories clamor for reenactment—they insist on being told. That which cannot be consciously identified forces itself into our reality and repeats itself. It is those now-seen patterns that we search for and unpack. Again and again, the human unconscious brings us to the original site of where things went wrong with the wish to do it all over again, repair the damage, and heal those who were hurt and wounded. We identify with previous generations—with those who have been injured, who have been humiliated, and who have died. In our fantasy, their cure is also our own. We plead for liberation from our bonds to the painful past and from the guilt of living and having a better life than the people who came before us. However, that unconscious wish to heal our ancestors often prevents us from mourning everything we cannot repair, save, or start again: our own childhoods, our parents’ wounds, and our grandparents’ trauma. It is the process of mourning and working through the pain that our parents couldn’t endure that paves the way to breaking the identification with those who suffered. Mourning differentiates the past from the present and separates those who died from those who stayed alive. We mourn what was out of our control, and therefore we mourn our lack of omnipotence, the fact that in reality we are not as powerful as we are in our fantasies. That emotional truth—our mortality, inherent vulnerability, and human limitations—leaves us humble and allows us to explore who we really are, to embrace future possibilities, and to raise the next generation with dignity. Ending the intergenerational cycle of suffering is expressed in the quote from Jeremiah with which I open this book—the wish that in the future “people will no longer say, ‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’” (31:29). This is a prayer that children won’t have to carry the consequences of their parents’ lives, and the wish that our emotional inheritance can be worked through and altered.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I recognize the tender love Alice has for them and her pain at not being able to start over, to heal her parents, bring them together, and live her childhood again. It is time to mourn, to treat her own wounds, and to liberate her future. “I want to let myself be my father’s daughter,” Alice says. I know what she means. She doesn’t want to end up envying her daughter for having the father she never had. She doesn’t want to repeat her history. Unlike the fantasy that one’s life starts or ends when a baby is born, life, and so, too, the process of examining it, is ongoing. There are many layers that Alice will have to peel away and explore as she gets closer to her emotional truth. She will relive her childhood with every stage of her daughter’s life. She will need to be angry at her parents and forgive them again. She will try to do her best, exactly the way her mother did, and will realize that her best isn’t always good enough. She will make mistakes and question herself, find herself overcorrecting for her parents’ faults as well as repeating them. She will feel gratitude for what they gave her, knowing that they were limited in their ability to know themselves and to work through their traumatic pasts, and that she had to do some of that work for them. Alice will never forget the painful yet fortunate journey of bringing Zoe to life. She and I will keep searching for her truths; she will try to own her past and question what she doesn’t yet know about herself and about life. In the end, we come to realize that it is the unexamined lives of others that we ourselves end up living. A Door Opens THE ABILITY TO love, to invest in life, to create and fulfill our dreams, is in ongoing dialogue with our capacity to search for emotional truths, to tolerate pain, and to mourn. While our journeys to healing vary, each starts with the decision to search, to open the door, and, rather than turn away from the hurt of the past, to walk toward it. We choose to unpack our emotional inheritance, to be active agents in transforming our fate into destiny. The secrets of others become our own enigmas, and our secrets will inevitably find shelter and hide in the minds of others. The more concealed these secrets are, the more we become strangers to ourselves, held in captivity, afraid of the freedom to know and be known. The ghosts of the past are alive in our unconscious. To some degree, we are all gatekeepers of the unspeakable. The scars of our inherited trauma take their own unique shape. Our awareness, like detective work, follows the traces those ghosts leave in our minds.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Like my own mother, Dana was ten years old when her brother died in a car accident. Now she is twenty-five. “How many years can one grieve?” she asks, frustrated that she is crying again. She tells me that she hated herself all those years for not being able to live like a “normal girl,” unable to stop her tears, to ignore the finger-pointing and whispers of “the girl who lost her brother.” She moved to New York City in order to forget, to become someone new. “And besides,” she says, “I’m not even sure I cry because of him. I’m just this whiny girl and I need therapy so I can start my life.” “Start your life,” I note. “Maybe I started, but then I had to pause and I’m not sure I know how to unpause,” she answers. I see how her fingers tap on the chair as she asks in a childish tone, “Do you know how to unpause a life?” My mother’s brother drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. She admired him; she loved his whistles, his jokes, his brilliant ideas. Dana tells me about her brother. “He was the funniest person in the whole world,” she says with a smile, “and I thought I would marry him when I grew up, or at least someone like him.” Her eyes fill with tears. It is clear that her pain is still so profound that she can’t finish a sentence without a sense of agony. Loss can never be fully processed, but at this point, for Dana, it is an open wound, and every time she thinks about it, the pain is intolerable. I am aware that she needs me to hold her hand and slowly guide her through this land of pain and devastation, but at this point I don’t recognize that I am also visiting my own family’s devastation. For fifteen years Dana has been alone with her pain. She has refused to talk with anyone about her past, and that refusal has been a way to protect herself from falling apart. But it has also required her to pause her life. She is frozen in place, a ten-year-old girl who has just lost her brother. After her brother’s death, both her parents became depressed and were unable to function. Her father had to leave his job, and her mother couldn’t get out of bed. As is typical with loss, Dana didn’t only lose her brother; she in fact lost everything—her family and her life as she knew it. She couldn’t bother her parents with her own confusing and overwhelming pain. She tried to make believe everything was as usual and focused on her schoolwork. But she couldn’t concentrate, and she failed in every class. “I am stupid,” she concluded. Walking into my office was frightening and unfamiliar for Dana. Her friend’s therapist had referred her to me. She had kept my phone number in her bag for almost a year before she called.