CHAPTER 14

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The Puzzle Solved: Unwinding the Mystery of “Annabel Lee”

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

In her sepulchre there by the sea—In her tomb by the sounding sea.

“ANNABEL LEE

EDGAR ALLAN POE


A couple of years into our friendship, John Purnell and I made a fateful discovery: we both loved the great old hymns of the Episcopal Church. John had a beautiful baritone voice. I had just bought a piano, and had begun to study it intensively again. One Saturday morning while we were having coffee at my house, John quoted a hymn. It turned out to be one of my favorites.

Angels and ministers, spirits of grace, friends of the children, beholding God’s face, moving like thought to us through the beyond, molded in beauty, and free from our bond!

Messengers clad in the swiftness of light, subtle as flame, as creative in might, helmed with the truth and with charity shod, wielding the wind of the purpose of God!

The words are set to a lovely old Irish tune that Seth used to hum while we were painting—back in college days. I sat down at the piano and played it. John came over and sat on the piano bench next to me. We sang it together. We were launched.

A whole new landscape developed in our relationship. We would sit at the piano, either at the church or at my house, and sing hymns together. Passionately. For hours on end. This opened a part of John he had not previously let me see. (The Seer was Being Seen!) John was emotional, unbound. He let these hymns rip with everything he had, and his beautiful baritone voice soared. He reminded me, in this, of my childhood Sunday school teachers, who had spent their whole lives as Christian missionaries in India, and who belted out hymns with the fervor of the recent convert. (“Sing with zeal. Zeal!” the elderly Mrs. Wright would exhort, as we teenagers eviscerated “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”)

John sang with zeal.

Singing together became a powerfully bonding part of my experience with John Purnell. Indeed, the piano bench became a strange kind of psychoanalytic couch. It was a safe way in which we could be physically close and emotionally attuned—and the music allowed us to touch places well beneath our cognitive minds. Through these hymn-sings, we were entering into the archetypal world together. I believe that I learned more about John’s soul from these moments at the piano than in any other way, and these songfests are deeply grooved into memory. Singing became a way of playing together. And we had found an altogether new way of seeing one another.

I discovered in those days that the old Episcopal hymnal (the 1940 edition is the version we were using) is like a giant Rorschach test—just one big projective test. What hymns do you love? What hymns do you relate to? What themes light you up? Are you drawn to the hymns of love? Of sadness? Grandeur? Death? Birth? It’s all there for the picking.

I saw almost right away that John loved the hymns of heaven, hymns that he sang with obvious emotion.

Jerusalem, my happy home,

When shall I come to Thee?

When shall my sorrows have an end?

Thy joys when shall I see?

He sang these songs like he meant it. And he did. I’ve said it before: There was some part of him that was broken and that longed for the wholeness of heaven. With his usual candor, he put it right out there. “Heaven,” he said, “is the place where people only come in, and never go out.” Heaven is where you will truly find non-abandoning love. In these hymn sessions, I could feel John’s loss, his grief, his sense of abandonment.

Later, when I became a “subdeacon” at All Saints and assisted John as one of the three sacred ministers at the altar (the subdeacon is the lay representative at the altar; it was a high honor in an Anglican parish), he told me that he saw the massive and intricately carved stone altar as the “gate of heaven”—the mystical intersection between heaven and earth. This transformed my sense of what I was doing at the altar with John. We would stand together facing the altar—facing heaven. John told me that having me join him at the altar in this way was one of the great experiences of his life.

John Purnell, as I have said, had opened for me a completely new view of suffering. The Christian, he reiterated, is a person with a broken heart. I began slowly to understand: We are broken in some way by life, but rather than hiding our brokenness, we expose the wound. We expose the wound to the light; we expose it for all to see. In this way we are fully participating in both the joy and the suffering of being human. In this way we strive to become what the Buddhists call a bodhisattva—a maturing Buddha—who claims full participation in the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows of life.

John’s view allowed me a wonderful reframe of my own sorrow. Sorrow was not a problem, but an opportunity. “Offer up the suffering” said John, “use it as a doorway to deeper relationship with God.” This was a whole new idea for me: Keep the door to your suffering open. Turn the wound into light—which is precisely what John did Sunday after Sunday in his sermons. It’s why his preaching had such power. Even those pictures of Christ on the cross, of the sacred heart—tears and blood streaming down—now began to make sense. Open the wound to the light. You cannot understand Christianity without an understanding of the redemptive possibilities in suffering. Let God touch your wounded heart. Let him hold you in his arms. This metaphor—that of being cradled and comforted by God—extends, indeed, to most spiritual practices. (An acquaintance of mine, in fact, wrote a book called In the Lap of the Buddha.)

