Time doesn’t heal. It’s what you do with the time. Healing is possible when we choose to take responsibility, when we choose to take risks, and finally, when we choose to release the wound, to let go of the past or the grief.
Two days before his sixteenth birthday, Renée’s son Jeremy came into the den where she and her husband were watching the ten o’clock news. In the flickering lights from the TV, his dark face looked troubled. Renée was about to reach for her son, wrap him up in the cuddly kind of hug that he would still consent to on occasion, when the phone rang. It was her sister in Chicago, who was going through a bad divorce and often called late at night. “I’ve got to take this,” Renée said. She gave her son’s cheek a quick pat and turned her attention to her distressed sister. Jeremy muttered a good night and headed toward the stairs. “Sweet dreams, baby,” she called to his retreating back.
The next morning, Jeremy wasn’t up by the time she was putting breakfast on the table. She called up the stairs to her son but got no response. She buttered the last piece of toast and went up to knock on his bedroom door. Still he didn’t answer. Exasperated, she opened his door. The room was dark, the blinds still closed. She called to him again, confused to find that his bed was already made. A sixth sense drove her toward the closet door. She opened it, a gust of cold dread at her back. Jeremy’s body hung from the wooden rod, a belt around his neck.
On his desk she found a note: It’s not you, it’s me. Sorry to disappoint you. —J
When Renée and her husband, Greg, first came to see me, Jeremy had been dead for only a few weeks. The loss of him was so fresh that they weren’t grieving yet. They were in shock. The person they had buried wasn’t gone to them. It felt as though they had put him in the ground alive.
During those early visits, Renée sat and sobbed. “I want to turn back the clock!” she cried. “I want to go back, go back.” Greg cried too, but quietly. Often he would look out the window while Renée wept. I told them that men and women often grieve differently, and that the death of a child could be a rift or an opportunity in their marriage. I urged them to take good care of themselves, to let themselves rage and weep, to kick and cry and scream and get the feelings out so that they didn’t make Jeremy’s sister, Jasmine, pick up the tab for their grief. I invited them to bring in pictures of Jeremy so that we could celebrate his sixteen years of life, the sixteen years his spirit had resided with them. I gave them resources on support groups for survivors of suicide. And I worked with them as the what-if questions rose up like a tidal wave. What if I’d been paying more attention? What if I hadn’t answered the phone that night, if I’d given him that huge hug? What if I’d worked less and been at home more? What if I hadn’t believed the myth that white kids are the only ones who commit suicide? What if I’d been on the lookout for signs? What if I’d put less pressure on him to perform in school? What if I’d checked in on him before I went to bed? All the what-ifs reverberated, an unanswerable echo: Why?
We want so much to understand the truth. We want to be accountable for our mistakes, honest about our lives. We want reasons, explanations. We want our lives to make sense. But to ask why? is to stay in the past, to keep company with our guilt and regret. We can’t control other people, and we can’t control the past.
At some point during their first year of loss, Renée and Greg came to see me less and less frequently, and after a while their visits tapered off altogether. I didn’t hear from them for many months. The spring that Jeremy would have graduated from high school, I was happy and surprised to get a call from Greg. He told me he was worried about Renée and asked if they could come in.
I was struck by the changes in their appearance. They had both aged, but in different ways. Greg had put on weight. His black hair was flecked with silver. Renée didn’t look run-down, as Greg’s concern for her had led me to believe she might. Her face was smooth, her blouse crisp, her hair freshly straightened. She smiled. She made pleasantries. She said she felt well. But her brown eyes held no light.
Greg, who had so often been silent in their sessions, spoke now, with urgency. “I have something to say,” he said. He told me that the previous weekend he and Renée had attended a high school graduation party for their friend’s son. It was a fraught event for them, full of land mines, devastating reminders of what the other couples had that they didn’t have, of Jeremy’s absence, of the seeming eternity of grief, every day a new host of moments that they would never experience with their son. But they forced themselves into nice clothes and went to the party. At some point during the evening, Greg told me, he realized that he was having a good time. The music the DJ played made him think of Jeremy, and the old R&B albums his son had taken an interest in, playing them on the stereo in his room when he did homework or hung out with friends. Greg turned to Renée in her elegant blue dress and was struck by how clearly he could see Jeremy in the slope of her cheeks, the shape of her mouth. He felt swept away by love—for Renée, for their son, for the simple pleasure of eating good food under a white tent on a warm evening. He asked Renée to dance. She refused, got up, and left him alone at the table.
