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 221 of 263 · 20 per page

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

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

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But, not in the same way. I knew it never would be, I didn’t mind. The fact is, she had a man-friend, who wished to marry her. But she wouldn’t do it, she believed in the free union. Nance, she was the strongest-minded woman I ever knew!’She sounded, I thought, insufferable; but I had not missed that was. I swallowed, and Florence gazed once at me, then looked again at the fire.‘A few months after I first met her,’ she went on, ‘I began to see that she was not - quite well. One day she turned up here with a suitcase. She was to have a baby, had lost her rooms because of it, and the man - who turned out hopeless, after all - was too ashamed to take her. She had nowhere... Of course, we took her in. Ralph didn’t mind, he loved her almost as much as I did. We planned to live together, and raise the baby as our own. I was glad - I was glad! - that the man had thrown her over, that the landlady had cast her out...’She gave a grimace, then scraped with a nail at a piece of ash that had come floating from the fire and had fallen on her skirt. ‘Those were, I think, the happiest months of all my life. Having Lilian here, it was like — I cannot say what it was like. It was dazzling; I was dazzled with happiness. She changed the house - really changed it, I mean, not just its spirit. She had us strip the walls, and paint them. She made that rug.’ She nodded to the gaudy rug before the fire - the one I had thought woven, in a blither moment, by some sightless Scottish shepherd - and I quickly took my feet from it. ‘It didn’t matter that we weren’t lovers; we were so close - closer than sisters. We slept upstairs, together. We read together. She taught me things. That picture, of Eleanor Marx’ - she nodded to the little photograph — ‘that was hers. Eleanor Marx was her great heroine, I used to say she favoured her; I don’t have a photograph of Lily. That book, of Whitman‘s, that was hers too. The passage you read out, it always makes me think of me and her. She said that we were comrades - if women may be comrades.’ Her lips had grown dry, and she passed her tongue across them. ‘If women may be comrades,’ she said again, ‘I was hers...’She grew silent.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

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

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  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. 10 THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE ONE SNOWY DAY, Guy, a man in his mid-forties, walks into my office for the first time. Wearing a heavy gray coat, he nods and says softly, “Like you, I am not used to this weather.” I am not sure exactly what he is referring to, and I wait for an explanation. “I was born in the same city you were born in,” he continues, almost whispering. We switch to speaking our mother tongue, Hebrew, but very quickly I come to understand that we are speaking different languages—one innocent, the other dangerous. “So,” Guy says slowly, as he tries to find a comfortable position in the armchair. “How come you chose to become a psychoanalyst when no one else in your family is in the mental health profession?” That is strange, I think to myself. How does he know no one in my family is a therapist? And if he doesn’t know, why would he make those assumptions? But I don’t have to speculate long, as Guy goes on: “Your sister, she is an architect, and her kids seem pretty sweet.” He doesn’t assume, I realize with fright. He knows. “It looks like you know a thing or two about me,” I say, inviting him to clarify, maybe to confess that indeed we met many years ago in Tel Aviv, or that we have mutual friends who referred him to me. Guy smiles. “I’m sure I know more about you than you want me to know,” he says. He pauses and then adds, “I hope you enjoyed your summer vacation in Italy.” How does he know that?