As I finally cracked this window into John’s understanding of Christianity, I understood for the first time the real power of the man. His power came through his very embrace of suffering, and his willingness to have his suffering revealed, and also redeemed. And I realized that just as he made so much room for his own sorrow, he had made room for mine as well. This is why it was safe to open to John. And long before I understood this intellectually, I felt it deeply.

2

Remember: D. W. Winnicott insisted that the parts of the developing self that were shut down in childhood (behind the closed door in my dream) remain alive, but in suspension, until they find a container in which they can once again bloom and thrive.

Together, John and I had created a rich holding environment in which the parts of myself—and his self, too, I now believe—that had been left in suspension had finally found true asylum.

Through our friendship, some new part of me was coming to life—or some old part of me was reigniting. Kohut called this “the restoration of the self.” I began to feel more real—especially in John’s presence, and also in church.

What John and I were engaged in was not a formal psychoanalysis, of course. But it was every bit as powerful. Indeed, Freud’s own early cases were handled in a very informal fashion. Freud gradually, and with lots of experimentation, identified the “active ingredients” of healing: safety, refuge, proximity to a loved or trusted object, free association, freedom to wander inside, and engagement with mechanisms that went directly into the unconscious—like dreams, or hymns. And then the young Freud put these ingredients together in whatever way would work. Only later did he come up with the system that we now know as psychoanalysis.

Stephen Mitchell, one of my favorite writers on “the analytic situation,” captures the essence of psychoanalysis and its active mechanisms. He writes, with co-author Margaret Black: “The psychoanalytic situation . . . is perfectly designed for the exploring and regenerating of personal subjectivity. . . . The patient is offered refuge from the demands of the outside world; nothing is expected except to ‘be’ . . . to connect with and express what one is experiencing. No continuity or order is demanded; unintegration and discontinuity are expected and accepted. The analyst and the analytic situation provide a holding environment in which aborted self-development can be reanimated . . . [In this situation it is] safe enough for the true self to begin to emerge.”

John and I had stumbled onto the very secrets upon which Freud had stumbled in his relationship with Fliess. There were the elements of intense—but safe—intimacy. There was, for John and for me, the experience of reaching deep into the unconscious—made possible by intense containment (a containment not just mediated through one other, but through the whole church, the “community of saints”). There were the hymns. There was the entrancing liturgy. There was, in short, a powerful surround of love. (“Because we are surrounded by such a cloud of witnesses,” John would often say, quoting scripture.)

It’s important to note here that we human beings seem to have some kind of radar for the precise situation that will heal us. I found John at just the right time in my life. He loved me, saw me, appreciated me, and was committed to my thriving. And I, likewise, was committed to his—as much as I could be as a late twenty-something.

You will find the right situation, too—or at least your radar will go off when you get near it. Whether or not you can use it, is, of course, up to you.

This is an essential point, and has, of course, been a theme throughout this book: Winnicott saw the patient as powerfully self-restorative. He believed that the patient himself shaped the analytic situation to provide the precise environmental features missed in childhood. “The patient comes to the analytic situation looking for experiences necessary to revitalize the self,” Mitchell and Black write, explaining Winnicott’s work. “The analyst offers himself to be used freely in providing the patient with missed experiences.” In a sense, says Winnicott, the patient creates the analyst—that is to say, uses him in precisely the way that is needed. This highly targeted “using,” Mitchell and Black explain, “enables the patient to rediscover her own capacity to imagine and fantasize, to generate experience that feels deeply real, personal, and meaningful.” The analyst, the friend, the mirror thereby becomes the perfect new “found object.”

Freud astutely described the essence of the healing relationship as a partnership. The analyst, writes Peter Gay, “is, after all, a dependable partner—the listener shocked by no revelation, bored at no repetition, censorious of no wickedness. Like the priest in the confessional, he invites confidences; unlike the priest, he never lectures, never imposes penances no matter how mild. Freud had this alliance in mind when he noted that the analyst should begin to reveal his patient’s deeper secrets only after the analysand has formed a solid transference, ‘a regular rapport,’ with him.”

