None of those left behind, the so-called leftovers, knows why this vanishing has occurred. Was it the Rapture long awaited by evangelical Christians, their chosen loved ones transported to heaven while they, the not-so-good, are left to face a period of tribulation? Or was it somehow a scientifically plausible event? The series, refusing to say, focuses narrowly on the aftermath. Those who are gone are simply gone; those who remain are devastated. Whether or not they have lost someone in their immediate circle, the survivors are enraged, or empty, or they fall apart. The leftovers split into two camps: those who try to cope with their grief and move on, and those who refuse to forget. Among the latter group is a cult called the Guilty Remnant. They live together, dress in white, chain-smoke, and generally make a nuisance of themselves. They want everyone to remember, and they behave nihilistically because they believe the world is ending. Their message is that there can be no recovery, no hope, no resumption of normal life after the event, for anyone.
The Leftovers is about the peculiar kind of suffering of people bereaved by unexplained disappearances. It shows their bafflement and loss of equilibrium. The division between those who seek to rejoin the current of ongoing life and those who don’t aligns roughly with the difference between mourners and melancholics set out in Sigmund Freud’s landmark essay “Mourning and Melancholia.” The mourners work to heal themselves and carry on the business of living, however diminished their world is. The melancholics, on the other hand, are much like the Guilty Remnant: their grief has become grievance, and they won’t move on.
I was fascinated by this divide because it reminded me of the period after I left the hospital, when I occupied both sides at once. I was mourning, but trying to accept what had happened and trying to re-enter the world. Traumatic memories were still with me, and I had trouble laying Anna to rest in my mind. It was as if her death and the aftermath had stripped away my accustomed pose of a normal, functioning person and left me revealed in my true nature—empty, drifting, without value. My mood was fragile, and I continued to be haunted by the meaninglessness of things.
The British psychoanalyst Darian Leader points to what may have been the reason for my continuing sense of blankness and devastation. “In mourning, we grieve the dead,” he writes, “and in melancholia we die with them.” In mourning we work through our grief, find the words to talk about it, share it with others, and gradually relinquish it to the past. In melancholia we remain in the trauma of loss, so that what Emily Dickinson called “the hour of lead” extends indefinitely into the future. My new psychiatrist, Dr. Waters, encouraged me to return to the work of mourning that was left undone when illness shunted my mind onto a looping track of despairing, suicidal thoughts.
Psychoanalysis, as many have observed, is a sort of secular religion, and it was a radical departure from my family’s long reliance on submission and prayer as the response to death, illness, and personal disasters of all varieties. In conversation, through an investigation into the source of intolerable feelings, it promised an alternative to the crisis of despair. For generations my family had said the Rosary on their knees each evening, prayed to patron saints for relief from affliction, and included the sick and dying in their prayers at Mass. But for me, Catholicism had been more powerful as a source of guilt and self-castigation than of comfort. As the grandchild of four Irish immigrants, I had done things that were unthinkable in the world they came from: I had gone to college, I had stopped going to Mass, and now I was in therapy. To most members of my family, psychotherapy seemed like self-indulgent nonsense. They blamed the psychiatrists for my disruptive new ideas—that I was unhappy, that I might need to get divorced.
One of my siblings and a couple of my friends became parents not long after I did, and the arrival of their healthy babies reinforced the rarity of what had happened to Anna. Since those days, I’ve met many people who have suffered more terrible losses, and even then I understood how lucky I was in not having had more time with her. Losing a child one has loved for two years, or twelve, or twenty, in the intimate attachment of daily life, is exponentially worse. So wasn’t my reaction overblown? I can see how it might look that way. But losing a child you’ve never known is strange. I didn’t know her, and neither did anyone else.
I was seeking solace and trying to make sense of things that just didn’t make sense. After nine long months of sharing my body with her, her fatal secret ticking like a time bomb, my acquaintance with my daughter outside the womb had been so brief that my most potent memories were of her dying. A line I knew from Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot expressed the absurdity of what had happened: “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” To be born with her half-formed heart was to begin to die. And if this was so, wasn’t her existence a pointless mistake? Who was she, apart from the error that ended her life? Didn’t she matter as a child, as a person, as a soul?
The answers offered by religious traditions—both my own and Jake’s—were not reassuring. Catholic teaching had maintained for centuries that if the sacrament of baptism wasn’t performed before its death, the newborn remained in the state of original sin and was condemned to limbo, a sort of eternal waiting room. Although the concept of limbo wasn’t official doctrine and is no longer taught, it underscored the Church’s insistence that the sacrament of baptism is necessary for salvation.
Judaism’s approach to neonatal death has been in place since the medieval Jewish sage Maimonides wrote, “We do not mourn for fetuses” or “anything which does not live for thirty days.” If the child was a late miscarriage, or stillborn, or died before a month was out, it would go unmourned and be buried in an unmarked grave. But as with the view of limbo in the Catholic Church, it’s a tradition that hasn’t gone unchallenged. Recently a group of Conservative rabbis voted to revise it for their congregations, acknowledging the psychological reality that bereaved parents do think of their dead infant as a person. New ritual observance, as of 1992, obligates parents to say the mourner’s Kaddish, to hold a burial with full rites, to sit shiva, and to observe the anniversary of the child’s death. Orthodox Jews continue to observe Maimonides’s rule, which no doubt reflects a point of view across ancient cultures: the death of a child was something that happened all too frequently, and parents were encouraged to move on rather than grieve. Historians of premodern eras have argued that because death claimed children so often, parents did not become as attached to them as we do today.