Greg cried as he recounted this. “I’m losing you too,” he said to his wife.
Renée’s face darkened, her eyes looked blacked out. We waited for her to speak.
“How dare you,” she finally said. “Jeremy doesn’t get to dance. Why should you? I can’t turn my back on him so easily.”
Her tone was hostile. Venomous. I expected Greg to wince. He shrugged instead. I realized this wasn’t the first time that Renée had perceived his experience of happiness as a desecration of their son’s memory. I thought of my mother. Of all the times I had seen my father try to nuzzle her, kiss her, and how she would rebuff his affection. She was so stuck in the early loss of her own mother that she hid herself in a shroud of melancholy. Her eyes would sometimes light up when she heard Klara play the violin. But she never gave herself permission to laugh from the belly, to flirt, to joke, to rejoice.
“Renée, honey,” I said. “Who’s dead? Jeremy? Or you?”
She didn’t answer me.
“It doesn’t do Jeremy any good if you become dead too,” I told Renée. “It doesn’t do you any good either.”
Renée wasn’t in hiding from her pain, as I had once been. She had made it her husband. In marrying herself to her loss, she was in hiding from her life.
I asked her to tell me how much space she was allowing for grief in her daily life.
“Greg goes to work. I go to the cemetery,” she said.
“How often?”
She looked insulted by my question.
“She goes every day,” Greg said.
“And that’s a bad thing?” Renée snapped. “To be devoted to my son?”
“Mourning is important,” I said. “But when it goes on and on, it can be a way of avoiding grief.” Mourning rites and rituals can be an extremely important component of grief work. I think that’s why religious and cultural practices include clear mourning rituals—there’s a protected space and structure within which to begin to experience the feelings of loss. But the mourning period also has a clear end. From that point on, the loss isn’t a separate dimension of life—the loss is integrated into life. If we stay in a state of perpetual mourning, we are choosing a victim’s mentality, believing I’m never going to get over it. If we stay stuck in mourning, it is as though our lives are over too. Renée’s mourning, though it was painful, had also become a kind of shield, something that fenced her off from her present life. In the rituals of her loss she could protect herself from having to accept it. “Are you spending more time and emotional energy with the son who is dead, or with the daughter who is alive?” I asked.
Renée looked troubled. “I’m a good mother,” she said, “but I’m not going to pretend I’m not in pain.”
“You don’t have to pretend anything. But you are the only person who can stop your husband and your daughter from losing you too.” I remembered my mother talking to her mother’s picture above the piano, crying, “My God, my God, give me strength.” Her wailing frightened me. Her fixation on her loss was like a trapdoor she would lift and fall through, an escape. I was like the child of an alcoholic, on guard against her disappearance, unable to rescue her from the void but feeling that it was somehow my job.
“I used to think that if I let grief in, I would drown,” I told Renée. “But it’s like Moses and the Red Sea. Somehow the waters part. You walk through them.”
I asked Renée to try something new to shift her mourning into grief. “Put a picture of Jeremy in the living room. Don’t go to the cemetery to mourn his loss. Find a way to connect with him right there in your house. Set aside fifteen or twenty minutes every day to sit with him. You can touch his face, tell him what you’re doing. Talk to him. And then give him a kiss and go on about your day.”
“I’m so scared of abandoning him again.”
“He didn’t kill himself because of you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“There are an infinite number of things you could have done differently in your life. Those choices are done, the past is gone, nothing can change that. For reasons we will never know, Jeremy chose to end his life. You don’t get to choose for him.”
“I don’t know how to live with that.”
“Acceptance isn’t going to happen overnight. And you’re never going to be glad that he’s dead. But you get to choose a way forward. You get to discover that living a full life is the best way to honor him.”
