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.

Page 194 of 263 · 20 per page

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  They all feel that their parents were never the same after Jane’s death. 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.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I wake up in the middle of the night and see the man’s face—I can’t stop seeing those eyes, I can’t stop thinking about his children and remembering what I’d done.” Ben starts sobbing. “I’m not crying about myself,” he says. “I can’t fix the past. I’m crying for the injustice. I’m crying for the inhumanity. I’m crying for the children.” The tears are streaming down his face. I am aware of the intermingling of life and death, of past and future, the father he killed and his son, who is about to be born. Ben tried to fix the trauma and the humiliation of the past. He wanted to be a hero who brings home victory and repairs his grandfather’s pride, his father’s trauma, and the wounds of history. Instead he was brought right into that trauma. Instead of being only the victim he became both victim and aggressor. Killing another human killed his own soul, too. “It is time to cry,” I say, referencing his father in his dream. “There is a lot to cry for. Your father was right. ” Ben nods. “I was a boy who thought he was a man. Now I’m a man who is about to have a boy. I will protect my son. You are my witness.” He wipes his eyes as I feel my own welling up. Boy soldiers don’t cry. But men, and fathers, can finally begin to mourn. 10 THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE O ne 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.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  They live in our psyche, like radiation, with no form, color, or smell. The mind cannot prevent the psychological invasion of destructive aspects of the past, and in Rachel’s case, her family trauma plays itself out over and over again. “I don’t know anything about what happened then,” Rachel says. We look at each other and she adds, “My grandfather mentioned once that they arrived at Auschwitz on a beautiful spring day. The place looked green and peaceful but one thing bothered him: a strange, overwhelming smell, kind of sweet and unfamiliar. In retrospect, the scent of death.” We are both silent. “My grandfather was a young man when the war started. He lost all his relatives. He was the only survivor.” “Who did he lose?” I ask. “I have no idea.” Rachel sounds frustrated. “He talked about the weather at Auschwitz. He talked about his best friend, who survived with him. But he never told us about the family he lost. “I want to know who Ruth was,” she adds, and there is a new spark in her eyes. “I understand that my nightmares are being triggered by this trip, but I think I should not cancel it. I should look for my grandfather’s friend’s family and find out. I owe this to myself and to all of us.” Rachel had planned the trip for mid-April, without realizing she was going to be there for Holocaust Remembrance Day. She was going to look for traces of her family history and try to put a narrative to the disturbing images she has carried inside her since she was a child. Names are a significant part of one’s identity. In first sessions, I usually ask people about the meaning of their names, inquire who chose the names for them and why, and wonder if there are specific meanings or stories associated with their names. Names are connected to emotions, the hopes parents have for their child, who they think the child will become or want the child to become. A name reflects the parents’ feelings about having that child. It contains remembrances from the past as well as a vision of the future. Babies are often named after relatives or others who passed away. A child might be given the name of a person the parents loved, admired, or attributed certain characteristics to. The child’s name might reflect certain expectations, responsibilities, or roles. For example, one of my patients was named after his mother’s father, who died just before my patient was born. In therapy we connected his name to the role he was assigned at birth, as his mother’s caretaker. His mother described him as a mature and responsible baby, wise from a young age, whom she turned to for advice. Another patient was given a name by his mother that meant “mine.”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  There is not a lot to say but to try to bear the pain, the guilt, the intensity of the horror. “We were proud to be chosen to serve in that unit, teenagers who didn’t think about life or death, who wanted to be brave men, not little boys. Only now I’m thinking to myself, what is so wrong about being a boy? Now, when I’m about to have a child myself, it all comes back to me. I wake up in the middle of the night and see the man’s face—I can’t stop seeing those eyes, I can’t stop thinking about his children and remembering what I’d done.” Ben starts sobbing. “I’m not crying about myself,” he says. “I can’t fix the past. I’m crying for the injustice. I’m crying for the inhumanity. I’m crying for the children.” The tears are streaming down his face. I am aware of the intermingling of life and death, of past and future, the father he killed and his son, who is about to be born. Ben tried to fix the trauma and the humiliation of the past. He wanted to be a hero who brings home victory and repairs his grandfather’s pride, his father’s trauma, and the wounds of history. Instead he was brought right into that trauma. Instead of being only the victim he became both victim and aggressor. Killing another human killed his own soul, too. “It is time to cry,” I say, referencing his father in his dream. “There is a lot to cry for. Your father was right.” Ben nods. “I was a boy who thought he was a man. Now I’m a man who is about to have a boy. I will protect my son. You are my witness.” He wipes his eyes as I feel my own welling up. Boy soldiers don’t cry. But men, and fathers, can finally begin to mourn. 