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Five years ago I flew over the Connecticut hospital mortuary where thousands of feet below my husband’s dead body lay. The map on the screen flashed up New Haven as we headed east over the Atlantic… leaving him behind. During the six-hour flight back to London I sat bolt upright, tearless and unable to eat, drink or even visit the loo. I felt nothing, utterly empty, numb and as close to inanimate as I imagine a person can feel.
Andrew, at just 52, had died at 8am that morning, killed by a vicious land grabber of a cancer that had taken 14 months to overwhelm every organ in his body. This was my trauma beginning, to be followed, inevitably, by grief. We knew from the start it was bad, but I didn’t somehow think he would actually die. We never discussed it. Now, this seems astounding to me. I am still perplexed by the strength of his denial. And by my complicity.
No one survives lung cancer for very long. But we had simply never even spoken of the possibility. Stranger still – I was, and still am, a psychotherapist, used to working with people in deep grief, contemplating their own impending death or that of a loved one, recently or in the past. I remain baffled that Andrew and I did not broach the subject as we did everything else, carefully and together. But I got a lot of things wrong.
With victims of trauma the rule is that “talking therapy” or psychological help should not begin for at least two weeks. The sufferer will simply not be able to take anything in. As a psychotherapist I should have known better, but no one reminded me of this and I had forgotten most of what I knew anyway, my brain drenched with cortisol and saturated with disbelief. Yet 24 hours after the plane landed and 24 hours before his hastily arranged burial I was lying on a therapist’s couch, trying to put into words what was going on in my mind.
The trouble was my mind was in a psychic paralysis, disabling any interest in exploring my unconscious. Yet, I continued the treatment for the next two years, even though the experience almost destroyed my conviction in the importance and value of the process. What on earth was there to be curious about? The worst thing I could imagine (bar my children dying) had actually happened.
Yet I functioned – back to work, the school run, the weekly shop. But the immense logistical crises caused by his death could not be solved by the analyst, nor by analysing them. Andrew had left a lot undone. Where we were going to live, for example. And, as I was discovering daily, widowed people cannot delegate “deathmin” as a friend grimly named it. I resented terribly the analyst’s silence – only an invitation to gently explore my war-torn inner world, but which felt to me like an intrusive sniper at the time, waiting to show me how useless my psychical apparatus now was.
The analyst and I staggered on, and I would guess it was as bad for him as it was for me. All I wanted was to regain some kind of outward order, work (this I found a balm), move, organise Andrew’s (and therefore my) affairs and ensure my sons’ massively disrupted lives were as calm as possible. I did not want to be made to mourn what I knew perfectly well I had lost.
Five years on I surprise myself by being unconvinced that therapy is the best remedy for grief, at least in the immediate or short term. Personally, I wish I had waited at least a year, or possibly longer – to return to psychoanalysis. And yet “talking therapy” is more than just my work. I am a passionate advocate of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. I believe that navigating the internal world, accompanied by a therapist, may be the only way for some people to deeply understand themselves.
I gave up but then did return again to psychoanalysis, and found that, three years after Andrew’s death, it once again became an essential part of my life, by which I mean I could “stand” it and more than that, found it deeply interesting as a process. And as I went over and over (with a new analyst) how much I had loved Andrew, what an extraordinary man he was, how unfair, brutal and unkind life had been to him, I often thought I was not analysing very much.
And yet this analyst reminded me that sharing can be as important as interpreting. He listened and listened and listened, in a way I could not expect my parents or friends to. And life began again for me. The analyst’s presence washed over me, his kindness and constancy rocking me back to the soothed contented way I knew how to live. My inquiring brain became available to me again. And, finally, I began to see how in mourning, rather than grief, I could recover Andrew psychologically.
Recently, a patient came to see me for a consultation. He had been bereaved and wanted to know whether he should get some help. Grey haired and robust, he sat easily in my room, looking at my books, the picture on the wall, and finally at me. He told me his only daughter had been killed in a car crash 32 years ago, when she was 21. He and his wife had three other children and he had enjoyed a significant and successful career. He said it had been a very happy life in many ways.
But he was about to celebrate his 75th birthday and wondered why he had never felt overwhelmed by the pain of losing his daughter. Had he ever grieved, he wondered aloud? He had been feeling sad as this milestone approached. I asked him to tell me about his daughter and was surprised by how little he had to say about her. She had been a sweet baby, a lovely little girl, successful at school and university. We spent much of the session in silence, the man seeming to enjoy the quiet, and feeling no need to fill it.
We met twice more and towards the end of the third session, he fell into silence again. At the end he told me our meetings had made him realise there was not much he could do. Life had dealt him a terrible blow, but he had had to get on with things and he had been good at forgetting the details of his daughter. He concluded that this had protected him from a grief he could not imagine. It is one way of coping.
I looked at him during our sessions and felt sadness on an inordinate scale. I found myself tearful as I tried to write up my notes. Was this my counter-transference (the term used for the therapist’s own feelings) provoked by the patient? Was I able to feel some sadness for him that he could not? (He wrote to me a week or so later, thanking me and telling me the sessions had been most helpful, but that he felt no need to continue. And I believed him.)
What do I know five years on, as widow and as a therapist? Only that bereavement is an idiosyncratic experience without states, process, rights or wrongs, other than for most of us, with luck, the shocked state of grief, eventually leads to mourning, which is life long but it diminishes. One way of managing is by using the very human capacity of forgetting – my patient and I discovered that in different ways.
I don’t remember the ordinary everydayness of Andrew any more. His smell is gone from the clothes of his that I kept, and I can’t really remember the sound of his voice. I don’t dream about him much and when I do I wake up restless and miserable, wishing I had not had him back for minutes in the night. But I am a Freudian – and believe that all our dreams are wish fulfilments. So there must be a part of me that does still want him back, however much I know that this is impossible.
To recover from enormous and unexpected deaths in our lives, we must (partly) forget, in order to move on and rebuild lives that are fulfilling. We tell ourselves our loved ones would have wanted this, and the man I saw for those three consultations told me he was convinced that this was what his daughter would have wanted. Our routes were different. I have gradually got back to the life I had, with a lot of therapeutic support. I simply live it without Andrew and, of course, it is different. I am contented again, with work I thoroughly enjoy, two beloved children, parents, family and friends who I treasure. And I love someone again, which doesn’t feel odd or strange or a betrayal. It just feels right. Time, the hard transformation of reality into memory, and forgetting, is all I know five years on.
The State of Disbelief by Juliet Rosenfeld is published on 7 February by Short Books at £12.99. Buy a copy for £11.43 from guardianbookshop.com
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