“Yes, little Annie wants you to be with her and listen to her like that,” Blumenfeld says, “just exactly like that.”
I lean back in the black chair and close my eyes and listen to the soft rhythm of Blumenfeld’s breathing.
In Blumenfeld’s company, the revels in “Our revels now are ended” become the plays of my life, on which my survival has depended. All my life, it becomes clear, I’ve been living within a particular play in the endless past, which becomes most vivid when, in Blumenfeld’s words, “you feel your life depends upon what someone else does or does not do.” Then, “catapulted into another world, another time,” I play the scenes which are reenactments of trauma. Ben and I are alike in this. This kind of play is monotonous and grim, as Lenore Terr tells us in her invaluable book on children’s experiences of trauma, Too Scared to Cry. Unlike other forms of play, traumatic play creates more anxiety than it dispels. Blumenfeld describes it in this way: “The pain of it is so unbearable that it surrounds you. When there are no words for this, no thoughts, then it can only be lived out.”
It is as if Blumenfeld is saying to me, “These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits.” The spirits of my play are indeed ghosts-missing parents who loomed over me, even as I waited for them to return. My fear of being abandoned, a terror in my body like the terror of imminent death, is the play I have lived all my life trying to escape. Just as Ben has fled his terror of abandonment and burning all his life. Fleeing my own terror, I created a play of vigilance and waiting—waiting for the appearance of my (remembered) mother and father, or waiting for their surrogates in later years. But, as Blumenfeld notes, to stop this vigilance is to know the terror of “I will die.”
Later in my childhood and in my adolescence, apparently there were elaborations on this little play of terror: if I died, if I actively chose to die, I might be missed and loved then. Or, if I could not manage to die, perhaps if I could play my part just right (as Blumenfeld points out to me), I could magically find the feelings and gestures that would conjure up the mother who sometimes comforted me, the father who swept me up off the floor and sometimes danced with me. Who has ever loved and not learned to do this-to conjure oneself and others with the most loving gestures?
But for me, this play of conjuring became a haunting obsession. Waiting for Melanie to call me, I conjured her up and then felt as if I would die if I could not be in her presence. And when I saw she did not call, I wanted to die. Probably, had I dared to feel my rage that night, I would also have wanted to kill her for instilling that kind of fear in me. But the fear was in me long before I met Melanie. In fact, in my attempts to avoid the fear of death, to dim the life within my child’s body that knew the nearness of death, I was living into tragic possibilities.
Lenore Terr describes the terror of trauma as the overwhelming, unexpected fear of death. It is human to fear death, but what marks a traumatic fear of dying is the victim’s close acquaintance with death. A child will reconstruct his or her life under and around and behind this fear of dying, anything to avoid facing straight into it, ever again, as Ben did, and as I did.
I wonder if the basic tragedy of trauma is not so much the fear of dying as it is the denial of death itself. Ironically, this denial does not work, because it sits beside the grindingly repetitious (and sometimes dangerous) plays we create to transform mortality into invulnerability. The denial of death sits beside a repeated fear of unexpected annihilation for those among us who know fear much too intimately.
Blumenfeld gives me a way to know and reenter my experience of terror. When he says, “You are in a real dilemma ... you can keep looking for Melanie, or you can know it’s not really Melanie you are looking for,” he isn’t just pointing out that Melanie may be symbolic of someone else, he is also giving me a way out of the tragic endings to my play.
My grim little play needs another ending-one that is real, and therefore satisfying and healing. Blumenfeld reminds me that I’ve not lost “everyone.” I still have a connection with “little Annie” (his name for the “little pieces” as one child), whom I admittedly “don’t always treat very well.” Through this relationship with her (a relationship within myself), he shows me how much I want to be able to be alive in my body and in all my feelings.
In this way, Blumenfeld poses another ending to ongoing play of my real life: I might learn to live with an unknowable future, unknowable in all ways except for the certainty of death. Knowing that “our little life is rounded with a sleep,” I might be free to live fully and to love again.
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Acorns, green in my hands; I pick them up from my yard. And yearn for a lost life, a lost self. I hold a little green breast in my hand, and desire has many doors.
I dream of little acorns popping down onto the roof; they touch me, here and here, on the small button, alive. Joan of Arc, courageous heretic, was burned for telling the truth about her voices, whom she insisted were substantial and touched her. How she yearned for them, missed them, at times.
I stand in the shower, a hot evening, weeping because I have not heard from or seen Telesporus in days.
With Blumenfeld’s voice in my left ear (himself away in the land where analysts go to vacation in August), I watch a father with his two daughters outside a bookstore. The little girls sit on a brick wall, one four or five, the other maybe six, one in green overalls and a white undershirt, the other in a red and violet flowered dress. They sit side by side, blond-haired children, eating Skittles. Their feet, shod in red high-top sneakers, dangle and swing. The father, graying-blond and blue-eyed, tucks one under each arm and makes the chugging noises of an airplane starting and taking off. The two small girls giggle, find my eyes and burst into laughter. Whenever he stops and puts them back on the wall, “Daddy, Daddy, come here, once more, oh plllease!” And off he goes, one under each arm, taking a turn around the building. They dangle, limp with laughter, one under each arm. I turn away, still laughing. Tears have covered my face.
