Love's Executioner (16 page)

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Authors: Irvin D. Yalom

Tags: #Psychology, #Movements, #Psychoanalysis, #Research & Methodology, #Emotions

BOOK: Love's Executioner
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“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do! Just humor me. What do you get out of hanging on to Chrissie?”
“I deserted her when she was dying, when she needed me. No way I’m going to desert her again.”
Though Penny didn’t yet understand, she was locked into an irreconcilable contradiction between her determination to stay with Chrissie and her reincarnation beliefs. Penny’s grief was stuck, gridlocked. Perhaps, if she confronted this contradiction, she could start grieving again.
“Penny, you talk to Chrissie every day. Where is Chrissie? Where does she exist?”
Penny’s eyes widened. No one had ever before asked such blunt questions. “On the day she died, I brought her spirit back home again. I could feel it in the car with me. At first she stayed around me, sometimes at home in her room. Then later I could always make contact in the cemetery. She usually knew what was going on in my life, but she’d want to know about her friends and her brothers. I stayed in touch with all her friends so I could tell her about them.” Penny paused.
“And now?”
“Now she’s fading. Which is good. It means she’s been reborn into another life.”
“Does she have any memory of this life?”
“No. She’s into another life. I don’t believe in this shit about remembering past lives.”
“So she’s got to be free to go on to her next life, and yet there’s a part of you that won’t let her go.”
Penny said nothing. She just stared at me.
“Penny, you’re a tough judge. You put yourself on trial for the crime of not letting Chrissie go when she was about to die, and you sentenced yourself to self-hatred. I personally think you judge yourself too harshly. Show me the parent who could have done otherwise. I’ll tell you, if my child were dying I couldn’t have. But, even worse, the sentence is so severe—so damn tough on yourself. It sounds like your guilt and grief have already broken up your marriage. And the
length
of the sentence! That’s what really blows my mind. It’s four years now. How much longer? Another year? Four more? Ten? A life sentence?”
I collected my thoughts, trying to decide how to help her see what she was doing to herself. She sat motionless, a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray in her lap; her gray eyes were fixed on me. She hardly seemed to breathe.
I continued: “I’ve been sitting here trying to make sense of it and I’ve just had an idea. You’re not punishing yourself for something you did once, four years ago, when Chrissie was dying.
You’re punishing yourself for something you’re doing now,
something you’re continuing to do this very moment. You’re holding on to her, trying to keep her in this life when you know she belongs elsewhere. Letting her go wouldn’t be a sign of abandoning her or of
not
loving her, but just the opposite, a sign of really loving her—loving her enough
to let her go
to another life.”
Penny continued to stare. She didn’t speak but seemed moved by what I had said. My words
felt
powerful, and I knew it would be best simply to sit in silence with her. But I decided to say something else. It was probably overkill.
“Go back to that moment, Penny, that moment when you should have let Chrissie go, that moment you’ve blotted from your memory. Where is that moment now?”
“What do you mean? I don’t understand.”
“Well, where is it? Where does it exist?”
Penny seemed anxious and a little irritable at being pushed or quizzed. “I don’t know what you’re getting at. It’s past. It’s gone.”
“Does any memory of it exist? In Chrissie? You say she’s forgotten all traces of this life?”
“It’s all gone. She don’t remember, I don’t remember. So——?”
“So you continue to torture yourself about a moment that doesn’t exist anywhere—a ‘phantom moment.’ If you knew of someone else doing that, I think you’d call it dumb.”
Looking back now on this interchange, I see much sophistry in my words. But at the moment they felt compelling and profound. Penny, who, in her streetwise way, always had an answer for everything, again just sat silent, as though in shock.
Our two hours were drawing to a close. Although Penny did not ask for more time, it was obvious we had to meet again. Too much had happened: it would have been professionally irresponsible not to offer her an additional hour. She did not seem surprised by my offer and immediately agreed to return next week at the same time.
Frozen
—the metaphor often applied to chronic grief—is apt. The body is stiff; the face taut; cold, repetitive thoughts clog the brain. Penny was frozen. Would our confrontation break the ice jam? I was optimistic it would. While I couldn’t guess what would be set free, I anticipated considerable churning during the week and awaited her next visit with much curiosity.
Penny began that hour by falling heavily into the chair and saying, “Boy, am I glad to see you! It’s been quite a week.”
She continued, with forced cheerfulness, to tell me that the good news was that for the past week she had felt less guilty and less involved with Chrissie. The bad news was that she had had a violent confrontation with Jim, her older son, and, in response, had been alternating between rage and crying jags all week.
Penny had two surviving children, Brent and Jim. Both had dropped out of school and were heading toward serious trouble. Brent, sixteen, was in juvenile hall detention for participating in a burglary; Jim, nineteen, was a heavy drug user. The current upheaval began the day after our last session when Penny learned that Jim had, for the last three months, not kept up his payment for their cemetery plot.
Cemetery plot? I must have misheard her and asked her to repeat herself. “Cemetery plot” was what she had said, all right. About five years before, when Chrissie was still alive but weakening, Penny signed a contract for an expensive cemetery plot—a plot large enough, she pointed out (as though this should make things self-evident) “to keep the whole family together.” Each family member—Penny, her husband, Jeff, and her two sons—agreed, after intense pressure from her, to contribute a share of the cost in payments spread over seven years.
Yet, despite their promises, the whole financial burden of the plot was falling on her shoulders. Jeff had been gone for two years now and wanted nothing more to do with her, alive or dead. Her younger son, now incarcerated, was obviously unable to keep up his share (he had previously contributed a small amount from his after-school job). And now she found that Jim had been lying to her and not making his payments.
I was about to comment on her bizarre expectation that these two young men, who were obviously having enough problems with the enterprise of growing up, should be paying for their burial plot, when Penny continued with her account of the harrowing events of the week.
The night after her run-in with Jim, two men, obviously drug dealers, came to the door asking for him. When Penny told them that he was not home, one of them ordered her to tell Jim to pay the money he owed or he could forget about coming home: there wouldn’t be any house left for him to come home to.
Now, there is nothing, Penny told me, more important to her than her house. After her father died when she was eight, her mother had moved her and her sisters from apartment to apartment at least twenty times, often staying for only two or three months until they were evicted for not paying the rent. She made a vow then that some day she would have a real home for her family—a vow she had worked furiously to fulfill. The monthly mortgage payments were high, and after Jeff left she had to carry the whole burden. Even though she was now working long hours, she was barely making it.
So the two men had said the wrong thing. After they left, she stood stunned by the door for a few moments; then she cursed Jim for using his money for drugs rather than his plot payments; and after that, as she put it, she “lost it completely” and tore after them. They had already driven off, but she jumped into her large, souped-up pickup and followed them at high speed down the highway trying to ram them off the road. She careened into them a couple of times, and they escaped only by gunning their BMW to over a hundred miles per hour.
She then notified the police about the threat (but not, of course, about the highway chase), and for the last week her house had been under constant police surveillance. Jim came home later that night and, after hearing about what had happened, hurriedly threw some clothes into his backpack and left town. She had heard nothing from him since. Although Penny voiced no regrets for her behavior—on the contrary, she seemed to relish telling the story—there were, nonetheless, deeper rumblings. Later that night she grew more agitated, slept poorly, and had this powerful dream:
I was searching through rooms in an old institution. Finally I opened a door and saw two young boys standing on a platform like they were on display. They looked like my two boys, but they had long girls’ hair and were wearing dresses. Only everything was wrong: their dresses were dirty and on backward and inside out. Their shoes were on the wrong feet.
 