3

I realize it only now, with the perspective of many decades: John gave me complete permission—even encouragement—to explore the sorrow that seemed during that first year of our friendship to be somehow at the very core of my being.

I had altogether forgotten, until my conversations with John in the first years of our friendship, that as a kid I read the obituaries first—a curious fact that I have already mentioned in these chapters. I had forgotten the extent to which I had been fascinated with death, loss, and grief. I’d forgotten that I had been transfixed by and drawn to funerals and their majesty, and the opportunities they gave me to cry. Indeed, I was well known among my sibs and cousins for losing it at funerals and sad movies (“There he goes again”). This is one of my own most real and vivid memories of childhood. As it turns out, I had been creatively drawn to the right opportunity, but altogether without knowing why.

Okay, but still: What was the source—at this particular moment in my life—of all this grief abounding? My response to Uncle Bill’s death was clearly overdetermined. That is to say, determined by hidden, unconscious factors—implicit memories. What did the insistence of this grief point to? What was it really about? What hidden city did we need to uncover in order to understand it all?

In truth, I have to tell you that it’s taken decades to unwind this mystery. In the safe space of All Saints in Dorchester, and with the help of John Purnell, I began what would become a long process of excavation. My story is now much more coherent than the autobiographical narrative John heard from me during that first year of our friendship. My narrative now integrates much more of the truth of my early attachment history. John was my first experience of clear mirroring, and he became an exemplar of what I could create throughout my life. Thanks to him, I went on to find other mirrors who could help me along my way: a fantastic psychoanalyst; a whole series of meditation teachers; and various best friends, partners, and lovers.

You can find these mirrors, as well. They’re all around you. And in order to grow into all of you, indeed, you must find them, and you must use them.

4

For many decades now, one of my most important partners in truth-telling and in mirroring—and finally in the reconstruction of our shared autobiographical narrative—has been my twin sister, Sandy. We admittedly have had a unique opportunity. We shared the womb together, and just about every experience after that until we each went away to college. I’m particularly fortunate, because Sandy has a supernormal memory. Indeed, often a photographic memory. She simply remembers everything.

Year after year, Sandy and I see more clearly. We share our insights with one another. With each decade that passes, we understand more. It’s like putting together a complex picture puzzle, except that there is an urgency about it all. And it sometimes comes together in out-of-the-blue aha! moments that we always want to share. (Not too long ago, when Sandy and I had been in the process of one such rich exchange, I had a dream of our hometown of Wooster, Ohio. In the dream, the entire town was in the process of being excavated, and seams of gold had been discovered.)

You will have to make room for the same almost-continual rewriting of your own self-narrative. And when you notice that the story is changing and widening, then you know that you’ve been doing some fruitful mining. Seams of gold.

5

Would it help you to hear my current autobiographical narrative (very much in brief)? Would it help you to hear how the puzzle looks at this moment in time? To hear some of the secrets I’ve unlocked so far—secrets that have become a part of my narrative?

Well, first of all, Sandy and I (and all of my sibs) understand now that our mother was intensely committed to her idealized version of our family. She went to great efforts to portray us as the ideal family for which she so much longed. Her narrative was spun out in her poetry, in her sharing at church and in the community, in letters she wrote home from Spain during our yearlong sabbatical there as a family when Sandy and I were fifteen. And reading over these pieces of her narrative even thirty or forty years later, anyone can see: Mom was exceptionally good at painting the picture. She was one convincing lady. And how could you not buy the story she was laying out? It was charming.

So, Mom was a great storyteller—like my grandmother, Armeda. She was fantastic at the details. But here was the rub: she left out almost all of the hard parts. So actually, her narrative was woven from pieces of the truth, but when it was all put together, it turned out to be a kind of elaborate cover story. It was a wish. The shadow side was left out. (Remember the play of opposites: wish and fear, hope and dread, love and hate?) And when the shadow side is left out, you have lost the real guts, the real meaning, of the story. This is why she—and the story—developed a distinct air of unrealness over time.

My siblings and I have had to patch together a more comprehensive truth, and have therefore had to dig into that deeply buried shadow land. We have had to take the Night Sea Journey, slowly and painfully uncovering a narrative that accounts for the suffering under the surface of our family life. And this narrative—as it unfolded—had a sense of inevitability about it. As Freud said, along with Shakespeare, “the truth will out.”

