Love's Executioner

by Irvin D. Yalom

  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.

  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.