I could only sit and listen and from time to time reassure her that these were human feelings, and that she was only human for thinking them. Finally, it was time to help her turn toward her sons. I posed questions, at first gentle and gradually more challenging.
Had her sons always been difficult? Born difficult? What had happened in their lives that might have pushed them into the choices they made? What had they experienced when Chrissie was dying? How frightened were they? Had anyone talked to
them
about death? How did they feel about buying a burial plot? A plot next to Chrissie? How had they felt about their father abandoning them?
Penny didn’t like my questions. At first they startled, then irritated, her. Then she began to realize that she had never considered what had happened in the family from her sons’ perspective. She had never had a positive relationship with a man, and it is possible her sons had paid the penalty for that. We considered the men in her life: a father (faded from personal memory but forever reviled by her mother) who deserted her, through death, when she was eight; her mother’s lovers—a lineup of unsavory night characters who vanished at daybreak; a first husband who deserted her one month after their wedding, when she was seventeen; and a cloddish, alcoholic second husband who ultimately deserted her in her grief.
Without question she had neglected the boys for the past eight years. When Chrissie was ill, Penny had spent inordinate amounts of time with her. After Chrissie’s death, Penny was still unavailable to her sons: the rage she felt toward them, much of it only because they were alive instead of Chrissie, created a silence between them. Her sons had grown hard and distant, but once, before they sealed their feelings from her, they told her they had wanted more from her: they had wanted the hour a day she had spent, for four years, tending Chrissie’s gravesite.
The impact of death on her sons? The boys were eight and eleven years old when Chrissie developed a fatal illness. That they might have been frightened by what was happening to their sister; that they, too, might grieve; that they might have begun to become aware of, and to fear, their own death: none of these possibilities had Penny ever considered.
And there was the matter of her sons’ bedroom. Penny’s small house had three small bedrooms, and the boys had always shared one while Chrissie had her own room. No doubt they resented that arrangement while Chrissie was alive, I suggested, but what of their anger now when Penny refused to let them use their sister’s room after her death? And how did they feel about seeing Chrissie’s last will and testament on the refrigerator for the past four years, attached with a magnetic metallic strawberry?
And think of how they must have resented her attempt to keep Chrissie’s memory alive by continuing, for example, to celebrate Chrissie’s birthday every year! And what had she done for
their
birthdays? Penny blushed and responded gruffly to my question by muttering, “The normal things.” I knew I was getting through.
Perhaps Penny and Jeff’s marriage was destined to fail, but there seemed little question that the final dissolution was hastened by grief. Penny and Jeff had different styles of grieving: Penny immersed herself in memory; Jeff preferred suppression and distraction. Whether they were compatible in other ways seemed immaterial at this point: they were vastly incompatible in their grieving, each preferring an approach that interfered with that of the other. How could Jeff forget when Penny papered the walls with Chrissie’s picture, slept on her bed, turned her room into a memorial? How could Penny overcome her grief when Jeff refused even to talk about Chrissie; when (and this had initiated a dreadful row) he refused, six months after her death, to attend the graduation of Chrissie’s junior high school class?
During the fifth hour our work on learning to live better with the living was interrupted by Penny’s raising a different type of question. The more she thought about her family, her dead daughter and her two sons, the more she began to think: What am I living for? What’s the point of it all? Her entire adult life had been guided by one principle: to give her children a better life than the one she had had. But now what did she have to show for the past twenty years? Had she wasted her life? And was there any point now in continuing to waste her life in the same way? Why kill herself to make mortgage payments? What future was there in anything?
So we changed our focus. We turned away from Penny’s relationship with her sons and ex-husband and began to consider another important characteristic of parental bereavement—the loss of meaning in life. To lose a parent or a lifelong friend is often to lose the past: the person who died may be the only other living witness to golden events of long ago. But to lose a child is to lose the future: what is lost is no less than one’s life project—what one lives for, how one projects oneself into the future, how one may hope to transcend death (indeed, one’s child becomes one’s immortality project). Thus, in professional language, parental loss is “object loss” (the “object” being a figure who has played an instrumental role in the constitution of one’s inner world); whereas child loss is “project loss” (the loss of one’s central organizing life principle, providing not only the
why
but also the
how
of life). Small wonder that child loss is the hardest loss of all to bear, that many parents are still grieving five years later, that some never recover.
But we had not progressed very far in our exploration of life purpose (not that progress can be expected: absence of purpose is a problem of
life
rather than of a life) when Penny changed course yet again. By now I had become accustomed to her bringing up a new concern almost every hour. It was not, as I first thought, that she was mercurial and unable to sustain focus. Instead, she was courageously unfolding her multilayered grief. How many more layers would she reveal to me?
She started one session—our seventh, I believe—by reporting two events: a vivid dream and another blackout.
The blackout consisted of her “waking up” in a drugstore (the same store where she had once before awakened holding a stuffed animal) weeping and clasping a high school graduation card.
Though the dream was not a nightmare, it was full of frustration and anxiety:
There was a wedding going on. Chrissie was marrying a boy in the neighborhood—a real turkey. I had to change my clothes. I was in this big horseshoe-shaped house, with lots of little rooms, trying one after the other to find the right room to change in. I kept on trying, but I couldn’t find the right one.
And, moments later, a “tagalong” fragment:
I was on a big train. We started going faster and then went up into a big arc in the sky. It was very beautiful. Lots of stars. Somewhere in there, maybe a subtitle (but it couldn’t be, because I can’t spell it) was the word
evolution
—there was a strong feeling about the word.