8 DEAD BROTHER, DEAD SISTER OUR EMOTIONAL INHERITANCE shapes our behaviors, our perceptions, our feelings, and even our memories. From a young age, we learn to follow our parents’ signals; we learn to walk around their wounds, try not to mention and absolutely not touch what mustn’t be disturbed. In our attempt to avoid their pain and our own, we blind ourselves to that which is right before our eyes. In “The Purloined Letter,” the third of Edgar Allan Poe’s three short detective stories, a letter is stolen from a woman’s boudoir. The reader doesn’t know the contents of that letter, but we know that it is secretive and forbidden.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  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. And I witness and identify with my mother and with Dana—a dead sister to a dead brother. All of those roles—some more conscious, some less so—accompany us on our journey. “In some ways, we mourn forever,” I say. My words are an emotional reminder of the fact that the process of loss continues across decades and generations, and that my children and I live with that unprocessed loss, which my mother, still alive today, survived more than sixty years earlier. That grief lives inside each of us, and in that sense, it is part of our family’s heritage. Dana remembers the moment vividly. It was just a few days before summer break. Although everyone had showed up for class, it was clear that even the teachers had given up on school. The kids were planning the end-of-the-year party when there was a knock on the classroom door. My own mother was sitting near the dining room table, doing her homework, staring at her notebook. She was an excellent student and always finished her homework on time. Suddenly she heard a scream.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “When you were ten years old and we played Little Red Riding Hood, you told me that the grandmother in the story had a lot of secrets,” I say. “‘You will see,’ you used to repeat, ‘you will see.’ But we never found out what those secrets were. Maybe you are ready now to ask the questions that were never asked.” Lara travels to meet with her grandmother Masha. She wants to learn about Masha’s childhood and hopes to find her own answers there. Masha grew up in a chaotic household with very few resources. Her parents went to work early in the morning and came back late at night. Her oldest sister, who was thirteen, became her main caretaker. Masha told Lara that she always felt her mother didn’t want her, that deep inside, her mother regretted having so many children. Masha was a shy girl and a good student. Excelling at school was her way to feel special and worthy. One night, when Masha was ten years old, she had a bad dream. She often had bad dreams but knew she couldn’t wake her parents up or they would be upset with her. She sneaked into her fifteen-year-old brother’s bed. Her brother was the smartest; he was funny and brave and the one she admired the most. He kissed her. From then on her brother came into her bed every few nights. She would make believe she was asleep and wouldn’t make any noise. He would touch her gently and never hurt her. In the morning they behaved as if nothing had happened. It was when Masha was about thirteen and got her period for the first time that her mother told her in a very matter-of-fact way that she shouldn’t let her brother in her bed anymore. “Do you mean her mother knew?” I can’t stop myself as I interrupt Lara, who is still shaken by what she learned. Lara nods. “Yes, but they never talked about it. She never told anyone.” Unprocessed experiences always find ways to come back to life, to reenact themselves again and again. Masha’s repressed memory came to life in the typical way repressed memories do. It snuck into the mind unexpectedly, triggered by later events. For Masha, Ethan and Lara were a reminder of her and her older brother. That close relationship between a brother and a sister awakened her own repressed memory, and she felt the urge to give Lara the protection she never had, to be the parent she herself had always wanted. Her request that Lara’s hair be cut short was an attempt to protect Lara, in the same way that Masha believed she protected her daughter, Hanna, when she became a woman. Through Lara, Masha relived her own sexual abuse, which she could never fully process.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  The next day Naomi comes in and immediately throws herself on my couch. Her eyes are red. She doesn’t speak and just sighs. The news is bad. “It was brutal,” Naomi finally says. “Isabella is dying.” She bursts into tears. So many questions are running through my head, but I keep silent. “Isabella gave me packages with things to give each of her four children after her death,” Naomi whispers. “That was her secret. She didn’t want anyone to know about those packages.” “How heartbreaking,” I say, and Naomi tells me about the packages. “It all started when Isabella read about a woman who, when she learned she was going to die, prepared several years’ worth of dinners for her family. 