In retrospect, and remarkably, it didn’t turn out to be all that complicated. And it hinges on this fact: Our father was a PTSD survivor from WWII. The war changed his life. It injured him deeply—at the young age of twenty-two. As I’ve said, Dad had been a handsome, charming, popular student-scholar in college. As a kid I spent hours perusing my parents’ college yearbooks. There was Dad: a star on the basketball court, the headwaiter in the main dining hall, president of the most prestigious fraternity. I was so proud of him when I looked at those pictures. He was darkly, stunningly handsome. He was glamorous. As a boy, I couldn’t get enough of those yearbooks. They became, indeed, the basis of my own youthful narrative.

A picture of my father in his officer’s uniform hangs on my wall. He looks like the mere boy that he was. A beautiful, sensitive, highly intelligent boy. He looks serious. Scared, perhaps.

The war damaged him. This boy, capable as he was, had been a member of the elite underwater demolition crew, the forerunner of the Navy SEALs. He saw action in France and Italy, and participated in some of the bloodiest battles of the war. He fought in the notorious Italian campaign at Salerno, at Rapido River, and at Monte Cassino—where all-out slaughter abounded. But as kids, we learned nothing whatsoever about Dad’s time in the war. Nothing. He never mentioned it. Indeed, he avoided all talk of it until the very end of his life. When we were kids, in fact, he had to leave the room when war movies came onto the screen of our little black-and-white TV.

The reality of the war—the war he brought home with him—emerged in darker ways. He often erupted in rage, seemingly out of the blue. He was verbally abusive and cruel at random. These terrifying, violent episodes would come in great, dramatic explosions—which are seared into all of our memories. Terror reigned at those times. No one was left standing. Mom cowered in the background, helpless, wide-eyed, terrified.

Later in life, Mom said to me, in a quiet, poignant moment: “He’s a good man.” She knew what I had been through with him. And yet: a good man. And of course, this was true in so very many ways; he pulled it together the best he could. He was more than a good man: He was heroic, both during the war and after. He did his duty and more. Only now do we even have a language for what he suffered. In the Civil War, they called it “soldier’s heart.” Today, of course, it is post-traumatic stress disorder. Yes, he was a good man who had been substantially eaten up inside by the atrocities he had witnessed, endured, and in which he had participated.

Mom married her handsome college sweetheart just after the war, only to find him a changed man. Mom had grown up as a princess, loved and adored by her parents and family, and happy and secure. She descended into another life altogether in marriage—overwhelmed by five children within five years. To be fully honest, we must say that Dad was not just a husband who was a changed and conflicted man, but was a tortured man who eventually became an alcoholic to deal with his internal pain.

For years, Sandy and I tried to piece together the puzzle. We wondered, most urgently: What happened to Mom? (What happened to Dad was much more obvious.) But here was the real mystery, and I say again: What happened to Mom? We finally understood: Mom had had the experience of having her life stolen from her. Dad came home from the war a different guy, a tortured guy. A guy trying to cope with demons for which he simply had no name.

And then, on top of that came five children—five children in rapid succession. As I have said, Mom loved the idea of children, but not so much the children themselves. I think she entered into those childbearing years—as no doubt so many other women did—in a kind of trance of duty. (You can see it in her eyes in the photos from that period: bewildered, exhausted, just holding on. The charming, carefree, glamorous girl is gone.) This is what one does. This is what marriage is.

It took me a long time to understand why Mom could not name our family’s desperate unhappiness. It was because she experienced her unhappiness as shameful. Suffering itself was shameful—an admission of failure. After one of my best friends died suddenly and tragically, I turned, sobbing, to Mom on the phone with my grief, trying to find some comfort. She barely knew what to say or how to comfort me at all. After all, who had comforted her? She couldn’t wait to get off the phone. I’ll never forget it. She suggested that I not come home for a family gathering at that time because I was in such breakdown. Sorrow was embarrassing. Grief must be kept at a distance. If she allowed it in, if she allowed my grief in—then what about hers? Would she simply crumble, scream out loud and rip her clothes as those ancient Greek widows wisely did?

6

But don’t get me wrong. There were real moments, too. Very real, and very sweet moments with my mother. And those are the ones I remember most vividly now, and I come back to them again and again—and more so as I age.