The poetic record, however, tells another story. Even in the plague- and disease-ridden days of the sixteenth century, an age of faith when mortality was unimaginably high, the Polish poet Jan Kochanowski could express how wrong it felt to survive his two-year-old daughter in this verbal epitaph:
the chisels sharp and cut the words in stone:
“Ursula Kochanowski lies beneath,
Her father’s joy that slipped his loving hands.
Learn from this grave the ways of careless Death:
The green shoot is mown down—the ripe crop stands.”
His daughter’s death struck him so forcibly that in his effort to cope with it he wrote a cycle of laments, poems that registered so powerfully with me that when I came across a few of them in the Times Literary Supplement, I cut them out and saved them. In the final one, Kochanowski describes a dream in which he sees his dead mother holding Ursula in her arms: “my never lovelier Daughter . . . Rose petal skin, eyes bright as a new day.” His mother says she has come from a “distant shore” to comfort him:
We are alive
Beyond the flesh. The dust returns to dust,
But spirit is divine, a gift that must
Return to its Giver.
The poet’s dream mother informs her son that he should “Trust and understand / This Mystery: she sits at God’s right hand,” and concludes her long speech with a pointed assertion: “There is— / Never forget—one Lord of light and bliss.” The last poem, and thus the entire Laments, ends on a note of uncertainty: “She vanished, and I woke, uncertain what / I had just seen: was this a dream or not?” His mother’s return, dream or not, is partly comforting and partly scolding: Why is he so weak in his faith? If doubt leaves him in such a state of anguish, isn’t this his own doing? It’s as if his mother has had to remind him to accept the simple solution he hasn’t arrived at on his own: the consolation of religious faith. I don’t know whether Kochanowski was convinced by his mother’s final statement, but the dream confirms that what is emotionally comforting may not withstand rational scrutiny.
Four centuries later, I was another grieving skeptic who had to be counseled by elder family members. My mother’s mother, Bridie, then my last living grandparent, wrote several letters to me while I was in the hospital, and among them I recently found a Mass card she sent me. For those unfamiliar with this practice, these are often sent as sympathy cards and represent a certain number of Masses that will be said for the soul of the deceased. The text of this particular card was a reminder that a child who dies is with Jesus and Mary in eternal life, awaiting the day when she will joyfully welcome her parents into heaven. The text on the card even spoke in the voice of the departed: “Do not grieve too much. We are living and are still with you.” I assume that such a belief must have sustained my grandmother when her only son died in infancy, because she continued to attend Mass every day for more than a half century after that loss. In one of her letters, Bridie had written of her certainty that Anna was in heaven with my grandfather, who died just weeks before I entered the hospital.
In the face of the ancestral consolation held out to me, I was sure only of the material facts of the case. I knew that Anna was dead. I had seen her die, and seen her coffin slide into a wall of flame. I knew that if she were anywhere, she was in the container that held the ashen remains of her body. But when I was asleep other possibilities, and other possible children, took the stage. For several years after Anna’s death, my nights were so troubled with dreams of pregnancy and childbirth that I often wrote them down. In one such dream, impatient to see the child, I scooped a baby boy out of my enormous belly and looked at him as if through a scrim of sheer stocking stretched taut. He was toddler-sized and fully dressed, in pale yellow suspender shorts and a white T-shirt. I decided to call him Andrew.
In another dream, a doctor told me I was carrying twin boys. In another, I was standing naked under an enormous sky, holding a newborn girl. The stars above were flickering in all colors, and I felt whole and at peace. In another, I was in a wide clearing, living outdoors without a tent. There I gave birth to three babies—two girls and a boy. They all died. I looked at them in their pine coffins and felt nothing, as if this were just what I expected to happen. Sometimes I dreamt about an infant that I’d lost or found. One night, I found an abandoned baby girl in an empty tenement building. Carrying her out of the building, I realized that two men were chasing me. Jake was there, and he quickly hammered slats of wood across a doorway as we escaped. Out on the street we caught a bus that took us to Canada, so that I could not be arrested for kidnapping.
In most of the baby dreams I was alone, which perhaps reflected the fact that Jake and I were sometimes living apart in the three years that followed my release from the hospital. After trying to stay together for a time, we separated for about a year. Then I moved back in to try again, and during that final period I became pregnant again and miscarried at eight weeks. The uncertain future of the marriage was captured in another vivid dream of that time: I was seated like the Mary of Michelangelo’s Pietà, looking down at Jake’s body lying across my arms. And I was sitting not on a chair but on a bicycle, moving slowly along the tree-lined sidewalk outside the office of Dr. Bennett, the psychiatrist I was briefly in treatment with before entering the hospital. The bicycle, like the tents and the camping gear of other dreams, seemed to represent our marriage. We did a fair amount of hiking and camping, and more often we covered miles and miles of hilly Vermont terrain on bicycles. As for the Pietà, it had been shipped from Rome for the World’s Fair in Queens, where I saw it with my family when I was eight. A replica occupied a place in my parents’ dining room cabinet. The dream is a bizarre tableau: a grieving mother named Mary seated on a bicycle, her husband lying dead in her arms instead of her child. Did Anna’s death foretell the death of my marriage? Ultimately, and in retrospect, it did.
