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 Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  As her shorn head fell into the basket, a cry went up of “Vive la révolution!” The most beautiful woman in Europe, the last great maîtresse-en-titre, was dumped in an unmarked grave beside other victims of the French Revolution. [image file=image_rsrc3DE.jpg] “Take that woman away out of my sight”While touring Italy in 1796 Wilhelmine Rietz, countess of Lichtenau, was informed that her lover of twenty-six years, King Frederick William II of Prussia, was dangerously ill. A high-level official wrote her that “only the presence of Countess Lichtenau could perhaps save the King, who was anxious to see her.”16 She set out at once for Berlin. Upon her return, Wilhelmine found the king greatly altered by his severe illness. Upon seeing his beloved companion, however, he began to feel better at once. She nursed Frederick William faithfully, arranging for plays to be performed in his sickroom, instructing the cooks to prepare his favorite meals. The pain-ravaged king was irritable unless his countess was by his side. Most courtiers agreed that she prolonged his life. But after eighteen months of gradual recuperation his condition worsened, and it became obvious to all that he was dying. Wilhelmine’s friends recommended that she flee the country with her jewels worth 50,000 crowns, and her drafts upon the Bank of England, worth another £120,000. But Wilhelmine was literally faithful until death. She wanted to be there, at her lover’s side, at the moment of passing. Only then would she look to her own concerns. Frederick William’s legs swelled horribly. Plays and music were no longer appropriate diversions for the dying man. Wilhelmine brought in courtiers whose conversation amused him. She read to him from books he found interesting. As the king’s agonies increased, Wilhelmine fell into convulsions. The doctors in attendance advised her to return home and get some rest. They would notify her if the king either improved or deteriorated. Drained, Wilhelmine complied. When she approached the crown prince, Frederick William’s twenty-seven-year-old son and heir, he cried, “Take that woman away out of my sight.”17 It was a sign of things to come. The crown prince had word sent to Wilhelmine that his father was doing well to prevent her from returning. And so King Frederick William II, at the last, strode into the abyss without her hand in his. Wallowing in a bed of sorrow, Wilhelmine soon learned that additional blows awaited her. Friends disappeared overnight. No one called to console her. Her own servants abused her. Worse, the new king sent agents to search her house for state papers and demanded the keys to her desk and cupboards. The papers so sought after proved to be romantic poems, songs, and love letters.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  Napoleon’s discarded mistress Maria Walewska also found happiness in marriage, albeit briefly. After Napoleon’s downfall in 1815, she devoted herself to their son Alexander and to regaining the estate left him by the emperor. After the death of her first husband, whom she had divorced, Maria was pursued by the dashing General Philippe Antoine d’Ornano, who had fallen deeply in love with her. She finally relented, marrying him in 1816. Nine months later she gave birth to a boy. But the pregnancy had taken a serious toll on her weak kidneys. She spent her last weeks dictating her memoirs—making herself out to be a Polish patriot rather than a lascivious mistress—and died in December 1817 at the age of thirty-one. On his desert exile of St. Helena, no one had the heart to tell Napoleon about her death. He thought she had stopped writing because she was happily married. When he died three years later, he was still wearing the ring she had given him, encasing a strand of her blonde hair, with the inscription, “When you cease to love me, remember, I love you still.”22 Upon parting from Lady Castlemaine after a liaison of twelve years, Charles II said, “All that I ask of you for your own sake is live so for the future as to make the least noise you can, and I care not who you love.”23 She could not help whom she loved, but she did make a great deal of noise. After countless messy love affairs, at the age of sixty-five she was finally unburdened of her long-suffering husband. Within weeks, the merry widow wed handsome Robert Fielding, a fifty-four-year-old who had married two fortunes and had the good luck to have both brides die. Fielding had been on the lookout for a third fortune when he happened to find two wealthy widows: Anne Deleau, worth about sixty thousand pounds a year, and Lady Castlemaine, whose vast income was well known throughout the kingdom. Fielding decided he need not limit himself to one—he would marry both women and take their fortunes. But instead of marrying Mistress Deleau, Fielding married an imposter named Mary Wadsworth, a friend of the heiress’s hairdresser, who pretended to be the wealthy relict, whom Fielding had never seen. At the third meeting, the couple was married by a priest and consummated the marriage. The “heiress,” however, said she needed to return home until she had broken the news to her father. She visited Fielding several times, each time having sex and collecting generous gifts from him.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  “Mom,” I said. “Oh, Junior,” she said and pulled me onto the couch with her. “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry.” “Don’t leave me,” she said. “Don’t ever leave me.” She was freaking out. But who could blame her? She’d lost her mother and her daughter in just a few months. Who ever recovers from a thing like that? Who ever gets better? I knew that my mother was now broken and that she’d always be broken. “Don’t you ever drink,” my mother said to me. She slapped me. Once, twice, three times. She slapped me HARD. “Promise me you’ll never drink.” “Okay, okay, I promise,” I said. I couldn’t believe it. My sister killed herself with booze and I was the one getting slapped. Where was Leo Tolstoy when I needed him? I kept wishing he’d show up so my mother could slap him instead. Well, my mother quit slapping me, thank God, but she held on to me for hours. Held on to me