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 Caroline had feared, Henrietta was replaced by younger, prettier, more manipulating mistresses. Dying from an umbilical rupture in 1737, wrapped in towels as her intestines spilled out, the queen, sensible to the end, suggested that George remarry. But the king, heartbroken, hovering near her bed in her last agonizing moments, swore he would have only mistresses and never remarry. “Oh, my God!” the dying queen said in French, with characteristic practicality, “that won’t make any difference!”22 “That whore will be the death of me”Louis XIV, the most powerful man in Europe, suffered his own share of disputes between his wife and his mistresses. In 1660 at the age of twenty-two the handsome young king married the infanta Marie-Thérèse of Spain, a short, dwarflike product of generations of inbreeding. Fortunately for the queen, she did not suffer the insanity and physical handicaps of her relatives Juana the Mad, John the Imbecile, and Isabella the Insane. Her only debility was a childlike simplicity—though even this was cruelly ridiculed in the sophisticated world of Versailles. Marie-Thérèse never learned to speak French well, and her new subjects found her coarse Spanish accent irritating. She had no idea of politics, literature, or witty conversation and preferred to spend hours playing cards. Courtiers patiently waited for a seat at the queen’s card table, which almost amounted to winning the lottery, as she would invariably bet high and play poorly. Primi Visconti reported that “the Queen’s losses provide the poor Princess d’Elbeuf with her sole means of support.”23 Louis was faithful to his devoted wife for a full year before he began flirting with his brother’s wife, Princess Henrietta of England. To distract him from such an unfortunate choice, Louis’s mother, the dowager queen Anne, planted a trio of fresh young things in his path. These three graces wore special heron plumes in their hair and were placed prominently near him at banquets. The ruse worked better than his mother had hoped. The king fell head over heels in love with one of them, Louise de La Vallière, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a petty nobleman. She had ash-blonde hair, dazzling white skin, and large blue eyes. One leg was a bit shorter than the other, so she wore specially made heels. Most attractive to the young king was her genuine mantle of innocence and kindness, of piety and modesty. The queen was devastated to learn that her husband had taken a mistress. “That young girl with the diamond earrings,” Marie-Thérèse said acidly one day in Spanish to a court lady, “is the one the King’s in love with.”24 Compared to other royal mistresses, sweet Louise de La Vallière did not deserve to become the target of the queen’s venom-spitting rage. Ashamed before God for her adultery, humiliated before the queen for tender stolen moments with her husband, Louise treated Marie-Thérèse with humility and respect. But the queen pointedly snubbed her at every opportunity.

• 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 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 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.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Yes,” I agreed. She had, it was true. She did. She did. She did. She’d come at us with maximum maternal velocity. She hadn’t held back a thing, not a single lick of her love. “I’ll always be with you, no matter what,” she said. “Yes,” I replied, rubbing her soft arm. When she’d become sick enough that we knew she was really going to die, when we were in the homestretch to hell, when we were well past thinking any amount of wheatgrass juice would save her, I’d asked her what she wanted done with her body—cremated or buried—though she only looked at me as if I were speaking Dutch. “I want everything that can be donated to be donated,” she said after a while. “My organs, I mean. Let them have every part they can use.” “Okay,” I said. It was the oddest thing to contemplate, to know that we weren’t making impossibly far-off plans; to imagine parts of my mother living on in someone else’s body. “But then what?” I pressed on, practically panting with pain. I had to know. It would fall on me. “What would you like to do with … what’s … left over. Do you want to be buried or cremated?” “I don’t care,” she said. “Of course you care,” I replied. “I really don’t care. Do what you think is best. Do whatever is cheapest.” “No,” I insisted. “You have to tell me. I want to know what you want done.” The idea that I would be the one to decide filled me with panic. “Oh, Cheryl,” she said, exhausted by me, our eyes meeting in a grief-stricken détente. For every time I wanted to throttle her because she was too optimistic, she wanted to throttle me because I would never ever relent. “Burn me,” she said finally. “Turn me to ash.” [image file=image_rsrc2VM.jpg] And so we did, though the ashes of her body were not what I’d expected. They weren’t like ashes from a wood fire, silky and fine as sand. They were like pale pebbles mixed with a gritty gray gravel. Some chunks were so large I could see clearly that they’d once been bones. The box that the man at the funeral home handed to me was oddly addressed to my mom. I brought it home and set it in the cupboard beneath the curio cabinet, where she kept her nicest things. It was June. It sat there until August 18, as did the tombstone we’d had made for her, which had arrived the same week as the ashes. It sat in the living room, off to the side, a disturbing sight to visitors probably, but it was a comfort to me. The stone was slate gray, the writing etched in white. It said her name and the dates of her birth and death and the sentence she’d spoken to us again and again as she got sicker and died: I’m with you always.