I felt overwhelmed. With so many promising leads I didn’t know which to choose. First, I thought of Penny’s desperate wish to keep everyone together, to create the stable family she never had as a child, and how that was manifested in her fierce resolve to own a house and a cemetery plot. And now it was apparent that the center could not hold. Her plans and her family were shattered: her daughter was dead, her husband gone, one son was in jail, the other in hiding.
All I could do was to share my thoughts and to commiserate with Penny. I very much wanted to save enough time to work on that dream, especially that final part about her two small children. The first dreams that patients bring to therapy, especially rich and detailed ones, are often deeply illuminating.
I asked her to describe the main feelings in the dream. Penny said she woke up crying, but could not put her finger on the sad part of the dream.
“What about the two little boys?”
She said there was something pathetic, maybe sad, about the way they were dressed—shoes on the wrong feet, dirty inside-out clothes. And dresses? What about the long hair and dresses? Penny couldn’t make sense of that, except then to say that maybe having the boys at all was a mistake. Maybe she would have wished them to be girls? Chrissie had been a dream child, a good student, beautiful, musically gifted. Chrissie, I surmised, was Penny’s hope for the future: it was she who could have rescued the family from its destiny of poverty and crime.
“Yeah,” Penny sadly continued, “the dream’s right on about my sons—dressed wrong, shoed wrong. Everything wrong about them—always has been. They been nothing but trouble. I had three children: one was an angel, and the other two, look at ’em—one in jail and the other a drug addict. I had three children—
and the wrong one died
.”
Penny gasped and put her hand to her mouth. “I’ve thought it before but never said it out loud.”
“How does it sound?”
She put her head down, almost into her lap. Tears were streaming down her face and onto her denim skirt. “Inhuman.”
“No, it’s the opposite. I hear only human feelings. Maybe they don’t sound good, but that happens to be the way we’re built. Given your situation and your three children, what parent wouldn’t feel the wrong one died? I sure as hell would!”
I didn’t know how to offer her more than that, but she gave no indication of having heard me so I repeated myself. “If I were in your situation, I’d feel the same way.”
She kept her head down but nodded almost imperceptibly.
As our third hour drew to a close, there was no longer any point in pretending that Penny was not in therapy with me. So I acknowledged it openly and suggested that we meet six more times and try to do as much as we could. I stressed that it would not be possible, because of other commitments and travel plans, to meet for more than six weeks. Penny accepted my offer but said that money was a big problem for her. Could we arrange to have payments spread out over several months? I reassured her that there would be no fee: since we had started to meet as part of a research venture, at this point I could not, in good conscience, suddenly change our contract and charge her.
In fact, I had no problems about seeing Penny without a fee: I had wanted to learn more about bereavement, and she was proving an excellent teacher. She had that very hour given me a concept that would serve me in good stead in all my future work with the bereaved :
if one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living.
There seemed much work for Penny to do on her relationships with the living—especially with her sons and perhaps with her husband; and I assumed that would be how we would spend our remaining six hours.
The wrong one died. The wrong one died.
Our next two hours were to consist of numerous variations on this harsh theme—a procedure referred to in the trade as “working through.” Penny expressed deep rage at her sons—rage not only because of the way they lived but rage
that
they lived. Only after she was spent, only after she had dared to say what she had been feeling over the last eight years (since first hearing that her Chrissie had a killing cancer)—that she had given up on both her sons; that Brent, at sixteen, was already beyond help; that she had prayed for years that Jim’s body could have been given to Chrissie (What did he need it for? He was going to kill it soon anyway, with drugs, with AIDS. Why should he have a working body and Chrissie, who loved her little body, have hers eaten away by cancer?)—only when Penny had said all these things, could she stop and reflect upon what she had said.

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