For the first time, I realize that Blumenfeld’s eyes are brown, not blue. My father’s eyes were blue, blue-gray.
Behind the caverns of my soul’s face, a blue eye is weeping again. Whose eyes will light up to see Ben, when I am gone?
I find myself often in tears. Grief runs its fine rivulets down my face at unexpected moments. I no longer paint the light on windows.
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On a beautiful, bright morning the first week in August, Ben decides to play outside again.
He comes into the playroom and hops up and down.
“Let’s go out, out, out today,” he exclaims. “Oh, let’s take Tea Bags, too!”
I smile at his antics. “You are all ready to go and we will go, but first we will mark off the calendar, OK?”
I pull down the calendar and give Ben a green Magic Marker to color over the red X. He counts the remaining X’s until he comes to the circle.
“Two more times?” he asks in a small voice.
“Three more times including our goodbye day,” I clarify, pointing to the circle.
He stands very still, all the liveliness gone now. He does not move or speak or cry. I know better now than to ask a direct question or make a remark. He will simply ignore me, as he has before. I feel his desolation and mine. What are the words, the sounds we might whisper to one another in this frozen frame? Stay away fish for me I had a bad dream don’t leave me please you are my mommy and now it is morning again I want a tall shining hat paint me a horse I don’t want any turkey did I kill her? I am shot the baby bear is shot come to our hideout a house is on fire Tea Bags tell me what to say tell me. Ben is remote, struggling alone. I ache for him.
Suddenly I have an idea. “How would you like to take a picture today, Ben? Jill can take a picture of you and me and Tea Bags.”
“With a real camera?” he wonders.
“Yep. A real camera, and you can keep it,” I tell him.
“I can keep it to remember you by,” he says softly. Then the excitemen
t he entered with comes back into his whole body.
“Put Tea Bags on your hand so I can talk to him!”
I put the puppet on my hand.
“You’re gonna have your picture took, Tea Bags! You got to get your hair combed,” he says, critically smoothing it down.
I offer him my pocket comb and he casually tugs a bit at Tea Bags’ yellow fur. He combs his own hair too.
I planned to take pictures on the last day, so when we arrive at the main office, I cue Jill, one of the secretaries, into my change of plans. Ben dances from foot to foot, impatient, as he waits for us. We go outside, and Ben and I sit on the steps by the playground and have a picture there; and Jill takes another with Ben on a high swing and me standing beside him. She uses a Polaroid, so the pictures develop within minutes. I hand the pictures to Ben.
“You pick the one you like best. One for you and one for me,” I tell him.
He picks the one with us sitting down, Tea Bags between us, my arm around him, and hands me the other.
“You look at me every day and you don’t forget,” he says solemnly.
“I won’t forget,” I say. “How could I ever forget?”
How can I ever forget you in this place of widening circles drawn into the air above us, this place we have come to, Ben, to witness wind leaves snow light leaving?
We walk along in silence. Ben bends down in the grass and lifts up a leaf with something on it.
“Look, a caterpillar! It got born from this leaf,” he announces, extending it to me.
I bend over the leaf. “Yes, it is a caterpillar. Born from this leaf?” I ask skeptically.
“I got a whole bag of leaves and there was one of ‘em in it. I didn’t put him in there,” Ben says, as if he has cracked a code.
“So the leaf did? Or all of them did?” I ask.
“Yep!”
“An egg was laid on a leaf perhaps,” I suggest.
Ben looks at me as if I do not have good sense. “No, Annie. Eggs you eat for breakfast.”
“So the leaf had him,” I say tentatively.
Ben nods. I do not argue. To him the idea of an egg is outrageous.
We walk in silence again, along the garden and down a road lined with white morning glories. I carry Tea Bags along, and Ben looks up at the puppet.
“Will I ever get to visit you, Tea Bags?” he asks.
I give Tea Bags words. “Yes. I will still be here. Annie is leaving me in the playroom. Only she won’t be here.”
What is the vanishing point where buildings melt into air this detonation of doors windows toys signs Ben at the door?
“I’ll miss you,” he says to me, and reaches for my hand.
“And I will miss you, too, Ben. And I will not forget,” I tell him. We walk, listening to the sound of bees and a lawn mower. The silence comes down on us again. We have gone so far beyond words.
“Who will I see when you are gone?” he asks.
“You will see someone else, but I don’t know who that will be, for certain,” I answer.
What are the sounds we will whisper to one another in this new territory where nothing is certain?
“No,” he says suddenly. “I don’t want anybody else.” And he releases my hand and runs ahead of me.
We have come full circle back to the garden. Ben bends over the flowers to smell them. I catch up with him and squat down beside him. He looks longingly at the flowers, then at me, and again at the flowers.
“I wish I could have those!” he says, his eyes wide as he scans the array of red, yellow, orange and violet flowers.
I can see a man gardening just a short distance away.
“We can’t just take these flowers,” I tell Ben. “But we can ask that man for some of them.”
Ben leads the way, but when he gets to the man, he stops and motions me forward.
“You ask,” he whispers loudly.