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

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

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

  We were all urged to give our babies to "Ma" (Joyce's spiritual name). We were told that these children would eventually be Ma's successors. All this was handled discreetly through "the girls," a group of women who took personal care of Joyce and handled her dirty work. When I was six months pregnant with our first child, I was targeted. The girls worked on Harryfirst and had him work on me. After two months of hell, I finally agreed to their plan. I remember the precise moment when the switch flipped: "There is nothing greater that I could do for my child than give her to the divine mother." Four of us gave our first child to this woman. She raised them as twins, like two matched sets of dolls. Joyce assured me that I would be significantly involved in my daughter's care. As it turned out, I got to watch all the children sleep a few hours a night, four nights a week. Near the end of the first year, I was thrown out of the nursery after an argument with Joyce's tyrannical teenage daughter. Shortly after that, I left Kashi Ranch and joined Harry, who had left five months earlier. I did not take my daughter with me, though I desperately wanted to. I had begun to see a rather dark side of Joyce, but I couldn't give her up: she was still my guru, my god. I had to truly believe this to leave my daughter with her. Harry and I moved back to Colorado and started a new life. Six months later, I got pregnant. When I gave birth to our first son, I learned how it felt to actually keep my own child. It was such a healing experience to love and nurture my son, yet it was so disturbing to think about my daughter. How could I have done this? Two years passed; trying desperately to replace my daughter, I became pregnant with our second son. For years I endured the deepest grief known to a woman: a longing for her child. Finally, I got up the courage to visit the Ranch to see my daughter. My little girl, Ganga, was six years old on my first trip back. She was so beautiful and full of life, and we connected right away, but I had to be careful because she thought Ma was her mother. Seeing her was both relief and torture. I wanted her back in my life, but I didn't want to move back to the Ranch and surrender to Ma again. For four months, Joyce and her cohorts worked on Harry and me to move back there. Finally, I hit my,limit; something snapped. I was breaking through the cult mind-set: I didn't have to accept Joyce's reality anymore. But what in hell was I going to do about Ganga? . I knew that I desperately needed good professional help.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  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! And then, your story was like hers, you had been with a gent who had thrown you out, after he’d got you in trouble - it seemed too queer. But there was a moment, when you picked up Cyril — I daresay you don’t even remember doing it - but you held Cyril in your arms, and I thought of her, who had never cradled him at all... I didn’t know whether I could stand to see you do it; or whether I could bear to see you stop. And then you spoke - and you were not like Lily then, of course. And, oh! I’ve never been gladder of anything, in all my life!’She laughed; I made some sort of sound that seemed to pass for laughter, some kind of face that could be mistaken, in that dim light, for a smile. Then she gave a terrific yawn, and rose, and shifted Cyril a little higher against her neck, and brushed her cheek across his head; and then, after a moment, she smiled and stepped wearily to the door.But before she could reach it, I called her name.I said, ‘Flo, there never was a gent who threw me out. It was a lady I was living with; but I lied, so you’d let me stay. I’m - I’ m a tom, like you.’‘You are!’

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

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

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

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

• From Wild (2012)

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

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

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

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Our defenses are important for our mental health. They manage our emotional pain and design our perception of ourselves and of the world around us. Their protective function, however, also limits our ability to examine our lives and live them to the fullest. Those experiences that were too painful for us to entirely grasp and process are the ones that are passed down to the next generation. It is those traumas that are unspeakable and too painful for the mind to digest that become our own inheritance and impact our offspring, and their offspring, in ways they cannot understand or control. Most of the personal stories that I tell here are accounts of buried traumas from the past that were held silently between people, life events that were not fully conveyed but still were known by others in cryptic ways. It is the stories that have never been told, the sounds that have often been muted, that leave us undone. I invite you to come with me to break the silence, to trace and discover the ghosts that limit our freedom, the emotional inheritance that prevents us from following our dreams, from creating, loving, and living to our full potential. PART IOUR GRANDPARENTSInherited Trauma in Past GenerationsWe all have our phantoms. But as the psychoanalysts Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham once wrote, “What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.” They were referring to intergenerational secrets and unprocessed experiences that very often don’t have a voice or an image associated with them but loom in our minds nonetheless. We carry emotional material that belongs to our parents and grandparents, retaining losses of theirs that they never fully articulated. We feel these traumas even if we don’t consciously know them. Old family secrets live inside us. This section focuses primarily on the third generation of survivors. It turns a lens on the aftermath of the Holocaust, where repressed trauma often turns into nameless dread and untold stories are reenacted again and again. It explores the effects of early loss on the next generations, looks into the ways a grandparent’s sexual abuse might impact their grandchild’s life, and presents the secrets of a grandfather’s forbidden love as they appear in a grandson’s mind. When set against a backdrop of life and death, it is sometimes the erotic that offers a lifeline, a way into the land of the living. That which we don’t have permission to know haunts us and remains mystified, rendering us inconsolable.