• From Wild (2012)

  “What are you thinking?” he asked, but I didn’t answer. I only leaned over and switched on the light. It was up to us to mail the notarized divorce documents. Together Paul and I walked out of the building and into the snow and down the sidewalk until we found a mailbox. Afterwards, we leaned against the cold bricks of a building and kissed, crying and murmuring regrets, our tears mixing together on our faces. “What are we doing?” Paul asked after a while. “Saying goodbye,” I said. I thought of asking him to go back to my apartment with me, as we’d done a few times over the course of our yearlong separation, falling into bed together for a night or an afternoon, but I didn’t have the heart. “Goodbye,” he said. “Bye,” I said. We stood close together, face-to-face, my hands gripping the front of his coat. I could feel the dumb ferocity of the building on one side of me; the gray sky and the white streets like a giant slumbering beast on the other; and us between them, alone together in a tunnel. Snowflakes were melting onto his hair and I wanted to reach up and touch them, but I didn’t. We stood there without saying anything, looking into each other’s eyes as if it would be the last time. “Cheryl Strayed,” he said after a long while, my new name so strange on his tongue. I nodded and let go of his coat. 7 THE ONLY GIRL IN THE WOODS“Cheryl Strayed?” the woman at the Kennedy Meadows General Store asked without a smile. When I nodded exuberantly, she turned and disappeared into the back without another word. I looked around, drunk with the sight of the packaged food and drinks, feeling a combination of anticipation over the things I’d consume in the coming hours and relief over the fact that my pack was no longer attached to my body, but resting now on the porch of the store. I was here. I had made it to my first stop. It seemed like a miracle. I’d half expected to see Greg, Matt, and Albert at the store, but they were nowhere in sight. My guidebook explained that the campground was another three miles farther on and I assumed that’s where I’d find them, along with Doug and Tom eventually. Thanks to my exertions, they hadn’t managed to catch up with me. Kennedy Meadows was a pretty expanse of piney woods and sage and grass meadows at an elevation of 6,200 feet on the South Fork Kern River. It wasn’t a town but rather an outpost of civilization spread out over a few miles, consisting of a general store, a restaurant called Grumpie’s, and a primitive campground.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  What a strange gift this woman gave me, the ability to accomplish what all my spiritual searching, ultimately, could not—the ability to break the chain of pain, right here, right now. Not only for me, but for my fragile four-year-old self. She did, after all, live with me still. It was time to dry her face and take her home. AFTER ACCOUNTING 4/3/3/3/3/3/3/1/2/0/0/0/0/0/2/0/0/0/0/3/2/1/2/1/2/1/1/0/0/0/1/1/2/3/1/2/2/3/1/1/0/0/0/0/0 The above is an accounting of anal penetrations per week for year three. All the zeros represent one of us being out of town. Except the last five. Number 298 was our last. The walls I had so carefully constructed around our love had split wide open. The world was in, and we were over. I sent A-Man away. It was Time. Yes, it was that sudden. That unexpected. Totally unplanned. Time to end the pain, time to end the beauty: they had become inseparable, a sadomasochistic adagio. So the search for the end of my end ended as abruptly as it had begun three years before. A symmetry of sorts. A single, swift, clean cut. No negotiations, no begging, no manipulations, no blame. After #298—it was again a Friday afternoon—it was over with A-Man while it was still hot as a volcano and beautiful as art. Try that for courage. Though for me, it wasn’t courage at all, it was necessity. I never would have had the courage to send him away. Curious how another woman was always the catalyst for him and me: the Pre-Raphaelite had joined us and, now, the mousy brunette separated us. I must have much unfinished business with women, with my mother. But this is the Daddy story, not the Mommy story—or so I thought. I started counting the zeros week after week after week, as if they would add up to something other than zero. Zeros marking the empty space in me where the nearly unbearable pain of loss grew and grew. I festered. And I died. The core of me that he had touched died. I felt that I would grieve for him all my life. And I do. I had been grieving for him since the first time he came in my ass; why stop now just because he was no longer there? If heaven is a taste of eternity in a moment of real time, then hell is an eternity of loss in a moment of real time. Completely bereft. We didn’t even make it to three hundred. RECLAMATION After many months without A-Man, the love bubble in which I had lived for so long began to deflate. I couldn’t keep living like this. I used to be such a happy little sodomite; now I was a miserable little sodomite with only memories to taunt me.