like I was a baby. And she kept crying. So many tears. My clothes and hair were soaked with her tears. It was, like, my mother had given me a grief shower, you know? Like she’d baptized me with her pain. Of course, it was way too weird to watch. So all of my cousins left. My dad went in his bedroom. It was just my mother and me. Just her tears and me. But I didn’t cry. I just hugged my mother back and wanted all of it to be over. I wanted to fall asleep again and dream about killer wasps. Yeah, I figured any nightmare would be better than my reality. And then it was over. My mother fell asleep and let me go. I stood and walked into the kitchen. I was way hungry but my cousins had eaten most of our food. So all I had for dinner were saltine crackers and water. Like I was in jail. Man. Two days later, we buried my sister in the Catholic graveyard down near the powwow ground. I barely remember the wake. I barely remember the funeral service. I barely remember the burial. I was in this weird fog. No. It was more like I was in this small room, the smallest room in the world. I could reach out and touch the walls, which were made out of greasy glass. I could see shadows but I couldn’t see details, you know? And I was cold. Just freezing. Like there was a snowstorm blowing inside of my chest. But all of that fog and greasy glass and snow disappeared when they lowered my sister’s coffin into the grave. And let me tell you, it had taken them forever to dig that grave in the frozen ground. As the coffin settled into the dirt, it made this noise, almost like a breath, you know? Like a sigh. Like the coffin was settling down for a long, long nap, for a forever nap.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  The police think Eugene and Bobby fought over the last drink in a bottle of wine: [image "Comic strip titled ‘How to Get the Last Sip of Wine from the Bottom of the Bottle’ illustrating various humorous methods: love, guilt, reverse psychology, sacred tradition, and force." file=image_rsrc4T5.jpg] When Bobby was sober enough to realize what he’d done, he could only call Eugene’s name over and over, as if that would somehow bring him back. A few weeks later, in jail, Bobby hung himself with a bedsheet. We didn’t even have enough time to forgive him. He punished himself for his sins. My father went on a legendary drinking binge. My mother went to church every single day. It was all booze and God, booze and God, booze and God. We’d lost my grandmother and Eugene. How much loss were we supposed to endure? I felt helpless and stupid. I needed books. I wanted books. And I drew and drew and drew cartoons. I was mad at God; I was mad at Jesus. They were mocking me, so I mocked them: [image "An illustration depicting Jesus standing on a shore with a group of people in front of him. The caption reads, ‘Jesus farteth and burpeth in harmony! MIRACULOUS! John 11:35.’" file=image_rsrc4T6.jpg] I hoped I could find more cartoons that would help me. And I hoped I could find stories that would help me. So I looked up the word “grief” in the dictionary. I wanted to find out everything I could about grief. I wanted to know why my family had been given so much to grieve about. And then I discovered the answer: [image "An illustration of an open book with the definition of ‘grief’ as feeling helpless and stupid, with a humorous comparison to macaroni and cheese tasting like sawdust. Source: Webster’s Dictionary 4ever." file=image_rsrc4T7.jpg] Okay, so it was Gordy who showed me a book written by the guy who knew the answer. It was Euripides, this Greek writer from the fifth century BC. A way-old dude. In one of his plays, Medea says, “What greater grief than the loss of one’s native land?” I read that and thought, “Well, of course, man. We Indians have LOST EVERYTHING. We lost our native land, we lost our languages, we lost our songs and dances. We lost each other. We only know how to lose and be lost.” But it’s more than that, too. I mean, the thing is, Medea was so distraught by the world, and felt so betrayed, that she murdered her own kids. She thought the world was that joyless. And, after Eugene’s funeral, I agreed with her. I could have easily killed myself, killed my mother and father, killed the birds, killed the trees, and killed the oxygen in the air. More than anything, I wanted to kill God. I was joyless.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  The police enter the house where they believe the letter is kept. They look everywhere, but they can’t find it. As it turns out, the letter is not hidden at all; it is in an ordinary card rack in plain sight and this confuses the police, who expect to uncover a secret truth. We tend to assume that what we can see must be known to us, but in fact, so much of what we don’t know about ourselves lies in the familiar, sometimes even in the obvious. Often we realize that it is in fact right before our eyes, and still we can’t see it. When I meet my patient Dana for the first time, I don’t know that her family traumas touch my own. My family trauma is unveiled and brought to life in the space between us. One ghost awakens another, and without awareness that brings us to new places. My mother’s older brother drowned in the sea when he was fourteen years old and she was only ten. In our family this was not a secret, but it was something we never talked about. We all knew that my mother was unable to speak about that part of her childhood. We understood that for her, remembering was a form of living through something that she couldn’t live through. The ten-year-old girl that she was had broken into pieces and never recovered. A part of her was gone with him, and only a picture in my grandparents’ living room hung as a reminder that many years ago, something was different. We, her children, were vigilant, trying never to touch what was clearly an open wound, and what became a sensitive spot for all of us. Once in a while, when someone whistled on the street, we all stopped breathing, waiting for my mother to briefly sigh, “My brother Eli,” her voice turning into that of a little girl. “He knew how to whistle, and his were absolutely the loudest.” Then she would pause for a moment and change the subject. In our attempt to protect the people we love from pain, we manage to keep those memories, stories, and facts forgotten, dissociated, hidden in our own minds. We know, and still we do not remember. Our unconscious minds are always loyal to our loved ones and to the unspeakable fact within their souls. So, while something familiar lives inside us, we treat it as a stranger within. Of course I knew that my mother had lost her brother. Of course I remembered every detail that I had ever learned. At the same time, I didn’t know and never remembered.