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.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “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. I wish I had the courage to ask her what else she was trying to tell me.” Naomi leaves my office and I’m glad that she is my last patient of the night. Walking home, I listen to the familiar hum of the city, which like the white noise machine in my office helps me to daydream when I’m alone. The Bowery neighborhood in Manhattan is never peaceful, and its hectic rhythm allows my thoughts to flow freely. I feel a strong urge to rush home and hug my own kids, to hold them tight and not let them go. I remember that feeling from when they were babies, how I used to hurry back, imagining our reunion—their smiles, their smells. Instead, I end up wandering. I walk aimlessly around the Bowery, back and forth on the same route that I take every day from my home to my office, and I cry. I cry for Isabella. I cry for her young children. I cry for Naomi and I cry for what I know Naomi doesn’t know about my life: that my life partner, Lew, is sick with bladder cancer and is fighting for his life. I walk on the street, carrying my patient’s pain, my own pain, not knowing yet that sooner than anyone expects, Isabella will die, and that not so long after, on a cold February morning, I will lose Lew to cancer. I find myself gazing at a group of young people waiting outside for a table at a trendy new restaurant. The days when I used to be one of them seem far away. I look at them with longing and see only purity, innocence, naïveté. They all look so happy, so glamorous, as if they have never lost anyone, never felt devastated or realized that cancer could be waiting around the corner, unaware that they might lose everything they have. Splitting, that primitive defense mechanism of all or nothing, takes place again, as it does in moments of devastation, dividing the world into good and bad, those who suffer and those whom we believe don’t know pain. And we look at them with wonder and envy, the healthy people who we imagine don’t know the taste of sorrow.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “When you were eighteen years old, becoming a man, your father told you not to cry, and now, right after you found out that you are about to become a father, he holds you in your dream and tells you that it’s time to cry.” Ben nods and we realize that there is a lot for us to understand about these permissible tears, about fathers, sons, and the intermingling of vulnerability and masculinity. Ben tells me about his father, who was born in Iraq and escaped with his family to Israel in the 1950s. Having parents who fled to Israel from Iran and Syria around the same time as Ben’s father, I am familiar with the complexities of that immigration. Israel of the early 1950s was a new country. It was built on the trauma of the Holocaust. At the end of World War II, many Holocaust survivors found homes in Israel, where they joined the Eastern European immigrants who had left their families in Europe and moved there before the war. The immigrants who had moved before the war were Zionists and were considered “real Sabras” (or Tzabarim in Hebrew), named after the prickly pear, which has a thick skin and spikes on the outside but is soft and sweet on the inside. This term started to be used in the 1930s to differentiate the old European Jew from the new Zionist one. The Sabras were thought to be tough, physically active, and shameless, the opposite of the old stereotypical Jews, who were considered soft and passive. The new Jews were not religious and didn’t study Torah; instead they were devoted to working the land, and they learned how to fight, first in the resistance movement and then in the Israeli army. After the Holocaust and mostly as a reaction to it, the Israeli state was founded and became the home for Jews from all over the world. The first wave of immigrants were traumatized survivors who had lost everything in Europe. The next immigration, in the fifties, was from the Middle Eastern countries: Morocco, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia, among others. Over the years, the new country of Israel consistently privileged native-born members over the more recently arrived immigrants. The goal was to create a new culture, and immigrants were encouraged to abandon their original identity and adopt the identity of the Sabra Jew. From a psychological perspective, we can see how this was a way to cope with the massive trauma of persecution. The new Jew, a fighter, represented a transformation from a passive victim into an active victor, from a weak minority into a strong nation.