“This is Ben,” I tell the elderly gardener, “and he covets your beautiful flowers.”
The man bends down to negotiate with Ben privately, and Ben comes away quite pleased. We return to the flower bed.
“He said I can have five. I want one of them, and that and that and that one,” Ben says, pointing.
“Go ahead and pick them, but watch out for bees,” I say.
He kneels and yanks up five flowers, one of each color and a white morning glory.
“Smell ’em, Tea Bags!” he says, offering the bunch to Tea Bags’s nose. Ben puts his own face down in the bunch to smell it.
“This one gots a little bug in it,” he notices, showing me the morning glory.
“Oh, so it has,” I say, and I add, mischievously, “Do you think the flower made that bug?”
“No, Annie. Just leaves do that!”
Inside, we find a paper cup for his flowers and go back to the playroom to glue his picture of us on a sheet of sturdy construction paper. Ben looks at the picture, standing very still, and then at me.
I feel myself fade into the stillness of his brown eyes, as if Ben is photographing me—a span of time, consciousness, discovery, memory—coming together in that long look.
He smiles a small smile, waves to me and to Tea Bags and leaves us. Ready to go and reluctant to go, he stands at the door a moment, clinging to the doorjamb, then comes back to me.
“I believe you do know the lady I will see in the fall,” he declares and runs off before I can comment.
Ben and I are each playing beside the shadow of our own perspective or story of loss as we anticipate leaving one another. As we listen to one another here, our shadows touch and the silence between us becomes very full. We go together into this silence-—the territory of facing a goodbye, rather than being helplessly shattered by another loss.
I introduce the idea of taking pictures while Ben is immersed in his unvoiced inner struggle with my leaving. After he marks off the calendar, as we’ve been doing for three weeks now, he stands very still, remote in his feelings and thoughts. I have been making tentative remarks about saying goodbye during these moments previously, but Ben seemed not to hear me. Perhaps he would have heard me and responded this time, I do not know. I feel his desolation, and my own-wordless, beyond words. I hope that picture-taking will give him a concrete way to convey some of his thoughts and feelings about ending with me.
Ben knows immediately that the picture is meant as a keepsake. “I can keep it to remember you by,” he says, and later, “You look at me every day and you don’t forget.” His words come into me and create a cryptic language that holds what is happening within me.
In the midst of our silence, laden with words and time and sorrow and rehearsed loss, Ben and I are not overwhelmed by our feelings. There is an underlying joy in this session that comes back to me as I write. Ben reminds me of the differences in our perspectives, he brings me new discoveries, he shows me beauty in the world we inhabit together as he picks his bunch of flowers from the gardener.
As we play between our silent walking we are light-headed, teasing. Ben finds a caterpillar on a leaf and says, “Look, a caterpillar! It got born from this leaf.” I am a little skeptical because I hold a different view about categories of species in the world and about reproduction. Ben hears my skepticism, but he makes an effort to include me in his discovery: “I got a whole bag of leaves and there was one of ’em in it. I didn’t put him in there.” “So the leaf did? Or all of them did?” I ask. As I try to understand his view of birth, I pose two alternatives: a birth by one leaf or by many. “Yep!” Ben answers, rejecting my categories by including both of them in his affirmation. I sense that to try to give Ben a lesson on how caterpillars come into the world will not only be lost on him, but I will also miss something herefor he brings me a bit of whimsy in his view of the world that is not unlike the wonder I feel in the presence of Telesporus. Nevertheless, I persist with my own point of view: “An egg was laid on a leaf perhaps.” Now it is Ben who teaches me, “No, Annie. Eggs you eat for breakfast.” Eating and birth have b
ecome separated for Ben, as they are not for a very young child, and he speaks to me as if I do not know this yet, with a tone of exasperated patience. We never understand one another wholly, because each of us lives and talks within the borders of a particular perspective. We are stitched to our own ways of knowing, “glued to our shadows,” as the philosopher Hannah Arendt says. Yet, as we play, Ben and I understand one another well enough. Our shadows touch. Ben is full of discovery, then patiently exasperated; I am skeptical, then enchanted by another way of seeing.
As Ben and I face into the loss of our time together, the stakes of how we understand and respond to one another are very high. We are unable to escape the limits of our different perspectives, our own constraining and compelling stories. There is no place I can stand as a therapist outside and apart from my own shadow and understand Ben’s and my play: I have no transcendent or omniscient view, no expert or foolproof understanding, and I am not and will never be entirely “cured” of my own suffering. We play.
I try to take seriously the old woman in my dream weeks ago who sewed my shadow onto my heels. I try to notice what should be obvious, but what I have to struggle to grasp in this year of my most intensive clinical training is that this story about Ben in all his suf fering is also a story about my suffering; it contains all the ways I have worked to heal both myself and Ben, to heal myself and Melanie, and myself and Blumenfeld too.
Our playing also reveals how Ben has unwittingly healed me. His story fills the drama of our play, his feelings spill over into each scene; I respond to Ben when he comes to play with me where our shadows meet. I play with him, especially as we are saying goodbye, in the place of my deepest wounding and loss.
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A Shining Affliction Page 25