The most vivid dream of all was one in which I was anxiously searching for my child, running along the corridor of a docked ocean liner and looking into the cabins. At last I found a familiar room with empty sleeping bags on the floor, but just then a ship’s horn sounded. I rushed back to the dock, where a smaller ship was just pulling away. On a bench on the top deck were three of my grandparents, the three who had died. On the lap of my father’s father sat Anna—a toddler with dark curly hair. She looked relaxed, and raised a chubby hand to wave at me. My grandfather had his familiar pipe clamped in his teeth. I stared in disbelief as the gangway was pulled back and the water widened between us. Too late. They were leaving me. But they seemed content, as if they looked forward to their journey and to being together.
Seeing Anna with my grandparents was consoling, even though I didn’t consciously believe, as my grandparents had, in heaven or an afterlife. But my dreams—unlike my secular, intellectual daytime consciousness—sometimes presented hopeful visions about what happens after death. My grandparents had crossed the Atlantic when they were young, and they were powerful presences in my life. The dream suggested that they were going to a place that, like the Greek underworld, was on the other side of a body of water that no one but the dead can cross. Anna was with them, and they were looking after her.
Clearly, my unconscious mind was working hard at producing its own consolation. It was telling me that Anna was cared for and loved, and that the departed members of my family were together. It wasn’t yet time for me to be with them, and I needed to get on with my task of living on this side of the sea that kept us apart. However far I felt from the Catholic faith, the image of an afterlife where we can be reunited with our beloved dead just stayed with me. Another potential consolation that people kept suggesting to me—having another child—was fraught with difficulty in my dreams and in reality alike.
There were good reasons that getting over this loss took a long time. Along with Anna, I’d lost the stability of mental health, and I feared the lonely and childless future I might be facing. I needed to accept her death and move on, but I also needed to distill some meaning from the experience. I wanted to turn what felt chaotic and random or, worse, like an intentional blow from some divine punisher, into a story I could accept. Amid so much uncertainty, psychotherapy offered a regular structure as well as reliable support in helping me to face my losses and look to the future.
TO SOME DEGREE the mourning process had begun in the hospital, where I was constantly being encouraged to talk about Anna’s death, as if talking were the best way to relieve myself of it. Everyone wanted me to let my despair and emptiness give way to the rage they were certain I was harboring. In the treatment plan for my first week of shock treatment, for instance, my psychiatrist listed two goals: “Patient will be less delusional,” and “Patient will be able to express angry feelings.” Dr. Waters was also interested in the anger I wasn’t expressing. I kept insisting that I didn’t feel angry—I felt empty. Though neither she nor Dr. Young ever said so, they were working from a Freudian principle. The ideas that the melancholic is full of rage, and that mourning should be an active and verbal process, come from “Mourning and Melancholia,” where Freud gave the work of mourning a name: Trauerarbeit, or grief work. In that essay, Freud proposed that people must, by juxtaposing memory after memory with their present situation, come to accept the reality that their loved one is truly gone. This process allows the grieving person to free up the libido, the part of the self that was so deeply invested in the attachment, so that eventually a new object of love or desire can be accepted as a substitute for the lost object. Other psychoanalytic theorists developed variations on this model, but all of them emphasized the necessity of working through the memories and hopes attached to the loved one, and particularly those that elicited negative emotions.
The principle that depression is anger turned inward is based on Freud’s theory of what happens to the psyche in melancholia. In Freud’s memorable phrase, “the shadow of the object has fallen upon the ego”: through an unconscious identification, the melancholic has taken the image of the lost person into herself. In this way, anger against the loved one is turned against the ego. Indeed, the lost person may not have died at all, but might be a lover or a parent who rejected or wounded the sufferer. The psychic wound may have occurred in the distant past, and may not even be consciously remembered. In both mourning and melancholia loss is experienced as injury, but the mourner will emerge from the grief work with the ego restored, and open to new relationships. While Freud acknowledged that melancholia has a physiological component, he saw it as a pathology to be addressed psychoanalytically: the treatment must help the patient uncover and let go of the buried, harmful attachment. In the years immediately after completing “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud conceptualized the superego, that internalized, punitive moral monitor, and it became clear to him that the overbearing superego was central to the melancholic’s suffering.
Many years later I learned that Freud was developing these theories just as the psychoanalytic movement he created was undergoing a painful schism. The Swiss branch, led by Carl Jung, was breaking away from Freud’s Viennese school. In early September of 1913, Freud traveled to Munich for the Fourth Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association, where Jung’s break with him was obvious. The Jungians sat apart from the Freudians, and Freud and Jung did not speak to each other that day, or ever again. The end of his fatherly relationship with Jung, whom he had called “my successor and crown prince,” occurred just as Freud was working out his ideas about the impact of loss upon the psyche.