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Dana was gazing out the window when she heard the knock. The teacher went to open the door, and Dana saw the nurse whispering something in the teacher’s ear. They both seemed serious and then the teacher said, “Dana Goren, the nurse needs you in her office.” My mother heard her own mother yelling, sobbing, screaming, “My son, where is my son? Bring me back my son.” The whole neighborhood heard her and people came over and gathered in the house, crying and praying to God that this was all a big mistake. Suddenly, her mother was lying on the floor. Dana walked silently with the nurse to her office, and as the door opened she saw her parents. They asked her to sit next to them. “From there I don’t remember much. I remember that I didn’t really understand what was going on. Everyone was upset and I was invisible. I knew that something terrible had happened.” Dana is crying. I cry with her, and it feels as if this is the first time I have heard something so terrible, so painful, so devastating. It is the first time I have had to think about a younger sister losing her brother, and, in so many ways, it is indeed the first time I have allowed myself to imagine the unimaginable. Like my mother, I had never let myself think about that experience, to live through it or to feel it. Dana took me to a place where a family secret was buried. Not remembering allows us to keep things “far from home” and to avoid wading into territory that might otherwise be too dangerous. I went there with Dana without fully realizing where I was going, silently following her to visit a hidden grave. Dana weeps for days, for months. She cries and I sometimes cry with her, explaining to her what she is crying about, how confused and scared she is, how it makes her feel guilty and ugly and dirty. How she had watched her parents fall apart and couldn’t do anything. How she had died with her brother. Slowly, she begins to feel less overwhelmed and starts reengaging in life. During the last year of Dana’s therapy, I give birth to my third child, Mia. “She will have an older brother,” my mother cries when she hears the news. I know she remembers herself as a younger sister, and I find myself thinking about Dana. A few days later I get an email from Dana. “Welcome, baby girl,” she writes to my new daughter. “I’m writing to you, new sister, as a younger sister who has been brought back to life.”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Whereas Freud’s two categories of mourning and melancholia were defined as opposites, in reality both conditions take place in different ways for different people. The process of mourning is multilayered, and a certain identification with the person we have lost, either to death or in a separation, will always take place. Like Leonardo, many people feel that they have lost a part of themselves with their loved ones. Many feel that they are dying with the dead, and they struggle with melancholic identification with those whom they have lost. The question Freud and many after him kept trying to explore was what a healthy mourning was, and how much we can actually let go of our loved ones. In 1929, Freud wrote in a letter to the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of existential psychoanalysis, Ludwig Binswanger: We know that the acute sorrow we feel after such a loss will run its course, but also that we will remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually, this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish. Here, Freud emphasizes that the loved one is always present, even as we slowly fill the gap of her or his absence. A part of us moves on, and another, more hidden part remains “something else,” connected and loyal to that love. Life goes on and we visit and revisit our separations and losses. We mourn them again and again, every time from a different place. We think about them, discover new layers, process from different angles. We accept them and give these losses new meanings. The process of separation requires slowly letting go of the attachment to the other person. In many cases, what is called “melancholic grief” results from a loss that we are unable to fully comprehend and therefore to let go. Leonardo and I wonder in what way he has tried to grieve something he is still unable to fully know or identify. It is impossible to grieve an unrecognized loss, yet without the process of mourning, one’s life is imprisoned by death. “You know how I always tell you that I feel cursed?” Leonardo begins the next session annoyed. “Now Milo chases me even in my dreams.” He tells me that he has dreamed about Milo again. In the dream Milo was knocking on the bathroom door, calling his name. “I don’t know what this dream even means,” Leonardo says. “He knocked on that door, decisively, trying to force me to open it.” Now he sounds angry. “He is trying to force me to come out.” “To come out.” I repeat his words and both of us recognize the association with being gay.