I now remember so clearly one of my favorite series of moments with my mother—almost certainly the moments that felt most real, most intimate. It turns out that Mom’s true self came out in her poetry—when she read her own poetry to us, or indeed when she read any of her favorite poetry aloud, or recited it from memory. She had been an English major in college, and in subsequent years wrote a considerable amount of poetry—and indeed, published several books of poetry toward the end of her life. Rereading it now, I see that her best poetry was about grief—was suffused with sadness and nostalgia. This was where she really touched something deep inside. Something as real as the earth under her feet.

I also realize now that she recited poetry less and less as we all grew older, and as the darkness of alcoholism filtered like a cloud over the family. But I remember now so distinctly those early moments—when I was a child—when she would burst forth with a poem. Perhaps she was ironing. Or dusting. Or just sitting. She was unguarded in those moments—and directly connected to her vast and, I think in many ways, beautiful internal world. Connected to her unconscious. And all of a sudden, so naturally and beautifully, a poem would emerge.

I felt all of this most poignantly in her frequent recitation of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee.” Later in life I would memorize this poem, because it simply resounded of Mom—like an echo.

It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me.

My mother’s voice sounded different when she recited this poem. Her voice, then, while she was saying the poem, was full of passion. Of deeper meanings. It was almost like a singing voice. Her voice had, in those moments, a new life. (Psychoanalysts are always looking for those moments when the patient on the couch brings a particular new life to his speaking, to his memories, to his associations. It’s an analytic truth: aliveness in voice and language is a signal that something important is being touched.)

I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea,

But we loved with a love that was more than love—I and my Annabel Lee—

With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven Coveted her and me.

This poem broke my heart as a boy. I urged her to go on. I was eager to hear the next part. The tragedy. The sad part. Her voice would fill with emotion as she recited the last stanzas:

And this was the reason that, long ago, In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling My beautiful Annabel Lee;

So that her highborn kinsmen came And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulcher In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven, Went envying her and me—

Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know, In this kingdom by the sea)

That the wind came out of the cloud by night, Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we—Of many far wiser than we—

And neither the angels in Heaven above Nor the demons down under the sea

Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

Love wins out. This was my favorite part.

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

In her sepulchre there by the sea—In her tomb by the sounding sea.

I cannot remember any one single moment of my childhood with my mother that was more real than this. Or any other moments in which I adored her more.

7

For some reason, Mom felt that her deep sadness had to be hidden, had to remain a secret. I have mentioned the day that we cleared out the big house on Main Street (Oliver and Armeda’s house—Mom’s very childhood home). Sandy and I were sobbing in the living room, in the bedrooms, on the front porch. Crying, almost howling, everywhere. And Sandy and I were both bewildered: Mom was not shedding a tear. She was split off from it all. Was her sadness just too big? Would it have blown her apart had she let it rip?

Her deep sorrow did, indeed, remain unspoken. But unspoken is different from secret. Indeed, this depth of sorrow is not the kind of thing you can keep secret. (“ . . . mortals can keep no secret . . . “) So, all of us kids knew about this tearing grief, not in our explicit family narrative, mind you, but in our very bones. We felt it in our guts. But we could not yet speak it with our lips: It was in implicit memory. And it impinged deeply on our formative years. (Indeed, this is the essence of impingement: Mom’s emotional life and conflicts were impinging on ours, unconsciously.)

This explains why, as a kid, I was fascinated by obituaries. By death. By the cemetery. By funerals. I finally understood. And it made so much sense. A new narrative emerged. A narrative that was more complete and more true. A narrative that was more satisfying. And much, much more real.

8

I did not understand this fully at the time of Uncle Bill’s death, of course, but I now understand that Bill’s death was a watershed in Mom’s life. Bill was the symbol of, and the connection to, her happy and secure childhood. And as such, he was the symbol, too, of her many losses. I understood, then, that Mom had had the same experience of Armeda and Oliver that I had had: a beautiful, secure, almost paradisal childhood. And now I get it. She spent much of her adult life in silent in mourning for this paradise. To be close to her real internal, subjective life was inevitably to be close to this deep sadness.

Could Mom have but spoken her grief, railed against it, named it, screamed it out, rent her garments, gone crazy for a stint—this would have been healthier. Instead, it all became a secret. And a shameful one at that. I remember the one single time she let it slip. “All I want is just a simple house by the water,” she said in a moment of drama during one of my father’s binges—or “episodes” as she called them. “Just a little cottage by the water where I can be still.” (Did she remember that Annabel Lee ended up in a house by the sea?)