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  She finally has a story that she can tell rather than relive again and again. The room is quiet but for the muffled sounds of her tears and breath, less labored now. PART II OUR PARENTS The Secrets of Others THIS SECTION UNCOVERS our parents’ secrets and hidden realities from the times before we were born and from our infancy. It explores known as well as unknown losses of siblings and the impact those have on the surviving children and on their offspring. It describes the enigmas of unwelcome babies— children of unwanted pregnancies and their constant struggle to stay alive. It looks into the eyes of fathers and fatherhood and further discusses the relationship between reparation and repetition: our wish to heal our parents’ trauma, to cure their wounded souls, which instead can lead us to reliving and repeating their painful histories. It is the ability to accept that which cannot be changed or fixed that allows us to start mourning. That permission to grieve for our losses and faults, as well as for our parents’, connects us with life and welcomes the birth of new possibilities. 5 WHEN SECRETS BECOME GHOSTS MY PATIENT NOAH has been preoccupied with death for as long as he can recall. When he was eight years old, he read the obituary section of the newspaper daily. “I wonder who this person was,” he would say, as he tried to share his interest with his mother. But she would shrug. “You can never really know.” Noah wanted to know; he needed to know. He was searching, investigating. Who had these dead people been? Whom had they left behind? How old were they when they died? Could Noah die? Could his parents? Decades later, Noah comes to see me with what he calls his “obsession with dead people.” He wants to know everything about these people in the obituaries, and I want to know everything about him. With each obituary that Noah brings into the consulting room, we piece together our respective puzzles, hunting for what is missing. “I got it,” Noah reports after hours of painstaking research at home, googling, filling in dates and details of the latest obituary. “I think I know everything. Now I can let it go.” Unlike Noah, I don’t get it. Missing many parts of Noah’s personal history, I try to wait patiently for them to enter the room. I know from experience that sooner or later the missing pieces will appear. I just have to silently listen and invite them in. Noah becomes irritated when he is missing something in his puzzle. He holds the newspaper and reads aloud to me from the obituary of a woman named Marie, then rolls his eyes. “Listen to how annoying this is,” he says. “How come they write that ‘Ronald’ was her second husband?

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Alice’s emotional growth is as speedy as her speech. I witness her picture beginning to be filled in with nuances, as she adds more colors to what used to be a black-and-white split view of her parents. She can now let herself see both of them as humans who struggle to be happy. She acknowledges the different ways they each used her in their divorce, treating her as a valuable asset that they were not willing to share. 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 OpensThe 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.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “My dad told us this story so many times that I visualize it in my mind as if it is a movie I’m watching,” he says. “I imagine him pounding on the door, calling his father’s name, begging him to open the door. And I see him crying into his pillow at night, blaming himself for not saving his father’s life: if only he had been stronger he could have broken down that door, or if only his father loved him enough he would not have left him.” Leonardo’s eyes fill with tears. “It is a pretty extreme thing to do,” he says, “killing yourself when you have three young children at home. I don’t know. I want to feel bad for my grandfather, but then I mostly get so angry with him.” Suicide, and especially a suicide of a parent, has serious implications for the surviving family members. The immediate survivors are overwhelmed with conflicting feelings of devastation, sorrow, anger, and shame. It leaves them with so much guilt that in order to cope they project it outside. The guilt turns into blame, and the question—whose fault was it?—is often the main pathway to releasing the intolerable guilt. Suicide is traditionally explained as a redirection toward the self of a murderous impulse originally aimed at others. That act of destruction leaves a loaded inheritance for the next generations, who will remain to hold the ghosts of suicide. They will struggle with the darkness of the soul, with buried secrets from the past, and often with their own suicidal wishes. Many of them will excessively invest in the well-being of others as a way to compensate for the unprocessed guilt. Their fantasy might be to save others in ways they couldn’t save the person who killed himself. Suicide can become a family myth, usually filled with unanswered questions. I wonder out loud, “What is the story behind your grandfather’s suicide? Why did he do it?” “I often ask myself that question,” Leonardo answers. “I’ll tell you the craziest theory I have,” he says, but then he pauses and falls into a long silence. “It feels like you are holding a secret,” I say. Leonardo smiles. “I wouldn’t call it a secret. It’s something I used to joke about with Milo, a wild thought that I always had, that Grandfather was actually gay and that his suicide was not the real secret my family kept, but his sexuality.” Leonardo leaves and I am left with the feeling that there are layers of truths unrevealed, unspoken facts from his family history as well as a hidden identification he has with his grandfather and with what he believes led to his death. That underlying identification sent Leonardo on an unconscious mission, which I locate in his dream—to liberate the family from shame and from a destiny of self-destruction.