• From Wild (2012)

  And then I wailed. No tears came, just a series of loud brays that coursed through my body so hard I couldn’t stand up. I had to bend over, keening, while bracing my hands on my knees, my pack so heavy on top of me, my ski pole clanging out behind me in the dirt, the whole stupid life I’d had coming out my throat. It was wrong. It was so relentlessly awful that my mother had been taken from me. I couldn’t even hate her properly. I didn’t get to grow up and pull away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things I wished she’d done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very height of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we’d left off. She was my mother, but I was motherless. I was trapped by her but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could fill. I’d have to fill it myself again and again and again. Fuck her, I chanted as I marched on over the next few miles, my pace quickened by my rage, but soon I slowed and stopped to sit on a boulder. A gathering of low flowers grew at my feet, their barely pink petals edging the rocks. Crocus, I thought, the name coming into my mind because my mother had given it to me. These same flowers grew in the dirt where I’d spread her ashes. I reached out and touched the petals of one, feeling my anger drain out of my body.O By the time I rose and started walking again, I didn’t begrudge my mother a thing. The truth was, in spite of all that, she’d been a spectacular mom. I knew it as I was growing up. I knew it in the days that she was dying. I knew it now. And I knew that was something. That it was a lot. I had plenty of friends who had moms who—no matter how long they lived—would never give them the all-encompassing love that my mother had given me. My mother considered that love her greatest achievement. It was what she banked on when she understood that she really was going to die and die soon, the thing that made it just barely okay for her to leave me and Karen and Leif behind. “I’ve given you everything,” she insisted again and again in her last days.

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

  After Lola’s death, a friend wrote seventy-four-year-old Ludwig in Munich that Lola “often spoke to me of your Majesty and of your kindness and benevolence, which she deeply felt—and wished me to tell you she had changed her life and companions…. She wished me to let you know she retained a sincere regard for your great kindness to the end of her life. She died a true penitent, relying on her Savior for pardon and acceptance, triumphing only in His merit.”45 The former king replied, “With great satisfaction I was hearing the repentance of L.M. of her former behavior…. It is a great consolation to hear her dying as a Christian.”46 In his last years, Ludwig’s increasing deafness isolated him from society. He lived to see many of his children die, including his son and successor, Maximilian II. He saw Bavaria’s defeat against the Prussians in 1866. He saw his insane teenage grandson Ludwig II generate his own political rumblings. In retirement, Ludwig wrote a poem about his love affair with Lola Montez: Through you I lost the crown But I do not rage against you for that For you were born to be my misfortune, You were such a blinding, scorching light! Be happy! So my soul calls after you, Into the ever-receding distance; Now at last choose the path of salvation; Vice brings only ruin and shame. The best friend you ever had, You thrust faithlessly away, The gates of happiness were closed against you, You simply followed your lascivious longings. For life we remain divided, And never again will meet face to face, Leave me my heart’s so painfully won peace, Without it life is such a burden.47 The Loss of BeautyThe destructive hands of time often deal more kindly with women wrenched mud-ugly into this world than with those who slipped effortlessly from the womb with preternatural beauty. There is less contrast between the glories of youth and the ravages of age. The sister-in-law of Louis XIV, the hefty German princess Elizabeth Charlotte, often quipped that as she had never been beautiful even when young, she had no vanished beauty to bewail with the passing years. Thrilled to see age leveling the playing field, Elizabeth Charlotte wrote, “I see that those whom I used to see when they were so beautiful are now as ugly as I am. Madame de La Vallière no one in the world would know any more, and Madame de Montespan’s skin looks like paper when children do tricks with it, seeing who can fold it into the smallest piece, for her whole face is closely covered with tiny little wrinkles, quite amazing. Her lovely hair is white as snow and her face is red, so her beauty is quite gone.”48