And my own grief? The protracted grief for Bill? I now understand: It was partially my grief at the loss of my beautiful mother to her sadness, the loss of my mother to her internal preoccupations, to her anger, her rage. And it was partially my own grief for the loss of Grandma, Grandpa, and Bill—who were, altogether, the true container and refuge in our family. (Aha! I felt the same nostalgia for the past that Mom felt. Some of it was hers. But some of it was mine.)

One thing it took me a very long time to understand: By feeling my mother’s deep grief and sharing it, I felt close to her. This was, indeed, the single—and only—way I could indeed feel authentically close to her. It was, after all, the real part of her. The “Annabel Lee” part of her.

9

Ronald Fairbairn understood and taught in depth about the precise bind in which I found myself. He pointed out that we often feel close to the repressed parts of our parents, the parts of themselves that our parents exiled to the basement or the attic of their own consciousness; the parts of themselves that were just out of reach, but that felt so real to us. Fairbairn saw that the repressed parts of the self are tied to features of the parents that could not be integrated. He positively nailed this life-changing insight: “The repressed,” he observed, “is the part of the self that is tied precisely to the inaccessible (often dangerous) features of the parents. The repressor (the part of the self that did the repressing, that had to do the hiding) was a part of the self tied to the more accessible, less hidden and dangerous features.”

So! This was how I felt close to my mother. This was how I joined her. I joined her in her longing. In her longing for her lost paradise. In her nostalgia for the safe container of Oliver and Armeda and Bill. (I had been named Crothers—my middle name—after her father, Oliver Frisbie Crothers. She relished this, by the way, and reminded me of it often. Her idealized version of me was actually a part of her idealized past.) And I joined her in her longing for those paradisal early years.

Now I could understand Annabel Lee. Annabel Lee was her. Remember that Annabel Lee was carried away into death because the angels in heaven were so jealous of her happiness. And these were the two parts of my Mother. The dearly loved and happy child. And the lover who misses that child, and lies down with that very child in the sepulchre by the sea.

I didn’t understand this for many years. But, for me, giving up Mom’s grief and longing, and her deep nostalgia for the past—this giving up would be quite difficult. Paradoxically, giving up the grief would be its own kind of loss. Say Stephen Mitchell and Margaret Black: “It is not at all uncommon for patients in the process of overcoming their own most painful affective states to feel they are losing touch with their parents as internal presences. As they begin to feel happier, they also feel somehow more alone, until they can trust in their growing capacity to make new, less painful connections with others.”

John had been exactly right about my sorrow. I had to experience it. To make it conscious. I had to feel it intensely, and then let it go. In many ways it had dominated my life. And it took decades to let it go—or actually, to transform it, to turn the wound into light. As it turned out, I had to speak it, to actually name it—to name it as if for her, for Mom. Indeed, I had to honor this naming as the very act that Mom could not do—could not bear. I had to write about it. I had to reflect on it. Above all, I had to invite it into the light.

10

Say Mitchell and Black: “According to Fairbairn, no one can give up powerful, addictive ties to old objects unless he believes that new objects are possible, that there is another way to relate to others, in which she will feel seen and touched.”

A friend, of course, can become this new object. A mirroring friend, a holding friend, a friend who values the truth. John had become for me the doorway through which I could walk, letting go of the past—the friend to whom I could cling and on whom I could rely for non-abandoning love.

11

Unfortunately, this transformative process was complicated by what happened next.

John Ritchie Purnell left me and his many other friends before our work had barely begun. He died of a massive heart attack at age fifty, when I was just thirty-one.

I remember everything about the last time I saw John. David and I were leaving for a vacation to Florida, and John was driving us to the airport. We trudged up and down the three flights of stairs to our apartment with baggage. John looked tired. I commented on this. He seemed winded, and had to sit down upstairs briefly to catch his breath. He waved it away. “A cold. Working too hard.”

We got the call several days later in Florida. David called me into the garage of his parents’ home in Sarasota. After he broke the news, I fled the house and ran to a huge field neighboring David’s parents’ property—an athletic field, I think it was. I ran, blindly, crying and shouting at the dark, cloud-filled sky. “John, you left too soon. John, you can’t leave me here. No, no, no, no.”

