Safely & Securely Held & Soothed
. . . Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! It is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
SONNET 116
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
I remember the exact moment when it first dawned on me that she was one of my best friends.
I was twenty-six. Not long out of college. A kid, really. She was seventy-eight.
It was late summer. The leaves in upstate New York had already begun to turn pale orange. It was a dry, clear day, and the sun shone pleasing and full. Forty years later I can still remember what she wore: a light grey linen suit from Bergdorf, with a bird’s egg blue silk blouse and pearls (always the pearls). Stockings. Black heels. Her hair was that vaguely blue color I then associated with older women. Blue, yes, but impeccably done. Recently coiffed, I’m sure, by the girls at Bette’s beauty salon down on Main Street.
We had driven her steamship of an ancient Buick out into the countryside near the little town of Phelps—her home—and were headed toward a two-hundred-year-old now largely lost-in-the-undergrowth cemetery. She was the only one alive who could still remember the exact location of the burial site of Lodowick VanDemark—her great-great-great-grandfather—who had died in 1868, at ninety, apparently of nothing more than old age. She was going to show me this damned cemetery if it was the last thing she did.
“You need to know where this is, Stephen,” she said with some urgency. “In case something happens to me.”
(Honestly, it had never really occurred to me that “something” would happen to her. What could happen?)
We’d parked the car a half a mile back. It was tougher going than I had imagined; the yellow forest was dense, dry, and crisscrossed everywhere with thick vines. For the final hundred yards, we found ourselves bushwhacking like any two bearded woodsmen, stepping over felled trees, ducking under branches. She carried a black alligator handbag the entire way, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
This was my grandmother: Armeda VanDemark Crothers.
Eventually we found the little gathering of ten or twelve pocked and crooked gravestones, which had been all but lost in a cyclone of vines. (I had not doubted for an instant that we would find them, by the way: Grandma knew this terrain like the farmer’s daughter she was.)
We had to enter the burying ground through an ornate, rusted gate, part of a wrought-iron fence that was clearly a Victorian addition to a much older graveyard. A twelve-foot granite obelisk in the center of the cemetery was almost completely covered in vines. We tore the vines away to reveal names and dates, and there he was: Lodowick VanDemark. “Born 1778. Departed this life 1868.” Grandma let out a small sigh of satisfaction and stepped back to take in the full picture. We poked around. She began to point out names. Here was his wife, Jane. Here were sons. Here, a daughter who had died in childbirth. Grandma’s forebears all.
After a satisfying inspection of the site—and a little more vine clearing—I pulled an old bedsheet out of my backpack and laid it on the rough side of a felled oak at the perimeter of the cemetery. We sat for a while and munched on the two turkey sandwiches Grandma had made earlier. The sandwiches are etched in memory. They were so her: Carefully cut on the diagonal. Pepperidge Farm bread—her trademark. (A small luxury.) All wrapped in wax paper.
We talked. She told me stories of the VanDemark clan.
I remember the blue of her eyes, and how they looked directly into mine. I remember her chiseled, deeply wrinkled and handsome face; her long, elegant fingers mottled with shade and light; the lively and interesting flow of her talk; the almost girlish delight she took in the adventure of the day.
She’d torn her stockings almost to shreds. We laughed.
Later that night as I climbed into bed, I thought about our trek. I wondered: Do other guys do this kind of stuff with their grandmothers?
2
It is in the nature of our earliest “containers” that we do not understand their true import until much later in life. They are the water in which we swim. We no more see their full meaning to us than we see the air we breathe.
When my grandmother died, not too many years after the cemetery trek, my twin sister, Sandy, and I stood in the living room of her big Victorian home and sobbed aloud for most of a day. We held each other, Sandy and I did, and wailed as hard as any ancient Greek widow, shrouded in black. (I believe if we’d thought of it several days later, at her burial, we might have thrown ourselves into her grave as those ancient widows did. It would have been the emotionally correct thing to do. But then, we were Presbyterians.)
In the psychological language I now speak, I will tell you that Armeda VanDemark Crothers was the source of my most secure childhood attachment. Only now, fifty years later, do I begin to peer over the edge of the mystery. My friend Brian says he woke up one day and realized he would take a bullet for his then-five-year-old son, Keane. I would have taken a bullet for Armeda VanDemark Crothers. To this day I call upon her memory, especially in times of stress or sadness. I smell her perfume. I see her long, elegant fingers in old age, crisscrossed with blue veins, resting on my own young hands. I feel myself lean in to her soft body. More than once when pushed to the edge, I’ve curled up on my bed and imagined myself held again in her thin, strong arms.