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  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. For years, we were used to accepting genetic heritage as fate. Biologists believed that environmental factors had little, if any, effect on DNA and that therefore psychological growth was separated from our genetic legacy. These days, the field of epigenetics gives us another framework for understanding how nature and nurture intermingle and how we respond to the environment on a molecular level.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  When the king was informed that his mistress had died, he shut himself up in his apartments with some of her best friends. Meanwhile, the duchesse de Praslin, looking out her window, saw the corpse of a woman, “covered only with a sheet wrapped so tightly that the shape of the head, the breasts, the stomach and legs were distinctly outlined.”12 Moments after Madame de Pompadour’s death, her body had been whisked away. The day of her funeral, a cold wind howled around Versailles. As the solemn procession passed in front of the palace, the king—who was forbidden by etiquette to attend the ceremony—stood on his balcony in the rain without a hat or coat, tears rolling down his face. “They are the only tribute I can offer her,” he said to his servant.13 When her friend Voltaire heard of her passing, he wrote, “I am greatly afflicted by the death of Madame de Pompadour; I weep when I think of it. It is very absurd that an old scribbler like myself should be still alive, and that a beautiful woman should have been cut off at forty in the midst of the most brilliant career in the world. Perhaps if she had tasted the repose which I enjoy, she would be living now.”14 A few days after the funeral the queen said, “Finally there is no more talk here of her who is no longer than if she had never existed. Such is the way of the world; it is very hard to love it.”15 The Business of LifeNot all royal mistresses suffered tragic endings. Most of them aged, were ousted, and went about the business of daily life, pockets stuffed with the wages of sin. Early in the reign of George I of England, three ancient royal mistresses of dead kings ran into each other at the English court. The duchesses of Portsmouth, Dorchester, and Orkney, mistresses of Charles II, James II, and William III, respectively, had beaten the odds and lived into a healthy old age. Like a trio of barnacled old scows bobbing in the harbor, the elderly dames looked at each other. Suddenly the plucky duchess of Orkney crowed, “Who would have thought that we three old whores would meet here?”16 After the exile of her lover, James II, Catherine Sedley, duchess of Dorchester, was given a pension by William III. She would afterward say that “both the kings were civil to her, but both the queens used her badly.”17 James had granted her a large pension from lands, but after his exile the House of Commons threatened her with the loss of it. Spirited Catherine went before the bar of the house to present her case herself and won it.

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

  Children may identify with their aggressors and bully other children or act out in abusive or even criminal ways. Or children may turn the anger inward with such self-destructive behaviors as cutting or burning themselves, or taking a passive stance toward repeated episodes of victimization. In cults, the victim stance is more likely, while the few who are more aggressive or fanatical may grow up to inherit leadership of the group or engage in abusive and destructive behaviors. Denial and numbing. With repeated trauma, children develop a mechanism of numbing, sometimes accompanied by a physical inability to feel pain. Children may develop a withdrawn or fearful personality-or its opposite, a hearty, charismatic style that camouflages their numbed and diminished sense of self. Dissociative disorders have been observed in adults abused as children in cults. Unresolved grief A child growing up in a cult, even without physical trauma, suffers many losses. Leaving the cult, sometimes without family, friends, or relatives, can produce feelings of isolation and desolation. As an adult looking back over the cult years, a person may feel a tremendous sadness for the childhood that might have been. The gaps in experience, in developmental stages, and in the development of normal trust and self-esteem, as well as a lack of common history with mainstream society, may severely affect a person's basic sense of self. The case of Ricky Rodriguez is but one terribly sad example of the damage and destruction that may he in the wake of unresolved issues related to an abusive cult childhood.24 Ricky was the son of "Mama Maria," the current spiritual leader of The Family International, the current organizational name for the Children of God (COG). Ricky grew up in COG. His mother was the second "wife" of the leader, and young Ricky was groomed as the heir apparent of the group, which was founded in the 196os by the late David "Moses" Berg. COG was one of the more successful of the so-called Jesus movements of that era, at one point claiming thousands and thousands of members and supporters. But COG was perhaps most famous (or infamous) for its controversial practices of using sex to recruit, as well as encouraging among its members multiple sex partners, sex between minors, and sex between minors and adultsincluding incest. As a young boy growing up in that environment, Ricky was subjected to a plethora of sexual behaviors with teen and adult women, some of whom cared for him while his mother was working for the cult. Ricky left the group in 2000, and suffered years of tremendous shame, guilt, and angerone can only imagine the tumult of emotions that must have befallen this young man. In January 2005, determined to find his mother (who remains hidden from members and the. general public), Ricky went on a rampage, killing his former "nanny" and then himself. He left behind a videotaped recording explaining his actions.