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  It is about not being able to save Isabella and abandoning her, sending her all alone into the unknown. But it is also about feeling so abandoned and devastated. Isabella dies on a Monday morning when no one is there. “She was waiting for us to leave,” Naomi says. Naomi is left to process her losses, to count her regrets, to cherish their friendship, and to wonder how she can move forward. “Can you believe it really happened? I lost Isabella. She will never come back.” She sobs and I cry with her. I feel that I have lost something as well. But mine is an unusual, unrecognized loss. I grieve for a woman I have never really known and mourn every loss I have ever experienced and cry for the losses of my future. THE NEXT DAY is rainy. On most mornings as I walk to my office, I listen to the voice mail messages on my cell phone. This morning, I’m holding an umbrella in one hand while trying to hold the phone close to my ear with the other. I rarely accept new patients these days, but something about the message I hear strikes me as unusual. I listen to it again. “I need to grieve but I don’t know how,” the caller says. Intrigued, I call him back and we set up an appointment. The following week a man in his mid-forties walks into my office. “Hi,” I say, referring to him by his first name. He smiles. I look at his face and try to find a sign of his loss. “The woman I love just died,” he explains, after he settles into the couch. “I felt that I needed to speak with someone and a friend gave me your number. I’m not even sure where to start.” I nod and he continues. “Her death was sudden. From cancer. One day she was here, and the next she was gone.” He lifts his head and looks into my eyes. “She left me many notes,” he goes on, “a box filled with love letters. I’m not sure why she thought that might help. It only makes it worse.” “She left you a box of letters?” My voice is too loud. “A big blue box,” he says. “That’s just who Isabella was.” “Isabella?” I hear myself say. “I mean, the woman I was with,” he clarifies. “We were lovers. We had a secret relationship and we both tried so hard to end it, to go back to our lives and forget each other. She even had a baby with her husband to try to stay in her marriage. But our love was stronger than life. We decided to have a life together right before she was diagnosed.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I remember feeling so happy. I felt that the puppy loved me and I picked it up again and decided to take the chance and bring it home. I knew my mother wouldn’t be happy about it—she never wanted to have pets in the house—but I made up my mind to do anything to convince her to adopt this puppy . “I remember walking into the house, giving the puppy some water that I poured into a glass, and looking for my mother. She was in bed. When I’m thinking about it now, she was always in bed,” Eve says. “Ha, I never thought about it,” she adds, and continues. “I sat next to her in the bed and whispered, ‘Mom, I found a puppy.’” I listen to Eve and remember the dogs her grandmother mentioned before she died. Eve continues. “My mother didn’t open her eyes and just mumbled, ‘What do you mean you found it?’ “I said, ‘It followed me on the street and I felt bad leaving it there alone. I thought we could take care of this puppy and—’ “My mom stopped me; her eyes were still closed. ‘We won’t,’ she said firmly. ‘Bring it back to where you found it.’ “‘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.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  The analysis of the mind, like a mystery story, is an investigation. We know that Sigmund Freud, the great sleuth of the unconscious mind, was a big fan of Sherlock Holmes and maintained a large library of detective fiction. In some ways, Freud borrowed Holmes’s method: gathering evidence, searching for a truth beneath the surface truth, seeking out hidden realities. Like detectives, my patients and I try to follow the signs and listen not only to what they say but also to their pauses, to the music of that which is unknown to both of us. It is delicate work, collecting reminiscences of childhood, of what was said or done, listening to the omissions, to stories untold. Looking for clues, piecing these together into a picture, we ask, What really happened and to whom? The secrets of the mind include not only our own life experiences but also those that we unknowingly carry with us: the memories, feelings, and traumas that we inherit from previous generations. It was after World War II when psychoanalysts first began examining the impact of trauma on the next generation. Many of those analysts were Jews who had escaped Europe. Their patients were Holocaust survivors and later the offspring of those trauma survivors, children who carried some unconscious trace of their ancestors’ pain. Starting in the 1970s, neuroscience validated the psychoanalytic findings that survivors’ trauma—even the darkest secrets they never talked about—had a real effect on their children’s and grandchildren’s lives. In the 1990s, studies were focused on epigenetics, the nongenetic influences and modifications of gene expression. They analyzed how genes were altered in the descendants of trauma survivors and studied the ways in which the environment, and especially trauma, could leave a chemical mark on a person’s genes that is passed down to the next generation. That empirical research emphasized the major role that stress hormones play in how the brain develops, and thus in the biological mechanisms by which trauma is transmitted from generation to generation. A large body of research done at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital by Dr. Rachel Yehuda, director of traumatic stress studies, and her team reveals that the offspring of Holocaust survivors have lower levels of cortisol, a hormone that helps the body bounce back after trauma. It was found that descendants of people who survived the Holocaust have different stress-hormone profiles than their peers, perhaps predisposing them to anxiety disorders. Research indicates that healthy offspring of Holocaust survivors as well as of enslaved people, of war veterans, and of parents who experienced major trauma are more likely to present symptoms of PTSD after traumatic events or after witnessing a violent incident. From an evolutionary perspective, the purpose of those kinds of epigenetic changes might be to biologically prepare children for an environment similar to that of their parents and help them survive, but in fact they often leave them more vulnerable to carrying symptoms of trauma that they didn’t experience firsthand.