The Buddha said that the debt of gratitude we owe to our parents (and by extension, to our grandparents) is so great that we could carry them on our backs for our entire lives and yet still never fully repay it.
Yes.
3
This is a book about human connection. And the drama of human connection begins, of course, in the womb—and in our earliest interactions with caretakers. The Western psychological tradition has examined these interactions carefully—scientifically—and has developed a great deal of observation and theorizing about what it calls the phenomenon of “early attachment.” This makes for fascinating reading.
What have we learned?
Well, Sigmund Freud—in so many ways the father of contemporary Western psychologizing—saw “attachment” as nothing more than a natural expression of the baby’s instinct to seek pleasure. Or, as he said, “gratification.” He viewed the baby in its essential nature as a “pleasure seeking” little being—all sucking and licking and eating and reaching. “Love objects,” then (or the objects of all this pleasure-seeking—usually Mom, of course) are to be used for the infant’s pleasure-seeking. Is that right? Quite right, according to Dr. Freud.
Hmm. Look closely, and you’ll see that a problem arises with this early view, a problem so obvious that you’ll wonder how Freud missed it: If our attachment to what Freud called “love objects” is all about pleasure, then how do we explain the fact that throughout life—even in life’s first precarious months—we can and most certainly do get deeply, hopelessly attached to “love objects” that give us nothing but pain? Have you noticed?
The twentieth-century English psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn had a more persuasive view of early attachment. The baby, he said, is not really at her core a pleasure seeking being. She is “object seeking.”
Object-seeking? What does that mean? It means that from our earliest moments, we little sucking, grasping beings are on the hunt not just for pleasure, but for objects of attachment. We are on the hunt for people to cling to. For people to know and to be known by. For people, like my grandmother, into whose blue eyes we can gaze. The fundamental motivation of our yearning is not gratification or pleasure per se but for connection with others. And let’s be clear: I mean connection with others as an end in itself.
Only connect! Yes! The baby is hardwired to connect. Indeed, the baby is so hardwired for connection that she will connect with—or “attach to”—just about any caretaker who is within arm’s reach. We are told by experts, in fact, that nearly all infants attach to their primary caretaker—however woeful said caretaker may be.
In his breathtaking movie Cast Away, American actor Tom Hanks famously attached to the volleyball with whom he was stranded on a desert island. If you haven’t seen the movie, a connection between a man and a volleyball may sound far-fetched. But if you have seen it, I’m guessing you’ll agree with me that the relationship between Hanks and “Wilson” was not only credible, it was incredibly moving.
And what “pleasure” did the volleyball bring to Hank’s character? The pleasure of connection itself—even fantasied connection.
English psychologist John Bowlby, a generation younger than Dr. Fairbairn, expanded further upon Fairbairn’s view. Bowlby asserted that there is an “attachment system” that is hardwired into the brain and nervous system. For Bowlby, the drama of attachment is all about survival—the survival of the very species, and therefore necessarily the survival and procreative success of the individual. (In many ways, Bowlby thought more like Darwin than like Freud.) The attachment system, he asserts, is the primary system given to us by millions of years of evolution to assure our survival and thriving.
And what does this attachment system do? Something very interesting: The attachment system motivates an infant above all to seek proximity. To seek proximity to parents and to other primary caregivers, and to establish bonds and communication with them. Proximity, we are told, “improves the infants’ chance of survival.” (An understatement, I should think.) Proximity, says one psychologist, protects the infant from “harm, starvation, unfavorable temperature changes, disasters, attacks from others, and separation from the group.”
But safety is only the merest beginning. The parent also provides soothing. When the parent is emotionally sensitive to the child’s signals, he amplifies the child’s positive emotional states and modulates the negative. The baby is soothed and calmed. The baby feels secure. Then, within the context of this secure container, the baby grows and develops. Our very brains and nervous systems grow and thrive, but only in the context of this safe and soothing dyadic relationship. Within this two-person crucible, there is a constant interchange of what American neuroscientist Daniel Siegel describes as “energy and information.” Energy and information! Our brains, nervous systems, and very selves are the product of this fecund and vital collaboration. From the get-go, we are contingent beings—beings who depend upon one another in the most profound way.