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  The few notes and photos I had I hid in a drawer, along with the small plastic bag of his pubic hair, the hair from that first trim. Nothing was thrown away, all was carefully preserved. You throw things away when love has turned to hate. That wasn’t what had happened to me. And then there was the Box. Sitting on my dresser, overflowing with the evidence of all I was trying to overcome, get beyond. I realized that I needed a bigger box—and one with a lock. There it was, waiting for me in the antique store: square, with a hinged lid, a red satin lining, and a tiny padlock with a key. In gold leaf. Perfect. I made the transfer, took one last, long, searing look, closed the lid, and locked it. I put the tiny key away. The casket was sealed—with tears, K-Y, and a wink to its future finder. This shrine of sacred relics was my monument—to the divinity of my masochism, to the great joy that once so frequently passed my way, to a state of consciousness I can no longer access, to a chemical connection that reached far beyond any logic or rationale, to the sacred insanity that so blessedly pervaded my being. Now, where to put it? Nearby . . . but out of reach. Like a smoker’s last pack, close by . . . but out of sight. Available . . . but forbidden. Climbing out of love with him, I felt like a pelican trying to extract itself from an oil spill: lurching, falling, getting up, trying again. But even if the bird breaks free, its feathers remain saturated, forever marked. I realized that until the pain of loving him no longer interested me, I wouldn’t be able to move on. Why was the pain so very interesting? It felt as though the key to my soul was buried inside it. The unmatched enormity of the ache begged for attention. Taking solace in other compulsions, I made lots of lists. Lists of pros and cons. Lists of what I lost in losing him and what I would have lost if I’d kept him. Lists of what I have gained, what I have accomplished, whom I’ve dated. They meant nothing in the end, those lists, but they gave me something to do while I cried. I realized that I had to change in order to not want him. Who I had become wanted only him. I had to become someone else, yet again. This is how my former self died, how I killed her. But she did not go quietly into the night. No, she raged herself into extinction with one last blast of scorching pain. Pain to stop the pain. But perhaps masochism never heals, just changes form. Different objects, different manifestations. I feared I could not be happy without my pain. But I had to direct it outside myself now; inside I was soaked to the bone.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The woman called her “Mrs Banner” - imagine that! She was good enough, I suppose, but rather strict. She wouldn’t let us in the room with her; we had to sit down here and listen to the cries, Ralph wringing his hands and weeping all the while. I thought, “Let the baby die, oh, let the baby die, so long as she is safe... !” ‘But Cyril did not die, as you see, and Lilian herself seemed well enough, only tired, and the midwife said to let her sleep. We did so - and, when I went to her a little later, I found that she’d begun to bleed. By then, of course, the midwife had gone. Ralph ran for a doctor - but she couldn’t be saved. Her dear, good, generous heart bled quite away -’ Her voice failed. I moved to her and squatted beside her, and touched my knuckles to her sleeve; and she acknowledged me kindly, with a slight, distracted smile. ‘I wish I’d known,’ I said quietly; inwardly, however, it was as if I had myself by the throat, and was banging my own head against the parlour wall. How could I have been so foolish as not to have guessed it all? There had been the business of the birthday - the anniversary, I realised now, of Lilian’s death. There had been Florence’s strange depressions; her tiredness, her