There was one high point during Freud’s unhappy visit to Munich in 1913. Freud’s friend and disciple Lou Andreas-Salomé attended the conference and invited along her former lover, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Before he met Freud in Munich, Rilke had considered undergoing psychoanalysis but decided against it. Despite his often fragile mental state and perennial writer’s block, Rilke thought it best to continue on his own, for fear, he said, that if psychoanalysis caused his demons to leave him, his angels might leave too, and compromise his poetic gift. Valuing his literary vocation above all and hoping to resume work on his Duino Elegies, Rilke preferred not to illuminate the dark places of his psyche in case the process interfered with the unconscious sources of his writing. Andreas-Salomé declared the meeting between her two friends a success: “They liked each other, and we stayed together that evening until late at night.” What they talked about is known only because Freud alluded to his conversation with Rilke two years later in an essay called “On Transience,” which can be considered a companion piece to “Mourning and Melancholia.” Freud wrote this brief essay in 1915, when the war between Germany and the Allies made him continually anxious for news of his sons Martin and Ernst, who were serving at the front. Home and family, landscapes and cities, literature, libraries, civilization itself—all felt threatened and precious. The war made mourning a subject of personal and cultural urgency.
For the sake of the argument he wanted to make about transience and the sense of loss that attends it, Freud invented a new setting for his Munich conversation with Rilke, turning what had likely taken place in a city park into a summer walk in “a smiling countryside.” Freud refers to Rilke only as “a young but already famous poet,” who “admired the beauty of the scene around us but felt no joy in it. He was disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would vanish when winter came . . . All that he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom.”
Puzzled by the poet’s dejection, Freud saw his attitude as a “revolt . . . against mourning,” a generalized, anticipatory sorrow for all that would vanish, which reduced his ability to take pleasure in the present. Whatever it was that Rilke actually said—and judging from his letters, Rilke was quite depressed at the time—Freud introduced the poet’s feelings in order to contrast them with his own therapeutic views on mourning. For Freud, Rilke was fixated on loss, and therefore unable to contemplate future gratification. His example underscored for Freud how “libido clings to its objects and will not renounce those that are lost even when a substitute lies ready at hand. Such then is mourning.” The substitute that the poet refuses is the knowledge that the turning of the year will bring back the landscape’s beauties: in nature, at least, time provides compensation for what it steals from us.
But the argument is a puzzling one, for Freud never concedes that nature doesn’t provide an accurate analogy for human life and death. Nature’s losses are replenished in the springtime, as new generations of leaf and bud, flower and seed come into being. An individual human life comes into being only once. Freud’s theory of substitution justifies his analogy to some degree: before too long, another loved person may be found to fill the void left by the first. Today, this process of adaptation and the openness to new relationships might be called resilience, a word that has become a touchstone for psychological health. So the Freud of “On Transience” espoused the pragmatic response—resilience in the face of loss—while the despondent poet looks to our eyes more like a depressed person, for whom loss blocks the view of future pleasures.
In January of 1920, three years after “Mourning and Melancholia” appeared in print, Freud’s daughter Sophie Halberstadt fell victim to the worldwide influenza epidemic. The mother of two children and pregnant with a third, she died at twenty-six within days of becoming ill. He was relieved to be too deeply absorbed in work “to mourn my Sophie properly,” but “way deep down I sense the feeling of a deep narcissistic injury I shall not get over.” He wrote to his friend Sándor Ferenczi of the unexpectedness of this peacetime death: “For years I was prepared for the loss of my sons; now comes that of my daughter. Since I am the deepest of unbelievers, I have no one to accuse and know that there is no place where one can lodge an accusation.” To his son-in-law, Freud lamented the “senseless, brutal act of fate, which has robbed us of our Sophie. . . . One must bow one’s head under the blow, as a helpless, poor human being with whom higher powers are playing.”
As “the deepest of unbelievers,” did Freud really suspect that higher powers had robbed him and his son-in-law of their beloved Sophie? Perhaps the unexpected death of the young, those who are not supposed to die, calls up this primitive urge to blame the punitive tendencies of higher powers. In another letter he wrote, “Indeed, to outlive a child is not agreeable. Fate does not keep even to this order or precedence.” All of Freud’s letters in the aftermath of Sophie’s death suggest that he received the blow, whether from fate or, more simply, from the plague of infectious disease that the war left behind, with an unprecedented degree of bewilderment and sadness.
As early as 1913, in Totem and Taboo, Freud had defined the crucial role that mourning plays in the eventual recovery of the bereaved person: “Mourning has a quite precise psychical task to perform: its function is to detach the survivor’s memories and hopes from the dead.” In 1933, when the poet Hilda Doolittle was in analysis with Freud, she mentioned having been very ill during the influenza epidemic, and Freud replied that his favorite daughter had died of the contagion. He opened a locket on his watch chain to show Doolittle a portrait of Sophie. “She is here,” he said, as if the locket contained her actual presence. Like the letters he wrote in the wake of her death, the locket worn near his heart suggests that he was unwilling to detach himself from his bond with her.