When the mother or other caretaker is “good enough,” asserts another English psychoanalytic thinker, Donald W. Winnicott, she provides the ideal environment for the development of the child. (Good enough, mind you. Not perfect.) The good-enough parent becomes a secure base from which the child can begin to explore himself and the world. Secure attachment to the primary caregiver, Dr. Siegel tells us, “establishes an interpersonal relationship that helps the immature brain use the mature functions of the parent’s brain to organize its own processes.”
Then, crucially, for better or for worse, these early experiences of attachment become the template for our ongoing connections. Repeated early experiences of attachment become encoded in memory as expectations, and then as “hardwired” mental models of attachment. Clearly, then, they have fateful consequences for each of us. They are strongly encoded patterns, yes—as we will see in detail in the coming pages and chapters—but they are not necessarily prisons, as we shall also see. (And this is very good news.)
4
As I have said, Armeda VanDemark Crothers, my maternal grandmother, was the source of my most secure and unambivalent childhood attachment. And what about my own mother, you might well wonder—my own mother, the very beautiful Barbara Crothers Cope, who was Armeda’s only daughter, and who was alive and very much in my life. Why was she not the source of my own most secure attachment? Much more about that somewhat more complicated relationship later.
Let’s stick with Armeda for now. With my grandmother, there was proximity. Check. There was safety. Check. There was soothing, holding, reliability, constancy. But there was something much, much more. There was attunement. Attunement between our very minds.
Neuroscientists now understand that this attunement—this mysterious alignment of minds—is, in fact, the central ingredient in secure attachment. As we will see, it is the very essence of connection.
The active ingredient (scientists would say the “mechanism”) of secure attachment is something in the quality of the mother’s responsiveness to the baby. The mother is fascinated by the baby. Indeed, she cannot get enough of the baby. Dr. Winnicott calls this “primary maternal preoccupation.” This preoccupation is amazing to me—indeed, probably to all of us who are not mothers. What happens? The mother puts herself aside. The mother, for a time, does not want anything but the baby. The mother finds her own subjectivity—her own personal interests, her own rhythms and concerns—fading into the background.
I have seen this very phenomenon with my friend Carol. Just now as I write this, Carol has a new baby. I watch her with little Riley. She is at the service of Riley. She’s happy about this (most of the time), which amazes me. She gets up every hour. She is sleep deprived. She cannot jog. We cannot watch our usual Thursday evening television series together. She—the athlete—cannot keep her fine figure just now. But she puts up with the difficulties and forgoes her pleasures willingly. My sister, Sandy, after becoming a mother, said to me, “A baby marks the end of your narcissism.” (I will add that if it doesn’t, this is bad news indeed for the baby.)
Within this “primary maternal preoccupation,” something magic happens: The mother attunes to the mind and the emotions of the baby. And as a result, the baby “feels felt.” The baby feels this attunement. This, apparently, is the whole secret. This is the magic: the baby feels felt!
The mother is attuned to the baby’s slightest signals. There are long moments of engagement, during which energy and information are exchanged through facial expressions, words, sounds—and most of all through the eyes. The mother’s mind attunes itself to the mind of the baby. She finds the channel. Psychologists call this “mental state resonance.”
(But wait! The mother attunes to the mind of the baby? Hmm. One wonders: Does the baby even have a mind yet? Oh yes. But a mind that is being actively co-created with the mother, or the primary caregiver.)
The mother also attunes to the child’s body, of course. The physical responsiveness of the mother’s body along with her mental and emotional responsiveness—that is to say the responsiveness of her whole being—is the active agent of attachment.
As it turns out, experts tell us, these physical and emotional interactions create psychobiological states of brain activity that are crucial to development. The mother and child become involved in “a mutual co-regulation of resonating states.” In other words, the baby’s brain is learning at lightning speed. It is absorbing and drinking in the mind and body of the mother. The baby’s brain and nervous system are echoing and mirroring the brain and nervous system of the mother. This is a mutual dance of psychobiological development and collaborative communication. The two minds and bodies are for a time inextricably connected. Inextricably.
Dr. Winnicott himself said it: “There is really no such thing as a baby,” he declared, “only the mother-child dyad.”
No such thing as the baby!
5
So what does all of this have to do with our Soul Friendships?
To my everlasting good fortune, attunement, alignment, and resonance were precisely what I had with my grandmother. We were on the same wavelength. She tuned in to me. And I felt it. There it was: In the presence of Armeda, I felt felt. And it didn’t stop when I was an infant, toddler, or schoolchild.