• From Less (2017)

  They went on in this way for nine years. And then, one autumn day, it ended. Freddy had changed, of course, from a twenty-five-year-old to a man in his midthirties: a high school teacher, in blue short-sleeved button-ups and black ties, whom Less jokingly called Mr. Pelu (often raising his hand as if to be called on in class). Mr. Pelu had kept his curls, but his glasses were now red plastic. He could no longer fit his old slim clothes; he had filled out from that skinny youngster into a grown man, with shoulders and a chest and a softness just beginning on his belly. He no longer stumbled drunk up Less’s stairs and recited bad poetry every weekend. But one weekend he did. It was a friend’s wedding, and he did show up, tipsy and red faced, leaning into Less as he staggered, laughing, into his mudroom. A night when he clung to Less, radiating heat. And a morning when, sighing, Freddy announced that he was seeing someone who wanted him to be monogamous. He had promised to be, about a month earlier. And he thought it was about time he stayed true to his promise. Freddy lay on his stomach, resting his head on Less’s arm. The scratch of his stubble. On the side table, his red glasses magnified a set of cuff links. Less asked, “Does he know about me?” Freddy lifted his head. “Know what about you?” “This.” He gestured to their naked bodies. Freddy met his gaze directly. “I can’t come around here anymore.” “I understand.” “It would be fun. It has been fun. But you know I can’t.” “I understand.” Freddy seemed about to say something more, then stopped himself. He was silent, but his gaze was that of someone memorizing a photograph. What did he see there? He turned from Less and reached for his glasses. “You should kiss me like it’s good-bye.” “Mr. Pelu,” Less said. “It’s not really good-bye.” Freddy put on his red glasses, and in each aquarium a little blue fish swam. “You want me to stay here with you forever?” A bit of sun came through the trumpet vine; it checkered one bare leg. Less looked at his lover, and perhaps a series of images flashed through his mind—a tuxedo jacket, a Paris hotel room, a rooftop party—or perhaps what appeared was just the snow blindness of panic and loss. A dot-dot-dot message relayed from his brain that he chose to ignore. Less leaned down and gave Freddy a long kiss. Then he pulled away and said, “I can tell you used my cologne.” The glasses, which had amplified the young man’s determination, now magnified his already wide pupils. They darted back and forth across Less’s face as in the act of reading. He seemed to be gathering up all his strength to smile, which, at last, he did. “Was that your best good-bye kiss?” he said.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It’s like - like having a roast in the pantry, and eating nothing but bits of crusts and cups of water.What I say is, if you’re not going to make an uncle of her, then, really, consider your friends, and pass her on to somebody who will.’‘You ain’t having her!’‘I don’t want anyone, now I’ve found Sue Bridehead. But there, you see, you do care for her!’‘Of course I care for her,’ said Florence quietly. Now I was listening so hard I felt I could hear her blinking, pursing her lips.‘Well then! Bring her to the boy tomorrow night’ - I was sure that’s what she said. ‘Bring her to the boy. You can meet my Miss Raymond...’‘I don’t know,’ answered Florence. The words were followed by a silence. And when Annie spoke next, it was in a slightly different tone.‘You cannot grieve for her for ever,’ she said. ‘She would never have wanted that...’Florence tutted. ‘Being in love, you know,’ she said, ‘it’s not like having a canary, in a cage. When you lose one sweetheart, you can’t just go out and get another to replace her.’‘I thought that’s exactly what you were supposed to do!’‘That’s what you do, Annie.’‘But Florence - you might just let the cage door open, just a little ... There is a new canary in your own front room, banging its handsome head against the bars.’‘Suppose I let the new one in,’ said Flo then, ‘then find I don’t care for it, as much as I did the old one? Suppose - Oh!’ I heard a thump. ‘I can’t believe that you have got me here, comparing her to a budgie!’ I knew she meant Lilian, not me; and I turned my head away, and wished I hadn’t listened after all. The parlour remained quiet for a second or two, and I heard Florence dip her spoon into her cup, and stir it. Then, before I had quite tiptoed back into the kitchen, her voice came again, but rather quietly.‘Do you think it’s true, though, what you said, about the new canary and the bars ... ?’My foot caught a broom, then, and sent it falling; and I had to give a shout and slap my hands, as if I had just that moment come home. Annie called me in and said that tea was brewed. Florence seemed to raise her eyes to mine, a little thoughtfully.Annie left soon after, and Florence busied herself, all night, with paper-work: she had lately got herself a pair of spectacles, and with them flashing firelight all night, I could not even see which way her glances tended - to me, or to her books.