Just three years after Sophie’s death, misfortune struck a double blow. Freud developed a progressive cancer of the mouth and underwent the first of many oral surgeries. Then, in June of 1923, Sophie’s four-year-old son, Heinele, died of tuberculosis. Freud, whom his biographer Peter Gay calls “the man without tears,” wept at the death of the beloved grandson he called mein Kind. At the time of Sophie’s death he had been more prepared for disaster, he later explained to a friend, because the war had increased his “resignation to fate.” But now he was profoundly unsettled as death stole a still younger child from him. “I am taking this loss so badly, I believe that I have never experienced anything harder. . . . Fundamentally everything has lost its value.” By July, he remarked on his “present distaste for life”: “I have never had a depression before, but this now must be one.” In August, he wrote to a friend that he was “obsessed by impotent longing for the dear child”; to another he said that the boy “meant the future to me and thus has taken the future away with him.” A depressed Freud proved unable to follow his own prescription for successful mourning; his increasing age, his illness, and the mounting weight of his losses made it impossible for him to recover his energies and optimism. After the death of Heinele, the aging Freud felt indifferent to his remaining grandchildren and lost his pleasure in life.
When the eight-year-old son of his friend Ludwig Binswanger died in 1926, Freud sent a letter of condolence in which he recalled the deaths of Sophie and Heinele: “Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.” Perhaps no substitute is possible for a child taken by death or for anyone truly beloved. Someone or something else may occupy the gap but the gap remains, in the shape of the absent one. Today, a large body of evidence shows that the death of a child makes mourning a difficult, prolonged, and possibly interminable project. We shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute, Freud writes, bereft of the optimism he espoused in “On Transience.” In the face of transience in its most painful manifestation, the death of children, Freud abandoned the principle that mourning frees us “to replace the lost objects by fresh ones equally or still more precious.” Ironically, a decade after meeting with Rilke, even as his theories were beginning to take hold and would powerfully influence psychiatric treatment in America and elsewhere, Freud had moved close to the poet’s mournful position, which he had argued against. But he didn’t revise his mourning theory, and his private reversal went unacknowledged in psychoanalytic practice, which would base its therapeutic model on Freud’s wartime essay, “Mourning and Melancholia.”
AND WHAT OF RILKE? He continued to work intermittently on the Duino Elegies begun in 1912, and completed the series a decade later. By then, he had increasingly resolved “to hold life open toward death.” The poems assume a continuity between life and death, which together are “a great Whole.” Instead of preserving a defensive boundary in the psyche between life and death, Rilke wanted to keep the door to the underworld open. In his perspective on death, Rilke sought what lies beyond material reality and rational perception. Death is the realm of the invisible, not an erasure but a metamorphosis.
What I found useful in reading Rilke’s elegies was the idea that the state of mourning is inevitable, given a human being’s finite life in time. Life and death are dual presences, equally valid and equally real. To a bereaved friend, Rilke suggested that mourning opens a path to a necessary kind of knowledge: “Our instinct should not be to desire consolation over a loss but rather to develop a deep and painful curiosity to explore this loss completely, to experience the peculiarity, the singularity, and the effects of particularly this loss in our life.”
As early as the first elegy, completed in 1912, Rilke referred to “those who died young” and insisted that grief is not a negative condition, because our unbroken connection with those who have died is elemental and necessary. “In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us,” he writes,
But we, who do need
such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often
the source of our spirit’s growth—: could we exist without them?
The ninth elegy includes a passage close to what Freud wrote in 1926 to Ludwig Binswanger upon the death of his son: because each person, each loss, is unique, there can be no substitute.
Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
The double mystery of our uniqueness and our transient passage on earth is one that Rilke felt restlessly compelled to pursue and, ultimately, to celebrate. Through the process of writing the elegies, Rilke could arrive at the statement “Being here is magnificent,” even as he approached his death from leukemia in 1926. He pushed his thinking about death right up against the edge of the knowable and the sayable. In doing so Rilke assured, as great poets do, his own immortality.
I’m drawn to Rilke’s conviction that the dead remain with us in some way; I’ve come to believe that. They are what Virginia Woolf called “invisible presences.” This might be seen as a defense against loss, but it’s also a bridge—one that does not depend upon belief in an afterlife—between the present, where the mourner is bereft, and the past, where the loved one was still alive. Writing about this many years later, I see that for a long time I couldn’t accept the fact that Anna was dead. I wanted to see her. I wanted her back.
This mode of thinking—which is essentially a refusal to mourn—isn’t so unusual. I’ve come across it in the work of many writers across long periods of time. Joan Didion, in her acutely observed memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, writes about her unspoken and perhaps unconscious agenda in the weeks and months following the sudden death of her husband John Gregory Dunne. After she had seen his ashes interred in the wall of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, after she had held a memorial service for him, led by an Episcopal priest and a Catholic priest, with hundreds of people in attendance, she acknowledges her disappointment at the outcome:
But I did the ritual. I did it all. . . . And it still didn’t bring him back.
“Bringing him back” had been through those months my hidden focus, a magic trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. “Seeing it clearly” did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he would need.