When I was about nineteen and on a visit “home” to my grandparents’ house from college, Grandma took me on a special tour of the attics of her big Victorian home. Not that I needed a tour of the attics. I knew them by heart, having played in every corner of them throughout my childhood. But this was a special guided tour, led by the master. We opened three big, dusty leather chests, which I had previously been warned not to open. They contained the fragile wedding dresses and wedding paraphernalia of every Crothers and VanDemark bride going back to 1827. There was a truly epic amount of crushed white and ivory silk—now musty and fragile, but remarkably intact. There were tiny white leather shoes, small white and gold bibles, dainty wedding hats, and even lace wedding undergarments.
Grandma began to extract the wedding dresses, one by one—dresses worn by Sarah Hubbell Frisbie in 1845, and Georgianna Frisbie Crothers in 1880, and so many others. With each extraction, she told a story: A story of the bride. The bridegroom. The wedding itself. She gave accounts of perilous journeys over swollen spring rivers in buckboards, houses that burned down on wedding nights, early deaths, jealousies, angry and disappointed parents, mix-ups in the naming process, happiness and unhappiness.
I remember the intimacy of this time, sitting together on dusty boxes of books as we peered into the past—Grandma carefully telling me stories with her usual precision and color, watching my responses, listening to my questions. How in the world did Grandma know I would be fascinated by the family history contained in those trunks? My grandmother knew me. Today we would say she “got” me.
She “got” me. There are more scientific ways of describing this, of course. We are told that “the ability to perceive and to understand other people’s minds [is] a form of ‘metacognition’ sometimes called ‘mentalization’ [that] begins within the first year of life and is proposed to play a role in the unfolding of consciousness.”
Okay. And how did Grandma learn this magic capacity for “mentalization”? Well, she must have learned this skill—this capacity for mentalization—from someone else. Someone else who did this for her! That would certainly have been her mother, my great-grandmother May VanDemark, the lively, ancient (or so I then thought) lady I knew as the one who squeezed my hand tightly when we sat next to one another at the big dinner table for Sunday dinner—the one who said she wanted to die on the dance floor. So: Armeda’s mother got her! Armeda had had an experience of feeling felt. Now she was passing it on to me.
6
Armeda VanDemark. Who in the world was she? She was born in 1894 in a little upstate New York village that her ancestors had helped to found a hundred and fifty years earlier. Her father, Herbert VanDemark, had been a farmer, and Grandma had grown up on a vast tract of farmland on the rich bottomland of Flint Creek, just outside of the village of Phelps. Grandma told stories of the gypsies who camped every spring on the farm’s bottom land and how she snuck down to watch their dances and their fires, and to inspect their tattered wagons from behind a tree trunk. Sepia-toned photos circa 1900 show a young Armeda—a playful farm girl, posing for the camera, arms around a cow’s neck, delighted.
Sitting on the big front porch of her Main Street home in old age, Armeda was full of stories. She was particularly fond of stories about her own grandmother, Catherine “Kate” Herbert—a storied local beauty who married her way to the top. Kate’s last husband had been a serious investor in the Union Pacific Railroad, and he and Kate had had their own railroad car in which they traveled cross-country. From San Francisco the car would be loaded onto a steamer and taken to Hawaii, where they would tour in comfort. The story, when Grandma told it, was an unusual combination of cautionary tale (it did not end well, with Kate losing her husband, her money, and her looks, and limping back to the homestead for a quasi-monastic and impoverished end) and a kind of fantasy about a richly passionate life to be emulated.
Armeda had a fiery temper. I never actually saw this myself, but there were plenty of stories of epic screaming fights between Armeda and my aunt Gertrude (her sister-in-law)—who lived in her family’s big brick house across Main Street from Armeda. Neighbors apparently marveled at this public drama at least several times a year.
It was surely no surprise when, in 1916, Armeda VanDemark married one of the most eligible bachelors in town: Oliver Frisbie Crothers. Oliver lived in the ornate, cupolaed Georgian brick house in the center of the village, and his grandfather, the magisterial Oliver Granger Crothers, owned the malt factory, which was the town’s biggest industry.