• From Less (2017)

  They are shown to a leather booth where two men and a young woman are waiting. These are Hans’s friends, and, while Less suspects the grad student is cagily sponging from the department’s expense account, it is a relief to have someone other than a Derridean to talk with: a composer named Ulrich, whose brown eyes and shaggy beard give him the alert appearance of a schnauzer, his girlfriend, Katarina, similarly canine in her Pomeranian puff of hair, and Bastian, a business student whose dark good looks and voluminous kinky hairstyle make Less assume he is African; he is Bavarian. Less judges them to be around thirty. Bastian keeps picking a fight with Ulrich about sports, a conversation difficult for Less to follow not because of the specific vocabulary ( Verteidiger, Stürmer, Schienbeinschützer ) or obscure sports figures but because he simply does not care. Bastian seems to be arguing that danger is essential to sports: The thrill of death! Der Nervenkitzel des Todes! Less stares at his schnitzel (a crisp map of Austria). He is not here, in Berlin, in the Schnitzelhaus. He is in Sonoma, in a hospital room: windowless, yellowish, encurtained for privacy like a stripper before her entrance. In the hospital bed: Robert. He has a tube in his arm and a tube in his nose, and his hair is that of a madman. “It’s not the cigarettes,” Robert says, his eyes framed by his same old thick glasses. “It’s the poetry that’s done it. It kills you now. But later,” he says, shaking a finger, “immortality!” A husky laugh, and Less holds his hand. This is only a year ago. And Less is in Delaware, at his mother’s funeral, a hand softly pressing on his back to keep him from collapsing. He is so grateful for that hand. And Less is in San Francisco, on the beach, in the fall of that terrible year. “You boys don’t know anything about death.” Someone has said this; Less discovers it is he. This one time, his German is perfect. The entire table sits silent, and Ulrich and Hans look away. Bastian merely stares at Less, his mouth hanging open. “I’m sorry,” Less says, putting down his beer. “I’m sorry, I do not know why I said that.” Bastian is silent. The sconces behind him light every kink in his hair.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  In 1754 Madame de Pompadour’s only child, ten-year-old Alexandrine, died suddenly in her convent school. Days later Madame de Pompadour’s father, heartbroken over the loss of his only grandchild, also died. Overcome with grief, the royal mistress knew that however much the king liked talking about death and illness, he grew bored in their presence. Having lost a beloved father and darling daughter within a fortnight, she once again dried her tears and put on her diamonds. The prince de Croy, who visited her shortly afterward, reported, “I saw the Marquise for the first time since the loss of her daughter, a dreadful blow that I thought had completely crushed her. But because too much pain might have harmed her appearance and possibly her position, I found her neither changed nor downcast.” Though the prince saw her chatting cheerfully with the king, he thought that she “was in all likelihood just as unhappy inside as she seemed happy on the outside.”5 Indeed, for many years Madame de Pompadour would confess to friends, “For me happiness has died with my daughter.”6 She was just not permitted to show her pain. Madame de Pompadour, who truly loved Louis, wrote to a friend, “Except for the happiness of being loved by the one you love, which is the best of all conditions, a solitary and less brilliant life is much to be preferred.”7 Her lady’s maid, Madame du Hausset, who well understood the stresses of Madame de Pompadour’s life, said, “I pity you sincerely, Madame, while everybody else envies you.”8 In Madame de Pompadour the king enjoyed a charming companion constantly at his beck and call. Having lost his parents at the age of three, living apart from the rest of humanity as a kind of demigod, Louis was inexorably lonely by nature. In her low apartments under the eaves of Versailles, she offered him the warm and loving home he had never had with parents or siblings, and certainly never with his ill-suited wife. At great cost to herself, she diminished for him the pain of living, the loneliness in a crowd that only a monarch can suffer. Devastated by Madame de Pompadour’s early death—which was no doubt hastened by her nineteen exhausting years as his mistress—Louis waited four years before choosing another maîtresse-en-titre, the Parisian prostitute Madame du Barry, in 1768.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  The king, who felt flattered by Louise’s years of reproachful glances and silent suffering as he flaunted her successor, had wanted to keep her at court, a reminder of how irresistible he was. He was peeved that she preferred God to her king. For years courtiers, eager to see the novelty of royal mistress turned nun, visited Louise in the convent. After saying a prayer to ward off temptation, she who had given up the world was forced to meet members of it in the convent parlor. But not the king. He never saw her again. Perhaps the devout queen wished at times to follow Louise into the quiet sanctity of a convent, to leave the vicious Montespan and backbiting courtiers. But queens, unlike mistresses, left court only in coffins. For years, Marie-Thérèse had enjoyed spending brief sojourns at the Carmelite convent for spiritual consolation and repose. One day after Louise had taken her vows, the queen looked out her convent window and saw a little nun in a coarse habit limping across the courtyard, bearing an enormous bundle of laundry. This, then, was her husband’s mistress whom she had treated so cruelly in her jealousy. Shorn of her pearls and silks and the king’s love, the sweet, hopeful girl had come to this. The queen wept. The world revolved quickly at Versailles. Actors and actresses boasting the most glorious parts were forgotten almost the moment they left the stage; there were throngs of new characters pushing to take their places on the crowded boards. Louise de La Vallière had never quite fit the resplendent part assigned her. She had far more character and conscience than the script required. The scenery about her was too lavish, the