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

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

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  She tells me that her mother chose the baby’s name. She told Rachel and Marc that this was the name she had wanted to give Rachel when she was born, a name that was written on the candle her parents used to light every Holocaust Day, but her parents strongly objected to that idea. “Ruth was a family member who was murdered at Auschwitz,” Rachel explains to me. “So when my mother wanted to give me that name, my grandparents argued that it was a bad idea. ‘There is no need to burden a baby with the name of one who died,’ my grandmother said to my parents with tears in her eyes. She looked at my grandfather, who stood there silently. My mother told me that her parents used to say that Jewish babies are the most important evidence that the Nazis didn’t win, that they didn’t destroy us. ‘Here is our next generation, right here,’ my grandmother said. ‘She should have an optimistic name.’” Rachel’s mother tried to convince her parents, but the more she argued, the more upset they became, and at some point Rachel’s grandfather got very angry. “A new baby should be connected to the future, not to old worlds. Our granddaughter should be associated with happiness, not with horror. What is wrong with you?” he shouted at Rachel’s mother, and left the room. “This was the most emotional my mother had ever seen him, before or after,” Rachel tells me. “He was a pretty steady, rational guy. She almost never saw him cry. She told me that when she was sad as a little girl, her father would pick her up and hug her until she could hardly breathe. Then he would look at her and ask, ‘Are you feeling better now?’ And when she nodded, he would set her back down and, without looking at each other, they would each go to their rooms. They never talked about emotions, and my mother didn’t know anything about his past. She only knew that he came from ‘there’ and that his whole family had been murdered at Auschwitz. She didn’t know how he had managed to be the only one who survived, and none of us dared to ask.” The past, Rachel and I now realize, was required to be forgotten. After that fight, her parents gave up. They named their baby Rachel. In the Bible, Rachel was the love of Jacob’s life, and Rachel’s parents knew she would be the love of theirs. Rachel’s grandparents died when she was young. Years later, when her mother suggested the name Ruth for their newborn, Rachel and Marc immediately loved it. “I want my baby to be connected to our family history. I want her to know who we are,” Rachel tells me. “I researched and found that Ruth was a popular name in Hungary in the 1930s.

• From Wild (2012)

  It took me years to take my place among the ten thousand things again. To be the woman my mother raised. To remember how she said honey and picture her particular gaze. I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn’t know where I was going until I got there. It was a place called the Bridge of the Gods. 2 SPLITTINGIf I had to draw a map of those four-plus years to illustrate the time between the day of my mother’s death and the day I began my hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, the map would be a confusion of lines in all directions, like a crackling Fourth of July sparkler with Minnesota at its inevitable center. To Texas and back. To New York City and back. To New Mexico and Arizona and Nevada and California and Oregon and back. To Wyoming and back. To Portland, Oregon, and back. To Portland and back again. And again. But those lines wouldn’t tell the story. The map would illuminate all the places I ran to, but not all the ways I tried to stay. It wouldn’t show you how in the months after my mother died, I attempted—and failed—to fill in for her in an effort to keep my family together. Or how I’d struggled to save my marriage, even while I was dooming it with my lies. It would only seem like that rough star, its every bright line shooting out.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  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. “You know that in my family being gay was never a big deal. I always thought my mother was actually happy about me not bringing girls home, and my father, until his last day, was so accepting. He used to say that as long as I’m happy, that’s what’s important.” Leonardo thinks for a moment and then adds, “I honestly think that it was because his own father committed suicide when he was a child. He just wanted me to be happy. He was afraid of sadness.” I know what he is referring to. Leonardo’s grandfather had died by suicide when his father, Jim, was a child. A few days before his fortieth birthday, he had locked himself in the bathroom and hanged himself.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I know that Naomi’s guilt is about being healthy and alive. 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.

• 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.