My grandfather was a gentle, graceful man—tall, blond, patrician. He had a natural, and very becoming, reserve. All agreed: He had that ineffable thing called “character.” He was steady, dependable, responsible. When a distant uncle, grieving over his lost wife, slit his wrists in our family summer cottage, Oliver cleaned up the blood (which had dripped through the floorboards of a second-floor bedroom and onto the dining room table) and never mentioned it again. One of the things I most loved about my grandfather: He was utterly averse to putting on airs. I remember how awed the whole town was when Oliver, after twenty years, finally turned in his ancient Oldsmobile and bought a brand-new Buick (the selfsame Buick that—now ancient itself—my grandmother drove to our cemetery adventure so many decades later).
So: Armeda and Oliver. The farm girl and the aristocrat. Together, they provided just about as ideal a container as you could invent.
Okay. Let’s say that you’ve been lucky enough to land caretakers or early attachment figures, like Armeda and Oliver, who are “good enough.” Who enable you to feel safe and secure. What then?
Well, now something extraordinary happens. You don’t realize this then—child that you are—but they have created for you the very container, the chrysalis, within which you will grow and thrive. Within the relational container they create for you, you begin to connect with your own internal experience—your own naturally arising impulses, desires, aversions, emotions, body states. The loving gaze and the attuned gesture reassure you that these internal states are okay. There is room for you in the world. There is room for you (and this is crucial) just exactly as you are.
In the presence of this “containing other,” the infant, and later the child, “drifts and glides” in her own inner experience. She feels the realness of her emerging feelings and needs. She feels literally “held together” by the safe holding environment that surrounds her. The bits and pieces of her own inner experience are momentarily unified in this container.
Here is a fascinating mystery: early on “the baby” is merely a collection of parts. A belly joined to a head and limbs. (Remember: there is no such thing as a baby, Dr. Winnicott tells us.) It is only through actual holding that the baby has an experience of being gathered together. We are gathered together in the arms of our loved one. We are held. And we are held together. It is through holding that we have an embodied experience of feeling unified. Of feeling put together.
So, holding facilitates a sense of being whole. And now a small miracle occurs: over time, the baby begins to feel—as a consequence of loving and handling—that this body is himself. These very moments of physical and psychological holding are the cradle of the real self. And we’ll see as we go along how very important this is.
One of my most important early professional teachers was a psychiatrist named Daniel Buie—a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School when I was doing an internship at a Harvard-affiliated hospital. Midway through a long and distinguished career, the reflective Dr. Buie had decided that there were five so-called self-maintenance functions that an adult had to develop in order to grow and thrive. The first of these is the capacity to feel safely held and soothed. Check. We’ve talked about that. And the second is this interesting skill that we are just now talking about: “the capacity to feel the realness of experience.” To feel the realness of experience. (The other three articulated by Dr. Buie, by the way, are “feeling an ongoing sense of personal identity, warmly loving the self, and esteeming the self.” We’ll talk about these three in later chapters.)
We can see now precisely how self-soothing and “feeling the realness of experience” go hand in hand. Only when safe and secure—and soothed—can we begin to feel and trust the realness of the experience of the body, and of the emotions—of the roiling internal life. We learn from analysis of Dr. Winnicott’s work that “this crucial early experience [of being held, and held together] enables the growing child to continue to experience his own spontaneously emerging desires and gestures as real, as important, as deeply meaningful, even though they must be integrated in adaptive negotiation with other persons.”
Donald Winnicott believed that the good-enough caretaker creates “a protected psychic space”—a kind of invisible, subtle, external womb. It’s a space between the real womb and the very difficult reality of adult experience. Winnicott called this “transitional space.” Transitional experience becomes the protected realm within which the creative self can operate and play. When the child is allowed to live in this protected psychic realm for a while—this safe harbor—she will glide into the next developmental phase with ease and readiness. She will have been securely contained.
Containment, by the way, is a subtle skill. The child needs to be held and contained, yes—but not too tightly! The good-enough mother knows when to move in, but also knows when to back off.
When to back off. This is an essential part of the dance of attunement. Sensitivity to the others’ naturally arising signals is the essence of secure attachment. Dr. Winnicott insists: it is crucial that the mother be there when she is needed, but it is equally crucial that she recede when she is not needed.
This is a deep challenge for many young parents.
Again, I was very lucky with Armeda. She seems to have known just when to back off.