We drove David’s parents’ old Mercury station wagon through the night from Florida back to Boston. It was a cold April night, and the power windows broke halfway through New Jersey. We were shivering with cold and stress when we pulled into the driveway at daybreak.

I showered and changed and sped to the church. Black crepe was hung around the door, and mourners were gathering for a special ceremony called Vespers for the Dead. John was laid out in his casket on a bier at the foot of the steps to the altar. The casket was tilted so that the whole congregation could see his body.

I approached him. I remember wondering why he didn’t have his glasses on. (He’d broken them when he’d fallen in the hospital, during the heart attack that had killed him. “He’d raised his arms, to take off his shirt,” the doctor later told me, “and the attack hit.” He fell over, dead. He could not be revived.)

I touched John’s hand. It was cold. He was dressed in Eucharistic vestments, and his hands were placed around the stem of a silver communion cup. They looked awkward and unreal.

John was dead. I could not believe my eyes.

12

When you’re barely in your thirties, you do not fully realize how rare true friendship is. How rare it is for someone to “get” you. To recognize you. To see you so fully. And for you to get them. Indeed, I now know now that to be “recognized” only happens a few times in life—if you’re lucky.

If you have such a relationship, use it to the fullest. Use it. Truly, that’s what it’s there for. And if you recognize someone else, you have a duty. See them. Reflect them back to themselves. Help them, too, to use the relationship.

And here is something that they don’t teach you in school: The biggest and most important selfobjects in your life keep on transmitting. They continue to transmit energy and information.

In the following years, I would go on to a full psychoanalysis with a man strangely not unlike John. Dr. Bill Richardson was an older man and a Jesuit priest. A distinguished professor at Boston College, where I was in graduate school. We dug in deeper and excavated some more. And John made all of that possible. He was the first doorway.

13

I have next to me in my study a picture of John Purnell. He is sitting in the big, red-leather chair in his study, flanked by his two black sheepdogs, and smiling out contentedly, happily. At home with himself.

I feel my losses now. And I feel the accumulated sorrow of a lifetime. But now they fill me up rather than deplete me. They no longer impinge upon me. Rather, they touch me deeply. They are not locked away in the basement. I feel their realness—and thereby I feel my own realness.

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

In her sepulchre there by the sea—In her tomb by the sounding sea.

things to ponder: mirroring

  1. As you think about your current relational field, who is it, I wonder, who really sees you at this time in your life?
  2. Keep in mind that it is very unlikely that there is anyone who sees the whole of you, but there will doubtless be some who see important parts of you with great accuracy.
  3. Do you avoid these friends, anxious about hearing their truths, or do you move toward them, toward their honesty? Do you encourage those who recognize you to share what they see?
  4. Have you learned, yet, how to use your mirrors, and their priceless reflections? And do you acknowledge to them how important their mirroring is? Remember: naming and claiming every mechanism of friendship only serves to strengthen it and its salutary effect.
  5. Is there anyone in your current relational field whom you particularly recognize—as I’ve said, for example, that I recognize my niece Catherine?
  6. If there is such a person, pay close attention. You’ve been given the gift of recognition—like the Old Testament prophets. Now, what do you do with it? Do you honor the gift, and share what you see—respectfully, tactfully, straightforwardly? Or do you keep it to yourself?
  7. Has reading the chapters in this section stimulated your thinking about your own autobiographical narrative? I wonder: Is it as full of gaps as mine was? Is there confusion? Are there missing years? Is there unrealistic idealization? Incoherence of any kind?
  8. Why not take some time as you dig into the latter part of this book to begin to sketch out your own autobiographical narrative. Perhaps find a big sheet of paper and some crayons or other writing materials and draw a long timeline, which includes all of the pivotal events of your life. Can you see any patterns across the trajectory of the whole of your life story? Any heretofore hidden meanings?
  9. Do you have a sense that there may be parts of yourself locked away in that attic or basement that we talked of? What exiled part of yourself haunts your dreams—your daydreams and your night dreams? Begin to name them.
  10. Are you still commingled with the repressed (hidden) parts of your parents in any way? What is your relationship to their exiled parts? (Remember: we are prone to act out these repressed parts, and then find our actions incomprehensible.)
  11. In what areas of your life are you currently an entire mystery to yourself? Again, name these mysteries and tune your observing ego, your witness consciousness, to them. See if you can find in some friend a protected psychic space in which you might investigate these mysteries.