I understood Didion’s magical thinking very well: if wishing had the power to return the dead to life, her husband would be needing those clothes. After Anna’s death, Jake and I put away the tiny clothes, the unopened package of diapers, the quilt and crib bumpers and the little sweater I’d made. I assumed that they would all be put to use, and that the child who arrived to use them would be Anna, again.
Stories from the ancient past also bear witness to this refusal to accept death’s permanence. The poet Orpheus takes the extraordinary action of going to the underworld to beg for his wife, Eurydice, who dies of a snake bite on their wedding day. I remember crying when I first read this story as a child, in D’Aulaire’s book of Greek myths. Walking back, Orpheus turns to be sure she is following, although he has been ordered not to turn around until they reach the earth’s surface. He loses her at that moment. Hermes, walking alongside Eurydice, stops her. They turn and head back down the path. Rilke wrote a poem about this too.
NO CLASSICAL STORY felt more relevant to my own loss than that of the goddess Demeter and her efforts to get her daughter, Persephone, back from the world of the dead. It was recorded in an ancient poem called the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, with which I was unfamiliar until I taught it in a first-year literature course at a women’s college. At the time, I was still trying to understand why what had happened to Anna and to me had been so devastating. I was still having what are called anniversary reactions, feeling sadness and anxiety increase in the darkening days of December, around the time of her death. The anonymous Hymn is the literary remnant of a secretive religion called the Eleusinian Mysteries, which for centuries provided solace to people who sought consolation in the face of their mortality.
Composed by an unknown writer of the Homeric school in the early sixth century B.C.E., the hymn was sung at religious festivals in honor of Demeter, the goddess of grain. It conveys with great power the effect on a mother of having her child stolen by death, while speaking directly to the issues of transience, loss, and mourning that preoccupied Freud much later. The story is familiar in its general outlines: Hades comes up to Olympus from the underworld with a proposal for his brother Zeus. He wants to take Zeus’s daughter Persephone as his wife and queen. Zeus is troubled by Hades’s request, knowing that Demeter will never agree to give her daughter to the god of death. So the brothers agree on a kidnapping, to be carried out without Demeter’s knowledge. Playing in a meadow of flowers with her girlfriends, Persephone reaches for an extraordinary flower, a hundred-blossomed narcissus that Gaia, the earth, has placed there as a lure. At the moment Persephone plucks it, Hades’s chariot emerges from a chasm in the earth, he grabs the girl, and the chariot disappears underground again.
Because the bond connecting this mother and daughter is symbiotic, the moment of the kidnapping doesn’t go unnoticed by Demeter. On Olympus, the home of the gods, she thinks she has heard Persephone scream. Distraught and tearing her hair she descends to earth, searching for nine days until she learns from Hecate, the moon, that Hades has stolen her daughter. She refuses to return to Olympus and, disguising herself as an old woman, she mingles with the women of Eleusis, where she becomes a nursemaid to the king’s infant son. At night, Demeter secretly tries to make the baby immortal by dipping him in fire. Discovered in this act by the child’s terrified mother, Demeter reveals herself in all her divine beauty and scolds the mother for her stupidity, for she has ruined her son’s chance of living forever.
In her withdrawal from Olympus, Demeter has allowed the grain to die. When all of the crops on earth wither away and mortals are threatened with famine, Zeus sends Hermes to the underworld to bring Persephone back to her mother. Demeter is overjoyed—until she learns that Persephone has eaten some pomegranate seeds that Hades offered her. Because she has accepted food from her host, Persephone is bound to return. She will spend a third of the year there as Hades’s queen, and two-thirds of the year with her mother. On the surface, the story is a simple nature allegory: Persephone, whose name means spring, is a girl with a flower’s beauty. Demeter is the life-giving mother, identified with ears of corn and sheaves of grain. In the underworld, Persephone eats of the pomegranate, a fruit filled with seeds. In its metaphors as well as its settings, the Hymn aligns flower, fruit, and seed with the female reproductive cycle and also inevitably with death. The seed falls to earth. The cycle begins again. The Greek called their dead demetrioi, Demeter’s people, and sowed grain on their graves.
I soon discovered that many contemporary poets had returned to the Demeter-Persephone story, and these recent versions worked well side by side with the ancient one. Eavan Boland’s poem “The Pomegranate” focuses on the way that a woman can enter the story of Demeter and Persephone from either perspective: as a mother or as a daughter. Her poem expresses the anxiety that a mother feels for her daughter each time she leaves the house, each time she is ill or hungry. That protective impulse is at odds with the knowledge that the daughter must grow up and enter into her own sexual maturity; the cycle must begin again. Louise Glück’s engagement with the myth can be seen in her collection Averno, and in her early poem “Pomegranate,” where she portrays Hades as the seductive young man for whom a young woman feels a powerful erotic attraction, in direct opposition to her mother’s wishes for her. I was aware, teaching the Hymn alongside these contemporary responses to the myth, that my students were at the point in their lives when they had just separated from their mothers’ protection and were free to experiment, to rebel, and to be wounded.