When I was in my twenties, Grandma and I often sat on the porch together, she in her rocking chair under the shade of the elephant-ear vine that crawled up rusty iron trellis at the side of the big, rectangular front porch, and I on the wooden settee next to her—maybe with a book, maybe not. Both of us in utter silence. Feeling the wind. Watching the people and the cars go by on Main Street. Just sitting. Just rocking. Just breathing.
These quiet moments are essential to the development of our own inner life. We learn to be alone, and to drift and glide comfortably in our own thoughts and feelings. But we learn this in the first instance by being alone in the presence of a safe other.
10
So: Holding. Containment. Attunement. Asylum. Safe harbor. These are perhaps the most important components of this first relationship. And, interestingly, everything around the primary caretaker becomes a part of this container. This includes especially the home they create, the nest they fashion—the physical container that is in every way an extension of their own bodies. The importance of this can hardly be exaggerated. (The poet Khalil Gibran says it: “Your house is your larger body.” Gibran writes movingly about the way in which an authentic and loving home itself is part of the surround of love that holds us together.) It’s only with the long perspective of decades that I truly appreciate the containing power of physical home.
Armeda and Oliver Crothers lived almost their entire married life in a big Victorian frame home across the street from the aforementioned Georgian manse of my great-grandparents. Armeda and Oliver’s sprawling home—2800 East Main Street—had been built by a banker who went bust halfway through the construction. This led to a certain interesting combination of elegance and roughness that perfectly mirrored Oliver and Armeda—the aristocrat and the farm girl. The front rooms of the house were paneled in rich split oak, and there was a massive staircase with a large paneled library at the top, surrounded by an elegant, curving oak bannister. But the entire back half of the house was mundane and rough-hewn, constructed of cheaper woods and without the rich paneling. It was the territory of bare hanging lightbulbs and curling linoleum. There was a very ordinary kitchen, and an adjacent summer kitchen which had never been finished at all—and was, indeed, still framed out in raw slats and plaster.
The house was chockablock with aging portraits and family memorabilia going back hundreds of years. Staring down from the staircase wall was a massive and badly peeling portrait of my great-great-grandfather, George Hubbell, who had made his way up the Erie Canal in 1825. Over the fireplace in the dining room was a portrait of his wife, Roseanna Jackson Hubbell, second cousin to Andrew Jackson, and their three-year-old daughter, Sarah. A large chip of paint had come off where Roseanna’s left eye had been, leaving a slightly ghoulish impression to my young eyes.
Most appealing to me as a child were the aforementioned attics, full of treasures: portraits covered in dusty sheets, an immense and intricate wooden dollhouse, wooden and leather chests. There, too, was the silk top hat worn around the village by Oliver Granger Crothers. From the curved window in one of the attics, I could look out and see the ornate white cupola on the top of my great-grandmother’s house across the street.
As I kid, I naturally supposed that everyone’s grandparents had a domain like this. I remember it as a kind of fortress. Every time we arrived for a family visit, my grandfather would say, gently, “Do you remember your way around this big house? You won’t get lost, will you? Just call out if you get lost.” As I grew, the house itself would be a part of the solidity I badly needed. It became a part of my grandparents’ secure, reliable, non-abandoning love. It became an essential part of the container.
(“Have you peace in your homes,” asks Khalil Gibran, “the quiet urge that reveals your power? Have you remembrances, the glimmering arches that span the summits of the mind?”)
11
My grandparents’ home and their physical and emotional love were transitional realms just as Winnicott described them. Their house was a playground in which I felt safe to explore over and over again. When I was a child, there was an overstuffed toy box; there were stuffed animals who lived in a wooden window seat; I had a special teddy bear; I had a soft blue blanket that I dragged behind me around the house.
As I got older, the whole house became my playground: the deep, mysterious attics and cellars, the garden, and the spider-filled old shack of a garage. Eventually, the entire village became a protected space. And then the whole countryside. As an emerging adult, I would take long walks out into the country down near grandma’s childhood farm. It all had a special resonance and magic.
And what was the magic? The magic was the fact that the whole environs were protected and held in the container of my grandparents’ love for me. I was safe. And from that place of safety, I was capable of exploring both my inner and outer worlds—my own thoughts and feelings, and also, increasingly, the reality of the world around me (including the many difficult realities that I faced as a young adult).