costumes too ornate, the music shrill, the plots hollow. Her retirement into a convent was the court’s hottest topic, and then bored courtiers looked elsewhere for fresh gossip. “After all,” yawned Anne-Marie de Montpensier, the king’s cousin, “she is not the first converted sinner.”33 Madame de Montespan, while happy to incarcerate her former rival in a convent, was not without her own kind of piety. She was known to fast during Lent, even to weighing her bread. When one visitor expressed surprise at this, Louis XIV’s mistress replied, “Because I am guilty of one sin, must I commit them all?”34 The duc de Saint-Simon wrote, “Even in her sinful life she had never lost her faith; she would often leave the King suddenly to go and pray in her own room, and nothing would induce her to break a day of abstinence, nor did she ever neglect the demands of Lent. She gave freely to charity, respected good church-goers, and never said anything approaching scepticism or impiety. But,” he added acidly, “she was imperious, haughty, and most sarcastic, and she had the defects of a woman who had climbed to her position through her own beauty.”35

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  When the royal family’s coach overturned in a flash flood while crossing a river in 1606, Henri grabbed César, his twelve-year-old bastard son with Gabrielle d’Estrées, and raced with him to safety, leaving the rest of the family in danger of drowning. We can picture fat Queen Marie, sputtering water, sinking in her heavy velvets into the muddy current, watching the back of her husband race away from her to carefully deposit his bastard on shore. The queen was fished out by a courtier, who dragged her to safety by the hair. She rewarded the courtier with a casket of jewels, an annual pension, and the position of captain of the Queen’s Guards. But she never forgave her husband. Much to Marie’s dismay, Henri IV insisted on raising his eight bastards by various mistresses in the royal nursery along with his six legitimate children. At first Henriette d’Entragues, who had obtained a written promise of marriage from the king and considered herself his true wife, refused to allow her child to join the nursery. “I will not,” she stormed, “allow my son to be in the company of all those bastards!”6 Eventually Henri insisted, hoping that daily contact would result in brotherly love among the children rather than bitter rivalry. The king visited his brood frequently but had a hard time keeping them straight. He wrote a list that he kept in his pocket describing the children, detailing their names, ages, and mothers. Many royal bastards, well loved by the king, disliked their mothers, who lived in a state of full or partial disgrace. Louis XIV’s son with Madame de Montespan, the duc du Maine, had developed infantile paralysis at the age of three which left him with a limp, a tragedy of incalculable proportions in that world of exquisite grace and howling ridicule called Versailles. The duke blamed his mother for this calamity and never forgave her for her subsequent coldness to him. In 1691 the duke was so thrilled when he heard the king had finally exiled her from court that he insisted on taking the news to his mother himself. Within an hour of her sudden departure, he had all her baggage sent after her to Paris. He then ordered her furniture thrown out the windows onto the courtyard below lest she come back to fetch it. The duke immediately took over her prime apartments for himself. Similarly, the son of Charles II and Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Portsmouth, was close to his father but disliked his mother. When the king died in 1685 Louise took fourteen-year-old Charles to France, where she compelled this staunch young Protestant to convert to Catholicism. At nineteen Charles fled to England—rumor said with his mother’s jewels—bounced back to the Protestant religion, married an English noblewoman, and took his place in the House of Lords—devastating his very French, very Catholic mother.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  As if bound by an unspoken agreement, the family members avoided talking about Jane. They knew that mentioning her name might cause their mother to blame them for something. “Why did you leave the cabinet open?” she would say angrily. “How many times have I told you to not eat with your mouth open?” The brothers all remember the day they asked their father to buy them bikes and how their father tried to convince their mother that it might be a good idea. “Especially because of what happened,” he said. “The boys shouldn’t be afraid of riding bikes. All the experts will tell you that it’s the right thing to do,” he argued with their mom. That same evening, their mother packed a bag and announced that she was leaving. She told them she was planning to throw herself under a train. Jon remembers the boys chasing her, screaming and sobbing. “Mommy, please don’t leave.” They ran after her to the street, and the farther she walked the louder was their weeping. They never asked for bikes again. Every year, in May, the family went to visit Jane’s grave. They would stand there for a few minutes, the boys observing their parents washing the gravestone, and then they all left in silence. Jon remembers the bad feeling in his body, the pain in his stomach, and a sense that he had done something wrong. But he never understood why he felt that way. At the age of thirty-five, Jon had what he described as a nervous breakdown. Six months later, he decided to start therapy. On the first day we meet, he says of his breakdown, “It came out of nowhere. One day I was okay and the next I fell apart.” I ask him to tell me about his life before the breakdown. I want to know more about who he is. Jon tells me that he married Bella a few years ago and that they have a little girl. “Her name is Jenny,” he says and pauses for a long moment. “I had a sister who died when I was a few months old. Her name was Jane.” He continues, “When my daughter was born, I wanted to cherish the memory of my sister, but I didn’t want to name her after my sister. I was afraid my sister’s name might bring her bad luck or maybe, God forbid, it would impact her life in other bad ways. You know, some people say that it’s not a good idea.”