crossness, her brother’s gentle forbearance, her friends’ concern. There had been her odd ambivalence towards the baby - Lilian’s son, yet also, of course, her murderer, whom Florence had once wished dead, so that the mother might be saved... I gazed at her again, and wished I knew some way to comfort her. She was so bleak, yet also somehow so remote; I had never embraced her, and felt squeamish about putting a hand upon her, even now. So I only stayed beside her, stroking gently at her sleeve... and at last she roused herself, and gave a kind of smile; and then I moved away. ‘How I have talked,’ she said. ‘I don’t know, I’m sure, what made me speak of all this, tonight.’ ‘I’m glad you did,’ I said. ‘You must - you must miss her, terribly.’ She gazed blankly at me for a moment - as if missing was rather a paltry emotion, terrible too mild a term, for her great sadness - and then she nodded and looked away. ‘It has been hard; I have been strange; sometimes I’ve wished that I might die, myself. I have, I know, been very poor company for you and Ralph! And I was not very kind when you first came, I think. She had been gone a little under six months then, and the idea of having another girl about the place - especially you, who I had met the very week I had found her - well!

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Muse? And with whom? Perhaps with a man who is difficult to love. A-Man provided no challenge in this regard. Loving him was so easy, too easy; not loving him was hell. So perhaps the opposite: loving that is difficult, leaving that is easy. Would I not then learn some tolerance? A-Man is now long gone. But was he ever really here? Did he ever really inhabit my ass and me? Was he indeed the demon-lover who avenged my anger, the ever-ready erection to which I so willingly and joyously martyred myself? Or was he the God of my own creation, the God I always wanted but couldn’t have, couldn’t find? Perhaps I finally found a place for Him, and A-Man entered my expectant space. I believe the equation goes like this: sex can only be truly deep, truly life changing, truly transcendent if you are being fucked by God; if you love your man like he was God. But—and here’s the rub that no lube can assuage—if your man is God and shifts your world, then you are, by definition, in the very center of your female masochism, open, willing, vulnerable. A-Man was my God, but he was my Last God. I fear no man can be God again for me. Lucky for all of us, perhaps: less far to fall. But I mourn this with all my being; it is the loss, finally, of my insistent innocence. It has been a long process, the extrication of him and the excavation of my soul. He no longer lives in my ass. I live there now. What a place. I have been to the precipice. I looked over, and fell off the ledge. But now I am back, back from the great valley of my masochism, back to bear witness —for myself but also for you—to my survival, to my return from a world where depth was all that mattered. If you don’t fuck with death chasing you, you are mistaken. So long as love, crazy, crazy love, can be survived, there is no excuse. No excuse at all. Go. Come. Slowly, resentfully, I have moved out of slavery, though I cannot forget its freedom. But I am no longer blinded by obsession. I can now recognize what is commonly termed reality, wretched reality. I even live in it on occasion, when feeling perverse. I have endured the loss. Choice is mine. But I know what to do—and where to go—should I need a fix of beauty, of submission, of relief, of bliss. And, besides, I still have the Box. It does not only contain his DNA. It contains my very own madness—safely captured under its gilded lid. But I don’t need to open it. I have the key. Acknowledgments I would like to extend my deep appreciation to Alix Freedman for true friendship and to John Tottenham for being the first to say, yes, you must.