Mourning

“I still can’t believe it,” Marcy says, tears streaming down her face, her hands clenched into fists. “

I can’t believe my big brother is dead. In an instance. He’d just played racket ball that morning. To die just like that. No sign of any heart problems. I can’t believe it.”

“I’m so sorry, Marcy. I know how important your brother was to you, almost like a stand-in father.”

Marcy nods, sobbing, unable to speak.

“And his sudden death must bring up all the feelings you had as a child when your father died so suddenly.”

March nods again, reaches for a tissue and blows her nose. “That’s why I know Dave did everything he could not to repeat our father’s history, not to leave a wife and young kids. He never smoked, didn’t eat red meat, exercised. And he barely made it into his fifties. It’s so unfair,” she says. “Life is so God damn unfair!”

Silence. Marcy looks up at me and says, “You look so sad yourself.”

Marcy has read me correctly. I reverberate with her pain. Although I never had a brother and my father didn’t die young, I’ve had my share of losses. The intensity of Marcy’s pain brings back the feelings of agonizing loss, of emptiness, of disbelief at knowing you will never again see the one you loved. That life is unfair goes without saying. I no longer rail against that indisputable reality. Loss is a necessary part of love and life. And life without love isn’t worth living.  

I respond honestly. “Yes, Marcy. I am. I feel the depth of your loss, your sadness and just as your brother’s death brings up past feelings about your father’s death, it also stimulates feelings about my past losses.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you sad,” she says, immediately illustrating the problem of a therapist being self-revealing.

“That’s perfectly okay, Marcy. You don’t have to take care of me. You have more than enough to do right now taking care of your own feelings. And, besides, although your pain now feels overwhelmingly agonizing, I know that you wouldn’t have given up having your brother in your life. And that’s true for me and my losses as well.”

“Oh no! I would never have given up having him in my life. Not for a moment. I literally don’t know what I would have done without him as a kid.” Pause. “But I’m still going to miss him,” she adds plaintively. “I feel like a kid when I say that,” she says between sobs.

“We all carry the child part of us along with our adult self, so I’m sure both the adult you and the child you will miss him. Very much.”

Silence.

“You know what you said about my not having to take care of you?”

“Right. You don’t.”

“I was thinking how different that was than when my father died. I was only six, but I felt that I had to take care of my mother. I was supposed to be the one to make her feel better. And I couldn’t do that. She felt bad for a long, long time. I can feel how I felt as that child. That long, long time felt like forever. And while I tried to take care of her, she wasn’t so good at taking care of me. Good thing my brother was 18, or who knows what would have happened to me. Probably shipped off to some aunt I hardly knew. My brother tried hard. But sometimes my clothes didn’t match or my hair was all messy. I don’t remember the other kids making fun of me. They mostly felt sorry for me, but that didn’t feel so good either.”

“It all sounds terribly painful, Marcy. So hard for you.”

“And now I’m back at it again. Trying to make Mom feel better. But it always seems reasonable. First she loses her husband, now her son. What could be worse than that? But I don’t want in that role again. It’s such a burden.”

“Are you concerned, Marcy, that you will need to take care of me, too?”

“No,” she says hesitantly.

“You don’t sound too sure.”

“Well, you don’t seem depressed and you’re certainly functional.” Pause. “But maybe making you feel sad worries me. Like I’m not supposed to do that.”

“I understand, Marcy. We should continue to look at that. And maybe looking at your feelings of needing to take care of me, will help you work through some of the past issues with your mother and free you from the burden of feeling responsible for her happiness.”       

Family Connections

“I’m kind of in a state of shock,” Sheila begins. “My sister was arrested for shoplifting. A lipstick for heaven sakes! She could have bought a million lipsticks! I don’t get it. And she doesn’t seem to be able to explain it. At least not to me.”

“You’ve never talked much about your sister,” I say to Sheila. “What’s your relationship like?”

Sheila sighs. “Pat’s two years younger than me, 36. I guess we’ve never been close. Not as kids, not now when we live less than a half hour apart. She was always difficult, always getting into trouble, creating some drama in the house. She’s very pretty. My father liked that. I guess I was jealous of her. I was the good girl, the one who always did well in school, the one who obeyed the rules. I got points for that, but her looks made her popular with the “in” girls and always got her dates with the most desirable boys. And then she married Cliff, married into all that wealth. She calmed down after that. I thought she was happy. Who knew?”

“Do you still feel jealous of your sister?”

“I guess. It seemed she was always creating problems, but still got everyone to love her. But I don’t know about this time. My parents are definitely not happy. And I can only imagine how Cliff’s family will react.”

“Does that bring you some satisfaction?”

“I wouldn’t say that to anyone but you, but yes, it does. Except she’ll probably get out of this too. And I really shouldn’t complain. I have a great career, a wonderful husband and a lovely daughter. You can’t ask for much more than that.”

“Do you feel less than your sister?”

“That’s a good question. It’s like if I think about my adult self and my adult life, I have absolutely no reason to feel less than Pat – except for her money, but that’s really not the issue for me. It’s these feelings from the past that creep in and suddenly I’m the one who gets to stay home on Saturday night, who watches my father look adoringly at my sister and, yes, I feel less than. Silly, right?”