How odd it was, I thought, that this poem was on the required syllabus because my students were all women, and yet it was in tension with the feminist principle that women’s roles should not be bound by their bodies’ reproductive capacity. The Hymn, and the whole basis of the bond between Persephone and Demeter, was about the uniquely female role of childbearing that mothers and daughters could share. For me, the poem crystallized the realization that childbearing meant moving forward in the line of the generations: Giving birth to Anna, I had become a mother as well as a daughter: I was one generation closer to my own death. Generation, in both senses, only happens in time, and time is the medium of mortality.
But in myth there is no time, and the two millennia that stood between the composition of the Hymn and my own first reading of it at a desk that looked out on brick walls and the tarred rooftops of an urban scene didn’t matter at all. I identified with Demeter’s determination to get her daughter back. Like Orpheus, she refuses to accept that the underworld is a place of no return. Demeter manages it successfully only because she is a goddess, and as powerful as her brothers. In her rage and withdrawal from her life-giving role, she forces Zeus and Hades to compromise.
At first, in her effort to make the human child immortal by dipping him in fire, she seems to be trying to replace her lost daughter with a substitute. According to Freud’s model of mourning, this would be a positive and adaptive use of her energies. (It’s likely that this aspect of the story alludes to the promise of a better afterlife that the Eleusinian Mysteries held out to initiates.) So too, the flower and seed analogy of the female reproductive cycle, represented by Persephone and her mother, provides another model of life, death, and the substitution for loss by the coming generations. In these ways, the story supports Freud’s optimistic vision of transience by offering both the return of the beloved and the substitution for loss that he argued for in “On Transience,” with nature’s promise that spring will arrive.
That promise was especially meaningful to me because I was finding winters so hard to get through. It was as if my body remembered the trauma of the long winter that began with Anna’s birth and ended with my arrival at the psychiatric hospital. Anxious for spring to come, I would go for walks in early March to see whether any shoots of crocuses or daffodils might be pushing up through dead leaves. When Jake and I were still together, each spring I would cut some lily of the valley, which grew under the eaves of the house, to bring inside. These fragrant white bells, arrayed along narrow stems and sheathed in bright green leaves, brought Anna’s delicate newness to mind. It was a way of summoning her, if only by association. It was the best I could do, because unlike Persephone, Anna did not come back.
AFTER TWO SEPARATIONS, two reunions, and a brief pregnancy that ended in miscarriage, Jake and I had decided to divorce. By then nearly five years had passed since Anna’s death. All that time, the container that held her ashes sat quietly in the bottom drawer of his bedroom dresser. Now that we would be apart, what should we do with her remains?
The summer after I moved out, I spent a few weeks in Vermont near where we had gone to college. It was a familiar and beautiful landscape, where after a blizzard one winter we had spent several sunny days skiing in the woods. In bright meadows, red-twig dogwoods glittered with ice. In the pine plantations, branches sprang upward as we passed, shedding their load of snow. Off to the side of one trail was a falling-down cabin with a swaybacked roof and a missing wall. Inside there was a wooden bed, painted blue. When I was in college, such nostalgic ruins appealed to a strong domestic instinct: I wanted to rescue old houses, cut back the saplings crowding the doorways, transplant the lilacs that had taken root in cellar holes.
Now that the marriage had ended, it made sense to find a home for Anna in the landscape where Jake and I had first been together. Old graveyards are a common feature in Vermont, sometimes found on remote backroads. Some were family plots or the burying ground of small settlements now abandoned, with trees and long grass growing up among the graves. Years earlier, out walking on a narrow dirt road a few miles from our house, we had come across a tiny plot with graves belonging to a single family. The deaths of five unnamed children were indicated only by a single word repeated on small bumps of granite: “Infant.” There was a full-sized stone for a daughter who died at eighteen. Beside her were her mother and father who, unless others had survived and were buried elsewhere, appeared to have outlived all their children. There was no shortage of grief in these old cemeteries, where carved slate or granite headstones tell the tale in names and dates. The name of this family, uncannily enough, was Child. Jake and I had stood stunned before this tableau of misfortune, unaware that our own misfortune lay ahead of us.
The cemetery I returned to in the summer of my divorce was the resting place of people who had lived and died, for the most part, in the nineteenth century. The headstones were loosely laid out beneath the wide branches of some old maple trees, and someone had hung a small chime that faintly registered passing breezes. Beyond the adjoining field the river rushed downhill in its rocky bed; it too could be heard faintly. Walking among the headstones, I noticed that many of the parents buried there had outlived their children. In one family plot a stone marked the grave of a child named Abby who died in September of 1853, “Age 11 months 11 days.” A brief verse on her stone began, “But again we hope to meet thee.” In another plot a pair of stones touched side by side on a single plinth, marking the graves of twin boys Bertie (“Age 10 months, 11 days”) and Allie (“Age 10 months, 20 days”) who died in April of 1876. The precise counting of days struck the note of anguish. On an engraved family monument, I read of the loss of two sons within six months in 1894. At nineteen, one son was “killed by an overturning load of lumber.” The other was sixteen when he died on the Fourth of July, “killed by the explosion of a cannon.” Such gravestones were eloquent in their brief notations, and told of how many families in a small place were struck by the death of their young, which in our own time happens far less often. That this quiet roadside graveyard was a place of shared misfortune was moving and also strangely comforting.