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  “What is to become of me?”In 1910 sixty-eight-year-old King Edward VII lay dying, his ox-like constitution finally broken by a lifetime of dissipation. Hearing the news, his mistress Alice Keppel rifled through her papers to retrieve a letter he had written her eight years earlier after he had recovered from a severe attack of appendicitis—during which her path to the sickroom had been firmly barred by Queen Alexandra. In this letter the king requested that Alice be allowed to visit him should he suffer a serious illness again. And so, permitted but unwanted, Alice slipped into the death room, sat next to the dying monarch, and stroked his hand. Alexandra looked out the window, turning her slender royal back on this touching scene between her husband and his mistress. Edward whispered hoarsely to his wife, “You must kiss her. You must kiss Alice.”19 We can imagine the revulsion with which the queen presented her marble lips. Such revulsion, in fact, that she later denied the kiss had been bestowed. When Edward lapsed into a coma, Alexandra took aside Sir Francis Laking, the king’s friend, and instructed him, “Get that woman away.” Alice grew hysterical and refused to leave her lover’s side. As she was being dragged from the room she cried, “I never did any harm. There was nothing wrong between us. What is to become of me?”20 With the door safely shut, in the presence of her husband’s corpse, Alexandra finally vented to Sir Francis the feelings she had sealed in for nearly five decades. “I would not have kissed her, if he had not bade me,” the queen cried. “But I would have done anything he asked of me. Twelve years ago, when I was so angry about Lady Warwick, and the King expostulated with me and said I should get him into the divorce court, I told him once for all that he might have all the women he wished, and I would not say a word; and I have done everything since that he desired me to do about them. He was the whole of my life and, now he is dead, nothing matters.”21 Having composed herself, Alice returned home and reported to all her friends that Queen Alexandra had not only kissed her but had assured her that the royal family would look after her, a statement denied by all other deathbed witnesses. Alice went in full mourning to Edward’s funeral, swathed in floor-length black veils and plumed with black ostrich feathers like his widow, but slipped into the chapel by a side door. After the period of mourning, Alice decided that her disappearance might be appreciated by the new king. With her ill-gotten gains, Alice took her husband and children on a two-year tour of India and China. When they returned to England, the family entertained lavishly.

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

  Regaining freedom of thought can be liberating, disorienting, and even frightening. But before you can regain your freedom, you have to acknowledge that you lost it. Grief and MourningGrief is a common reaction. After an initial period of shock and denial, feelings of grief will surface as the full impact of the loss or harm you experienced sets in. Leaving a cultic group or abusive relationship means experiencing and confronting various losses, such as: • Loss of the group, of a sense of belonging, of commitment, and of goals • Loss of time; for some, loss of their youth and a sense of excitement about life • Loss of innocence, naivete, or idealism • Loss of meaning in life; loss of one's spirituality or belief system • Loss of family and loved ones • Loss of self-esteem or loss of pride in oneself We will look at each of these losses in order to understand its potential effect on your emotional life. Being able to accept your losses is an important step in moving forward. Loss of the GroupIn the cult, you probably experienced camaraderie, support, and a sharing of ideals and goals. You felt a sense of purpose in life. You may also have experienced fear and pain, hardship, or misery. All of these experiences create a strong bond between people. No doubt you formed friendships that were difficult to leave behind. People who spend more than a year or two in a cult may not have old friends or family outside the cult to go back to. Those bridges may have burned long ago. People who were raised in a cult may know few, if any, folks on the outside. The cult may be their only link to the world. However certain you may have been about your decision to leave, it is natural to feel alone and lonely once you actually do leave. It's natural to mourn the loss of your group. Sadness and confusion are normal emotions at this time. Humans are social animals, and you are not regressing if you find that you miss what you left behind. Try not to deny or denigrate your feelings of loss. They're natural. Black-and-white thinking styles may prevent some former members from acknowledging the good that may have resulted from the cult experience. You may have gained specific skills or certain types of knowledge, and you may have created important relationships with other members. The apparent contradiction of having positive feelings about the experience may throw some former members into despair or confusion. Being part of an intense group dynamic (even a bad one), or an intimate relationship (even an abusive one), is a unique experience. However exploitative or manipulative the encounter may have been, most likely there was something good there or you probably would not have been attracted to the group (or person) in the first place. Sometimes that "something good" may have kept you in the situation longer than you would have stayed otherwise.