“Not silly at all, Sheila. Our unconscious is timeless and the experiences and feelings we had at five and ten and fifteen, are as much with us, as our present day experiences and feelings.”

“Makes sense.”

“You haven’t talked at all about your mother’s feelings about you or your sister.”

“I guess that’s because I never knew how my mother felt. About anything. She was always efficient and proper and did the things she needed to do, including taking care of us, and I suppose loving us, but there was a shallowness to her feelings. Or maybe it’s that feelings were too messy. She did what she needed to do, her feelings on the shelf.”    

“So in relation to your mother, your sister and you were equal, neither of you getting very much.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I mean we may have been equal, but it’s not that we didn’t get very much.”

“Emotionally?”

“Are you saying you think we were emotionally deprived?”

“You were the good girl, your sister acted out. Maybe you were both trying to get more love and attention.”

Pause.

“I wonder if that’s why I sometimes get depressed out of the blue. It’s like everything is going along fine and suddenly there’s this black cloud.”

“That a great insight, Sheila. What you’re saying is that those childhood feelings we were talking about earlier catch up with you and suddenly you’re a kid again feeling needy and ungiven to and depressed.”

“That’s exactly right!” She pauses. “You know, that also makes me feel more sympathy towards my sister. I like that. It’s a new feeling.” Another pause.  “Do you think she shoplifted because she felt needy and thought the lipstick would make her feel better?”

“You’re saying she was trying to nurture herself with a material object, because she didn’t feel given to emotionally. That’s certainly a possibility. And I imagine there’s some anger thrown in there as well. Probably for both of you.”

“Hmm. I’ve never seen myself as an angry person, but I guess we’ll have to talk about that next time.”

“Okay. We will.”  

Unspoken Loss

“I never expected to be in a therapist’s office,” Darlene says, pulling at her fingers, glancing anxiously around the room. “I like all your windows. It makes your space feel larger, but still cozy.” She laughs self-consciously. “I’m an interior designer. Space matters to me. I’m sorry, I’m just rambling. I guess it’s hard to begin.”

“Take your time,” I say reassuringly. “It’s hard to open up to someone you’ve never met before.”


“It’s hard to open up to anyone. I’m 37 years old and except for my husband and my best friend I never talk to anyone about my sister. Or her death. That’s how I got to you. My friend sent me your blog about your husband’s death and I looked on your website and saw that you wrote a book about it and I thought, wow, here’s someone who can talk about her loss, maybe she can help me talk about mine.” 

Darlene is talking rapidly now, as if in a rush to discharge years of pent up words. “I was seven when she died in a car accident. She was 16, the golden girl. Literally. She had beautiful long blond hair. And she was very smart, in her senior year of high school, with her pick of all the best colleges. Even her name was special – Lily, like the flower. Me, I kind of faded into the background – skinny, brown curly hair, a bit of a tomboy back then, okay in school but nothing exceptional. I was the tag along little sister, kind of a pest. 

“Then she got killed. Of course my parents were devastated. Everyone was. I know now that my mother became majorly depressed, but then all I knew was that she vanished into her bedroom. I would hear her crying. I’d want to go in and comfort her but the door was always locked. Sometime I’d curl up on the floor outside the room and just wait for her to come out. My father threw himself into his work. He’d tell me not to bother my mother, not to upset her any more than she was already upset.”

I’m aware of the sadness I feel for Darlene as the lost, frightened child. I’m also aware of Darlene’s envious feelings towards her sister and wonder how that has affected her mourning.

She continues. “I don’t know how long it was before things became normal again. Except they weren’t normal. All the pictures of Lily disappeared. And no one could mention her name again. I never really understood how Lily died. I mean I knew she died in a car accident, but I don’t know who was driving or who was at fault or any of the particulars. I still don’t know. No one talks about her. It’s as though she had never existed. It’s weird.”

I shudder internally. I can’t imagine a more unhelpful way to mourn. And I can’t imagine the message Darlene received about death and mourning when a child goes from being loved and adored to being vanished and unspoken. There’s so much that Darlene needs to work on. 

“How did you feel about Lily’s death?” I ask.

“Scared. I couldn’t understand how someone could be here one day and gone the next. It was frightening. I still feel that way. Death scares me. It’s one of the reasons I keep putting off having a child. My husband really wants children. But I worry. How would I cope if the child died?”

Darlene has stated her conscious concern about having a child. I wonder about possible unconscious reasons such as fear that her negative thoughts magically killed Lily and might similarly kill a child or that a child would become a competitor for her husband’s affection just as Lily was for her parent’s. But these are just speculations on my part and very far from where Darlene is at the moment.

She continues. “I still miss Lily. And I imagine losing a child would be way worse. Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Is there something wrong with me that I still miss Lily after 30 years, that I still want to talk about her?”

Sadness fills me as I think about my two October losses - my husband now dead for seven years and my grandmother for 44. I carry them with me always, aware of the richness they brought to my life.

“Absolutely not,” I say. “Your parents never gave you or themselves the chance to mourn Lily, to tell stories about her, to remember her so that you could take Lily inside yourself so that it wouldn’t feel as though she had never existed. Taking the person who’s died inside us is a way to bring ourselves comfort, as well as a way to keep that person alive in the only way possible.”

Darlene’s eyes fill with tears. “You will work with me, won’t you?” she asks plaintively.

“It will be my privilege.”