I proposed to Jake that we bury Anna’s ashes in this place, and he agreed. It was unlikely that either of us would ever live nearby, but it felt like the right choice. When I inquired about buying a plot, I learned that the town was now burying its dead in a newer and much larger cemetery. The town clerk told me they couldn’t locate the site plan for the old cemetery, which was unofficially closed to new burials. But he felt certain that no one was buried along the edges or where the turnoff from the road was. He allowed me to buy a plot along one side, and I was grateful.
In a nearby town, I visited a stone yard and purchased a small, slanted granite marker. Below Anna’s name and the dates of her birth and death, I wanted to include a line of poetry that would distill the experience of losing her. For a long time I’d known that the poem would be T. S. Eliot’s “Marina.” Simpler than choosing a single line would have been to have the entire poem carved onto the stone—but that was of course impossible. The line on the stone somehow had to gesture toward the whole poem while managing to express something, however concisely, itself.
“Marina” wasn’t among the Eliot poems I’d been assigned in college. My boss, the editor of our publishing house’s highly esteemed poetry list, often browsed at the nearby used book stores Gotham and Argosy, and one day he’d brought me an early edition of Eliot’s complete poems and plays. I opened that volume after I’d returned to work, when I was terribly depressed and anxious, trying to fend off suicidal ruminations, returning to “Four Quartets” and “Ash Wednesday.” When I first read “Marina,” I was struck by its rhythmic music. It begins with halting, bewildered questioning, moves through verses ending insistently with the words “Death” and “my daughter,” and arrives, after its passage through loss and grief and memory, at consolation.
“Marina” is a powerful poem even when a reader has no idea that it’s named for the king’s daughter in Shakespeare’s late romance Pericles. I first read it without knowing anything about the strange play it’s based on. By the time I returned to it I was in graduate school and had read the play, which centers on Pericles, a young Greek king who suffers a series of misfortunes. In the midst of a raging storm at sea, his wife, Thaisa, dies (or so it appears) just after giving birth to a daughter, Marina. At the sailors’ insistence that the body is bringing bad luck to the ship, Pericles allows his wife’s coffin to be pushed overboard. Unable to care for his infant daughter, he leaves her in the care of friends and returns to his kingdom, where he learns some years later that she has been murdered. He doesn’t know that his daughter is still alive, or that his wife’s coffin washed ashore and that she was revived. The play ends with the three restored to each other. Fortune and misfortune move events in this play with no relation to anyone’s deserving or willed actions.
Eliot’s poem is based on the climactic moment of the play, when Pericles, mute and withdrawn, having lost all interest in life, gradually realizes that he is in the presence of the daughter he has long thought dead. It opens with the king’s disoriented questions and with sensory associations awakening his memory. Bewilderment continues as the vision becomes more than memory: an apparition has materialized before his eyes, and with a halting set of statements, he recognizes the young woman as his own child:
I made this, I have forgotten,
and remember.
. . .
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.
“Marina” spoke powerfully to my helpless wish that my own child might be restored—or that in the absence of that miraculous event, at least another, different child might one day be given to me. But which single line could I put on the stone that would gesture toward the poem as a whole? I wanted to use the final three lines:
What seas what shores what granite islands toward my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.
But those three lines wouldn’t fit on Anna’s small gravestone. I chose instead the final line from the movement where Pericles recognizes that Marina is the future he would give up his own life for: believed dead, she has returned to life. She is
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
These nine words encapsulate the hope and the wish that the play fulfills: that lost children can return. For me, now divorced and moving into an uncertain future in which I might well remain childless, it also expressed the irony that my hope was suspended; my new ships were not arriving, not yet.
My parents came up to Vermont and we held a little impromptu ceremony before the newly carved stone that had been set in place. I read “Marina,” and then I read a letter I had written to Anna the night before, addressing her as a child now five years gone. I told her how I looked for her still, in the children who had come into the family since her death. I could imagine her there, playing with my nieces who were roughly the age she would have been. The letter ended,
Since we could give you nothing but a name, this place and this stone will preserve your name. This piece of granite proves that you were with us, and that you fought your brief struggle for life. “When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers,” the poet Milosz wrote, and it seems fitting to place you near the banks of a river, where birds will sing, ferns and wildflowers will push themselves up in the spring, red and gold maple leaves will flame above and drift down to cover you, where deep snow will blanket you on winter nights. The grace of this place, this distance in time, have brought me closer to accepting what happened to you, what happened to me. Perhaps we who lost you are now as healed as we’ll ever be, and so we leave you here in peace.
After that I knelt and dug a hole perhaps six inches deep in front of the stone. I pried off the top of the can holding the ashes and tipped the contents into the hole, then reached in and loosened with my fingers the gritty remains that clung to the bottom. I rapped the bottom of the can to release the fine ash. No shimmering of the air, no ghostly blurring escaped from the can. It was a purely material substance: here was the last of her unique embodied life, now mingling with the soil of this particular, beloved place. By our presence there we were insisting on giving a home to Anna’s spirit. Then with a trowel I filled in soil on top of the ashes and smoothed it level again. And we left her there, with the trees and the sky, and the river and the birdsong.