Last year I received a Christmas card from Renée and Greg. It shows them standing by the Christmas tree with their daughter, a beautiful girl in a red dress. Greg embraces his daughter in one arm, his wife in the other. Over Renée’s shoulder, a picture of Jeremy sits on the mantel. It’s his last school picture, he wears a blue shirt, his smile larger than life. He isn’t the void in the family. He isn’t the shrine. He is present, he is always with them.
* * *
My mother’s mother’s portrait now lives in Magda’s house in Baltimore, above her piano, where she still gives lessons, where she guides her students with logic and heart. When Magda had surgery recently, she asked her daughter, Ilona, to bring our mother’s picture to the hospital so that Magda could do what our mother taught us: to call on the dead for strength, to let the dead live on in our hearts, to let our suffering and our fear lead us back to our love.
“Do you still have nightmares?” I asked Magda the other day.
“Yes. Always. Don’t you?”
“Yes,” I told my sister. “I do.”
I went back to Auschwitz and released the past, forgave myself. I went home and thought, “I’m done!” But closure is temporary. It’s not over till it’s over.
Despite—no, because of—our past, Magda and I have found meaning and purpose in different ways in the more than seventy years since liberation. I have discovered the healing arts. Magda has remained a devoted pianist and piano teacher, and she has discovered new passions: bridge and gospel music. Gospel, because it sounds like crying—it is the strength of all the emotion let out. And bridge, because there’s strategy and control—a way to win. She is a reigning bridge champion; she hangs her framed awards on the wall in her house opposite our grandmother’s portrait.
Both of my sisters have protected and inspired me, have taught me to survive. Klara became a violinist in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Until the day she died—in her early eighties, of Alzheimer’s—she called me “little one.” More so than Magda or I did, Klara remained immersed in Jewish Hungarian immigrant culture. Béla and I loved to visit her and Csicsi, to enjoy the food, the language, the culture of our youth. We weren’t able to be together, all of us survivors, very often, but we did our best to gather up for major events—more celebrations our parents would not be present to witness. In the early 1980s, we met in Sydney for Klara’s daughter’s wedding. The three of us sisters had awaited this reunion with happy anticipation, and when we were finally together again, we went into a frenzy of embraces as emotional as the ones we shared in Košice when we found one another alive after the war.
No matter that we were now middle-aged women, no matter how far we had come in our lives, once in one another’s company it was funny how quickly we fell into the old patterns of our youth. Klara was in the spotlight, bossing us around, smothering us with attention; Magda was competitive and rebellious; I was the peacemaker, hustling between my sisters, soothing their conflicts, hiding my own thoughts. How easily we can make even the warmth and safety of family into a kind of prison. We rely on our old coping mechanisms. We become the person we think we need to be to please others. It takes willpower and choice not to step back into the confining roles we mistakenly believe will keep us safe and protected.
The night before the wedding, Magda and I came upon Klara alone in her daughter’s childhood bedroom, playing with her daughter’s old dolls. What we witnessed was more than a mother’s nostalgia over her grown child. Klara was caught up in her make-believe game. She was playing as a child would. My sister had never had a childhood, I realized. She was always the violin prodigy. She never got to be a little girl. When she wasn’t performing onstage, she performed for me and Magda, becoming our caretaker, our little mother. Now, as a middle-aged woman, she was trying to give herself the childhood she had never been allowed. Embarrassed to have been discovered with the dolls, Klara lashed out at us. “It’s too bad I wasn’t at Auschwitz,” she said. “If I’d been there, our mother would have lived.”
It was terrible to hear her say it. I felt all my old survivor’s guilt rushing back, the horror of the word I spoke that first day of Auschwitz, the horror of remembering it, of confronting that old, long-buried belief, however erroneous, that I had sent our mother to her death.
But I wasn’t a prisoner anymore. I could see my sister’s prison at work, hear her guilt and grief clawing through the blame she threw at me and Magda. And I could choose my own freedom. I could name my own feelings, of rage, worthlessness, sorrow, regret, I could let them swirl, let them rise and fall, let them pass. And I could risk letting go of the need to punish myself for having lived. I could release my guilt and reclaim my whole pure self.
There is the wound. And there is what comes out of it. I went back to Auschwitz searching for the feel of death so that I could finally exorcise it. What I found was my inner truth, the self I wanted to reclaim, my strength and my innocence.