At one level the dream related to Chrissie. We talked for a while about the bad marriage she made in the dream. Perhaps the bridegroom was death: it was clearly not the marriage Penny would have wanted for her daughter.
And evolution? Penny had said she was no longer feeling a connection with Chrissie in her cemetery visits (now down to two or three a week). Perhaps evolution, I suggested, signified that Chrissie had indeed left and gone on to another life.
Perhaps, but Penny had a better explanation for the sadness in both the blackout and the dreams. When she woke up from the blackout in the drugstore, she had the strongest sense that the graduation card in her hand was not for Chrissie (who would have graduated from high school at this time) but for herself. Penny had never finished school, and Chrissie was going to do it for both of them (and was also going to attend Stanford for both of them).
The dream about the wedding and the search for a changing room was, Penny thought, about her own bad marriages and her current attempt to change her life. Her associations to the building in the dream corroborated this view: the dream building bore a striking resemblance to the clinic that housed my office.
And
evolution,
too, referred to her, not to Chrissie. Penny was ready to change into something else. She was fiercely determined to evolve and to succeed in the genteel world. For years, between customers in her taxicab, she had listened to self-improvement cassette tapes on vocabulary improvement, great books, and art appreciation. She felt that she was talented but had never developed her talents because, since the age of thirteen, she had had to earn a living. If only she could stop working, do something for herself, finish high school, go to college full-time, study “nonstop,” and “take off” from there
(there
was the dream train “taking off” into the air!).
Penny’s emphasis began to change. Instead of talking about Chrissie’s tragedy, she spent the next two hours describing the tragedy of her own life. As we approached our ninth, and last, hour, I sacrificed the rest of my credibility and offered to see Penny three additional hours, right up to the time of my sabbatical departure. For a number of reasons, I found it difficult to terminate: the sheer enormity of her suffering compelled me to stay with her. I was concerned by her clinical condition and felt responsible for it: week by week, as new material emerged, she had grown progressively more depressed. I was impressed by her use of therapy: I had never had a patient who had worked as productively. Lastly—I might as well be honest—I was transfixed by the unfolding drama, as each week offered a new, exciting, and entirely unpredictable episode.
Penny remembered her childhood in Atlanta, Georgia, as relentlessly bleak and impoverished. Her mother, an embittered, suspicious woman, had been hard-pressed to feed and clothe Penny and her two sisters. Her father made a fair living as a department-store delivery man but was, if her mother’s account were to be trusted, a callous, joyless man who died of alcoholism when Penny was eight. When her father died, everything changed. There was no money. Her mother worked twelve hours a day as a laundress and spent most nights drinking and picking up men at a local bar. It was then that Penny’s latchkey days began.
Never again did the family have a stable home. They moved from one tenement flat to another, often being evicted for nonpayment of rent. Penny went to work at thirteen, dropped out of school at fifteen, was an alcoholic at sixteen, married and divorced before she was eighteen, remarried and escaped to the West Coast at nineteen, where she proceeded to bear three children, buy a home, bury her daughter, divorce her husband, and put a down payment on a large cemetery plot.
I was particularly struck by two powerful themes in Penny’s account of her life. One was that she had been gypped, that the cards were stacked against her by the time she was eight. Her fondest wish for the next life, for both herself and Chrissie, was to be “stinking rich.”
Another theme was “escape,” not just physical escape from Atlanta, from her family, from the cycle of poverty and alcoholism, but escape from her destiny of becoming a “poor crazy old lady” like her mother, Penny having recently learned that her mother had, over the last several years, had several psychiatric hospitalizations.
The escape from destiny—from social class destiny and from her personal poor-crazy-old-lady destiny—was a major motif in Penny’s life. She came to see me to escape becoming crazy. She could take care, she said, of not being poor. Indeed, it was her drive to escape her destiny that fueled Penny’s workaholism, that kept her working long grueling hours.
It was ironic, too, that her drive to escape the destiny of poverty and failure was halted only by a deeper destiny—the finitude inherent in life. Penny had, more than most of us, never come to terms with the inescapability of death. She was a quintessentially active person—I thought of her careening down the highway after the drug dealers—and one of the most difficult things to face during Chrissie’s death was her own helplessness.
Despite the fact that I was used to Penny’s making new major disclosures, I was not prepared for the bombshell she dropped in our eleventh, penultimate, session. We had been talking about the end of therapy, and she described how accustomed she had become to meeting with me and how difficult it would be to say goodbye next week, how losing me would become another in her string of losses, when she mentioned, casually, “Did I ever tell you I had twins when I was sixteen?”
I wanted to shout, “What? Twins? At sixteen? What do you mean ‘Did I ever tell you?’ You know damn well you didn’t tell me!” But, having available only the rest of this session and the next, I had to ignore the way she made this revelation, and deal with the news itself.
“No, you never told me. Fill me in.”
“Well, I got pregnant at fifteen. That’s why I dropped out of school. I didn’t tell anyone till it was too late to do anything about it, so I went ahead and had the baby. Turned out to be girl twins.” Pausing, Penny complained of a pain in her throat. Obviously this was much harder to talk about than she pretended.
I asked what happened to the twins.
“The welfare agency said I was an unfit mother—they were right, I guess—but I refused to give ’em up and tried to take care of them but, after about six months, they took them away. I visited them a couple of times—until they got adopted. I never heard anything about them since. Never tried to find out. I left Atlanta and never looked back.”