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  She was protective of and loyal to her mother and estranged from her father. As a child Alice thought fathers were not important. She wasn’t jealous of her friends who had good relationships with their fathers and believed that as long as she and her mother had each other, they were better off without him. Unconscious dynamics are, behind the scenes, shaping Alice’s life as a repetition of her mother’s history. While she believes she inherited her mother’s genetic “bad luck,” it is in fact the identification with her mother, and the unconscious attempt to heal her mother, that bring Alice to live the same psychological pain her mother experienced: the drama of a daughter who loses a parent. Her mother’s trauma is reenacted in Alice’s childhood and, like her mother, she, too, grows up with one parent and loses the other. Alice’s loss, unlike her mother’s, was not framed as a tragedy for the daughter. Through this reenactment, Alice and her mother could relive the mother’s history together, but this time with the illusion of control; Alice believed that it was her own choice to end the relationship with her father. Instead of feeling sad, like her mother, she felt angry. Instead of being abandoned, she was doing the abandoning. Alice and her mother shared an unconscious fantasy of repairing her mother’s trauma and healing her. Alice’s loss of her father remained unrecognized and even dismissed. Once again, grief and sadness belonged solely to her mother—her mother was the one who had lost a husband she loved, and Alice became her emotional caretaker, replacing the mother her own mother never had. It is only now, for the first time, that we start questioning how much choice Alice actually had in that family dynamic as we try to differentiate between her mother’s needs and her own. “My mother remarried but she was still unhappy. Her childhood trauma was always there and it made her fragile and sad. She never stopped mourning her mother, and she never recovered from my father’s abandonment of her. ” Alice is unconsciously tied to her mother’s traumas. I recognize how confused she feels as she tries to find out the truth about herself and the people around her. Her parents were both dishonest, in different ways, and she struggles with the double messages she received from them, with her mother’s dissociated anger, with her father’s lies, and with her own aggression, which functions as a defense against her hidden vulnerability. Alice pauses and searches her pockets. She finds a hair tie and quickly puts her long dark hair up in a ponytail. Then she looks at me and smiles. “My mother is almost seventy years old now and she wears her hair in two long braids, like a little girl. Did I tell you that?” she asks. In that moment a thought crosses my mind. I wonder if her mother was envious of her for being a child with a mother.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I notice the tears in his eyes. “This is what my dream was about,” he says. “My father’s wish to save his father from a breakup that felt like death. ” “From a death your grandfather couldn’t fully mourn,” I say. Philosopher Judith Butler describes the idea of “grievability,” the notion that some things, lives, or relationships are not considered valuable, and therefore if they were to be lost, that loss wouldn’t register as such. It is only lives that were acknowledged by the culture as having a value that we consider worthy of grief. Some lives, some loves, some races, sexual orientations, and identities, are seen as less valuable or are not recognized as lives at all. Butler writes, “Grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters.” There is no way to grieve what is not considered lived. When love isn’t recognized as such, it is not grievable, and one is left mystified and inconsolable. As in Leonardo’s case, the loss that couldn’t be fully mourned lives in its raw form in the unconscious of the next generation. They are left to process old losses that don’t fully belong to them and to mourn what originally was ungrievable. Leonardo and I begin to piece together a picture of the context of his loss of Milo: his grandfather’s struggle with his homosexuality and his identity; his inability to mourn the loss of his illicit love; his suicide, leaving behind a devastated little boy, Jim, who believed that if his dad had only loved him enough he wouldn’t have left him . Many layers of unprocessed loss. A known secret that shelters another secret, a forbidden one. For years, Leonardo’s father kept the gift he had made for his father for his birthday, just a few days before he died. He had created a small ceramic vase in the futile hope of making his father happy for a day and keeping him alive. Jim had clung to this vase as a child, and then for the rest of his life. When Jim died, Leonardo inherited it, and he kept it on a shelf in his clothes closet. But it wasn’t only the vase that he had inherited. It was also the trauma and the losses of earlier generations, unprocessed losses that were held in his closet and in symbolic ways lived with his own belongings, until it was too hard to differentiate what was his and what wasn’t. Leonardo picks up his bag. “Maybe I’m not cursed after all,” he says as he heads to the door. “Maybe this is just a sad story with a hopeful ending.” He walks into the next session looking pleased. “I had a good week and I even met someone,” he says. “I feel encouraged.”