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  There were some things to tidy up. I put the few clothes of his I had inside several plastic bags and hid them away. I resisted smelling them one last time, and in doing so, I knew I would have the strength to do what was necessary to move on. The few notes and photos I had I hid in a drawer, along with the small plastic bag of his pubic hair, the hair from that first trim. Nothing was thrown away, all was carefully preserved. You throw things away when love has turned to hate. That wasn’t what had happened to me. And then there was the Box. Sitting on my dresser, overflowing with the evidence of all I was trying to overcome, get beyond. I realized that I needed a bigger box—and one with a lock. There it was, waiting for me in the antique store: square, with a hinged lid, a red satin lining, and a tiny padlock with a key. In gold leaf. Perfect. I made the transfer, took one last, long, searing look, closed the lid, and locked it. I put the tiny key away. The casket was sealed—with tears, K-Y, and a wink to its future finder. This shrine of sacred relics was my monument—to the divinity of my masochism, to the great joy that once so frequently passed my way, to a state of consciousness I can no longer access, to a chemical connection that reached far beyond any logic or rationale, to the sacred insanity that so blessedly pervaded my being. Now, where to put it? Nearby . . . but out of reach. Like a smoker’s last pack, close by . . . but out of sight. Available . . . but forbidden. Climbing out of love with him, I felt like a pelican trying to extract itself from an oil spill: lurching, falling, getting up, trying again. But even if the bird breaks free, its feathers remain saturated, forever marked. I realized that until the pain of loving him no longer interested me, I wouldn’t be able to move on. Why was the pain so very interesting? It felt as though the key to my soul was buried inside it. The unmatched enormity of the ache begged for attention. Taking solace in other compulsions, I made lots of lists. Lists of pros and cons. Lists of what I lost in losing him and what I would have lost if I’d kept him. Lists of what I have gained, what I have accomplished, whom I’ve dated. They meant nothing in the end, those lists, but they gave me something to do while I cried. I realized that I had to change in order to not want him. Who I had become wanted only him. I had to become someone else, yet again.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  A-Man is now long gone. But was he ever really here? Did he ever really inhabit my ass and me? Was he indeed the demon-lover who avenged my anger, the ever-ready erection to which I so willingly and joyously martyred myself? Or was he the God of my own creation, the God I always wanted but couldn’t have, couldn’t find? Perhaps I finally found a place for Him, and A-Man entered my expectant space. I believe the equation goes like this: sex can only be truly deep, truly life changing, truly transcendent if you are being fucked by God; if you love your man like he was God. But—and here’s the rub that no lube can assuage—if your man is God and shifts your world, then you are, by definition, in the very center of your female masochism, open, willing, vulnerable. A-Man was my God, but he was my Last God. I fear no man can be God again for me. Lucky for all of us, perhaps: less far to fall. But I mourn this with all my being; it is the loss, finally, of my insistent innocence. It has been a long process, the extrication of him and the excavation of my soul. He no longer lives in my ass. I live there now. What a place. I have been to the precipice. I looked over, and fell off the ledge. But now I am back, back from the great valley of my masochism, back to bear witness—for myself but also for you—to my survival, to my return from a world where depth was all that mattered. If you don’t fuck with death chasing you, you are mistaken. So long as love, crazy, crazy love, can be survived, there is no excuse. No excuse at all. Go. Come. Slowly, resentfully, I have moved out of slavery, though I cannot forget its freedom. But I am no longer blinded by obsession. I can now recognize what is commonly termed reality, wretched reality. I even live in it on occasion, when feeling perverse. I have endured the loss. Choice is mine. But I know what to do—and where to go—should I need a fix of beauty, of submission, of relief, of bliss. And, besides, I still have the Box. It does not only contain his DNA. It contains my very own madness—safely captured under its gilded lid. But I don’t need to open it. I have the key. Acknowledgments I would like to extend my deep appreciation to Alix Freedman for true friendship and to John Tottenham for being the first to say, yes, you must. I am eternally grateful to David Hirshey whose inexhaustible good humor and unwavering enthusiasm kept me laughing and gave me faith when mine faltered. And to Alice Truax, thank you for everything: guidance, intelligence, impeccable taste, and relentless pursuit.