When I was in college and feeling shaky and insecure, as I did intensely throughout my excruciating freshman year, I would go to Phelps for the weekend and nestle into the house. In the exquisitely familiar surroundings, I once again had the feeling of being plugged-in to some deep fountain of energy—of being held together. So simple: safely held and soothed. Here, at 2800 East Main Street, there was gazing, proximity, attunement, alignment, and resonance. Here, I was able to relax deeply; to reconnect with my inner world; and to feel repaired, renovated, and shored up. Then I could return to college and again face the challenges.
This safe and protected zone lasted until Armeda and Oliver died. Even now, actually, the sense of a protected and magical realm hangs distinctly around the sacred environs of the house and the cemetery where they’re both buried.
Grandma had her first heart attack on Thanksgiving Day 1975. I had not known anything about her history of heart disease—how she had contracted scarlet fever as a twenty-year-old, while visiting my grandfather at a World War I Army base; how the scarlet fever had weakened her heart; how she had spent her entire adult life weakened and scarred by this early experience; how she had spent every afternoon of her adult life in her silent, darkened bedroom, “resting.”
Mom called to tell me the news of the heart attack. Within half an hour I was driving my dinged-up white Toyota wagon at breakneck speed on Interstate 90 from Boston to Phelps. My heart leapt in my chest to see Grandma in cardiac ICU, hooked to tubes and monitors. Her blue hair was covered with a hospital issue hairnet. Her frail arms were horribly bruised from needle punctures. She smiled at me. I sat on the edge of the bed. We talked, and for a while I warded off tears.
Grandma took one of my hands in both of hers, and held it firmly. “You were the last person I thought of, Stephen,” she said. And then she recounted in detail the near-death experience, just as you always hear it: The distant light. The faint presence of others beckoning. The sense of utter well-being. The warmth.
I held her hand tighter, touched her cheek softly, and began to sob uncontrollably, laying my head on her chest. The last person she thought of. I had known that we had a special bond. Still, this one sentence put away any doubt. It was an entirely reciprocal love.
Grandma lived another year precisely, and died—of a second heart attack—on Thanksgiving Day 1976.
13
Grief is the outward and visible sign of true attachment. In fact, you’ll never really know—fully, viscerally—how attached you are to someone until you have to negotiate the grief process for them.
The deep bonds of attachment are like energy filaments that are subtle but oh-so-real. The grieving process exposes these filaments one by one. The first time I went to the attic after Grandma’s death, I was overcome by a memory that brought searing pain, and I sat by the leather trunks and sobbed. A filament. The first time I sat on the big settee next to her empty rocking chair, I lost it. A filament.
To this day, forty years later, I still expose filaments that have not yet been cut. Coming upon her hairbrush in an unmarked box of heirlooms recently left me gasping for breath. I could smell her.
14
The human being seeks proximity to secure love objects above all things. Simply proximity. At her death, where did Armeda go? This was an urgent question in my young mind. Was she at her grave, with her body? On the porch of 2800 East Main Street? Where was she? Where could I go to stay close?
It turns out that after the death of an important love object, nature has provided us with a remarkable new form of proximity. This is called “evocative memory.” Nature has provided us with the capacity to call up very clear, specific memories of our loved ones: how they smelled, how they felt in our arms, the exact shade of their eyes. (Indeed, by 18 months of age, the frontal parts of the brain enable the child to perform this evocative memory—to bring forward in her mind a sensory image of a parent in order to help soothe herself and regulate her emotional state. This skill—terribly important to survival—is hardwired into each of us.)
Sometimes when I feel lonely, I experiment with this: Can I call up the exact smell of 2800 East Main Street? (It had its own repertoire of smells—smells that belonged only to it. As soon as one opened the heavy mahogany front door, there it was. A hundred years of aged oak, breathing. Of Grandma’s perfume.) As soon as I recall this exact smell, my body relaxes. The smell always takes me in memory directly to Armeda’s rocking chair.
And so we have the wonder—the miracle—of non-abandoning love: when I die, my ashes will be placed right next to Grandma’s mahogany casket, under a large granite stone marked “Crothers.”
Shakespeare understood the power of this kind of non-abandoning love. An ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. I cannot read his Sonnet 116 without feeling Armeda’s arms around me.
A part of Sonnet 116 serves as the epigraph to this chapter. I’m sure you can see why. Read the entire sonnet to yourself, now, if you’d like; and as you read it, call to mind your own most important container. Bring out the picture of this particular loved one—perhaps your own most cherished safe harbor. And ponder Shakespeare’s unequalled description of non-abandoning love.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! It is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
Armeda VanDemark Crothers: the bright star to my wandering bark.