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  We both recognize that one way to face that transmission from generation to generation is to process those experiences and help others process and own them, too. Demons tend to vanish when we turn on the lights. 3 SEX, SUICIDE, AND THE RIDDLE OF GRIEF “I’M CURSED,” LEONARDO whispers, looking straight into my eyes. “Do you know what I mean?” He then concludes decisively, “You know what I mean. Of course you do.” Leonardo started coming to see me two years earlier, right after a breakup with his partner, Milo. In the first months, he couldn’t stop crying. He said that although he knew he and Milo never got along, his pain was intolerable. Two years have passed and his agony has not diminished. He still feels paralyzed, lost. He tells me that he is not ready to meet anyone else and fears that he will remain sad forever. “Somehow I’m stuck,” he says, and we agree that at this point it seems like his grief is not just about Milo anymore. We try to understand what it is that he lost when that relationship ended. Separations are emotional deaths that we have to mourn. In breakups, we always lose more than just the person we love. We lose a life, a future, everything that we have dreamed about and hoped for. And while we know whom we have lost, we might not understand what we have lost. Leonardo and I try to figure out what it is that he keeps mourning. “I want to move on,” he says. “Milo and I were together for only a year and I have been grieving for two years already,” he says, irritated. “I wish you could program my brain and delete parts of my memory so I could forget my past and move forward.” 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.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  We decided to have a life together right before she was diagnosed. A couple of months later she was dead.” 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. 4 THE RADIOACTIVITY OF TRAUMA I n 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.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  In her article “Enduring Mothers, Enduring Knowledge: On Rape and History,” Dr. Judith Alpert describes how sexual abuse can present itself in the mind of the next generation. Using her own childhood experience, she discusses the way traumatic thoughts and “memories” can be transmitted from parents and grandparents and present themselves in the child’s mind as their own. That phenomenon leaves everyone, the child and her caretakers, with the confusion that is at the core of sexual abuse. As in Lara’s case, our challenge is to hold all generations in mind—grandmother, mother, and child—as victims of either sexual abuse or the intergenerational inheritance of sexual abuse. Masha, who was reliving her own unprocessed trauma, devastated her family with the idea that Lara’s brother sexually abused her. Lara became more and more overwhelmed. It was as if she were reliving her grandmother’s repressed feelings. Through the family’s ongoing rumination and the premature introduction of sex, Lara felt the intrusion into her body and thus the scene of sexual abuse was reenacted. “When I was sitting with my grandmother last week and she told me about her childhood, I cried. She didn’t,” Lara says, and tears drop down her cheeks. “I tried to listen to her the way you listen to me, and to help her understand that she could tell me anything and I wouldn’t judge her, that I really wanted to know her. “At some point she stopped and said she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. But she kept talking and I didn’t say a word. She started blaming herself, saying it was she who went into his bed first. Then she started to question her memory and said that it all sounded much worse than it actually was, that things were different then. “Before we went to sleep she made me a cup of tea and served it with a slice of the chocolate cake she had baked for me. “‘I know how much you like chocolate,’ my grandmother said, and hugged me. Then she held my shoulders, making sure I looked at her. ‘Lara, please don’t take my problems on you,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to be sad because bad things happened to me. Worse things happen to people. That’s life; my life isn’t so special.’ “‘You had to keep a secret for so many years, Grandma,’ I said, and hugged her as tight as I could. But she just kept nodding. ‘I didn’t keep a secret. It was something I didn’t always remember. The secret kept itself.’” “I think I found my ‘me-search,’” Lara tells me as she wipes her tears. She will go on to study the tormenting and deceptive impact of incest and sexual abuse on the next generation, those aspects that are hard to research, as they are seemingly irrational, puzzling, and unformulated experiences, but that Lara lived through in her own childhood.

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

  His suffering was apparent to everyone. That expressive face took on a flayed unhealthy look — the pallor of a church martyr. In seeing him thus I was vividly reminded of my own feelings during the last meeting with Melissa before she left for the clinic in Jerusalem. The candour and gentleness with which she said: ‘The whole thing is gone.… It may never come back.… At least this separation.’ Her voice grew furry and moist, blurring the edges of the words. At this time she was quite ill. The lesions had opened again. ‘Time to reconsider ourselves.… If only I were Justine.… I know you thought of her when you made love to me.… Don’t deny it.… I know my darling.… I’m even jealous of your imagination.… Horrible to have self-reproach heaped on top of the other miseries.… Never mind.’ She blew her nose shakily and managed a smile. ‘I need rest so badly.… And now Nessim has fallen in love with me.’ I put my hand over her sad mouth. The taxi throbbed on remorselessly, like someone living on his nerves. All round us walked the wives of the Alexandrians, smartly turned out, with the air of well-lubricated phantoms. The driver watched us in the mirror like a spy. The emotions of white people, he perhaps was thinking, are odd and excite prurience. He watched as one might watch cats making love. ‘I shall never forget you.’ ‘Nor I. Write to me.’ ‘I shall always come back if you want.’ ‘Never doubt it. Get well, Melissa, you must get well. I’ll wait for you. A new cycle will begin. It is all there inside me, intact. I feel it.’ The words that lovers use at such times are charged with distorting emotions. Only their silences have the cruel precision which aligns them to truth. We were silent, holding hands. She embraced me and signalled to the driver to set off.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  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.” He opens his bag. “Also, I brought something to show you.” He pulls out a small box wrapped in layers of newspaper. “I had to bring it in, just to show you how amazing this is.” There it is, a small blue ceramic vase: his father’s vase. “For years,” Leonardo says, “I imagined my father as a boy, holding in his hands this gift he made at school for his father’s birthday in his favorite color, blue. That gift that I saw so many times as a child, and that I kept in my closet after my father’s death.” Leonardo pauses and then exhales deeply in relief. “Only after our last session,” he says, “did I realize what I’ve been using it for.” He hands me the vase and I peek inside, where I see three single, mismatched cuff links. I look at Leonardo, puzzled. He explains that he stored each of them there when they lost their mate. We look at each other and Leonardo shrugs and smiles. “They’ve been waiting all these years for their loved ones to come back.” 4THE RADIOACTIVITY OF TRAUMAIn Israel, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Ha’Shoah, is a national holiday.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Then she started to question her memory and said that it all sounded much worse than it actually was, that things were different then. “Before we went to sleep she made me a cup of tea and served it with a slice of the chocolate cake she had baked for me. “‘I know how much you like chocolate,’ my grandmother said, and hugged me. Then she held my shoulders, making sure I looked at her. ‘Lara, please don’t take my problems on you,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to be sad because bad things happened to me. Worse things happen to people. That’s life; my life isn’t so special.’ “‘You had to keep a secret for so many years, Grandma,’ I said, and hugged her as tight as I could. But she just kept nodding. ‘I didn’t keep a secret. It was something I didn’t always remember. The secret kept itself.’” “I think I found my ‘me-search,’” Lara tells me as she wipes her tears. She will go on to study the tormenting and deceptive impact of incest and sexual abuse on the next generation, those aspects that are hard to research, as they are seemingly irrational, puzzling, and unformulated experiences, but that Lara lived through in her own childhood. We both recognize that one way to face that transmission from generation to generation is to process those experiences and help others process and own them, too. Demons tend to vanish when we turn on the lights. 6 UNWELCOME BABIES J on doesn’t remember his sister, Jane. She died when he was only a few months old. Throughout his childhood, he heard stories about her tragic death. He knew that she had been riding her bike in the suburban neighborhood where they grew up, on her way to visit a friend, when she was hit by a car. She died right away. Jane was twelve, the oldest and the only girl in a family of five children. Each of Jon’s three older brothers has his own recollection of that morning in mid-May. His middle brother remembers the dress their mother was wearing. His third brother says he can’t forget the sound of the siren, but he isn’t sure if it was from the ambulance or the police car that came to inform them of Jane’s death. His oldest brother, Jake, swears that his mother dropped the baby, Jon himself, as she was running out the door, but their father insisted that had never happened .