Creative living always involves a transaction with [an] object . . . First we put ourselves into the object, then realize ourselves through this object which has become significant for us. A “found object” is significant because of its subjective investment, and this applies not only to the baby’s transitional object, but to any object that in later life arrests our attention through its having a special aura . . . All are “found objects” in which we “find” parts of ourselves . . .
KENNETH WRIGHT,
DESCRIBING THE WORK OF DONALD WINNICOTT
It was a Saturday night, and Susie and I had just returned from a late dinner with our best friends, Dave and Diane. We were sitting on the smooth, wood floor of our newly renovated living room (the room was still empty of its furniture), playing with our dogs, Squirt and Timmy.
Susie and I had just made it through a bumpy three-month renovation of the house, an ordeal my friend Kelly would dismiss out of hand as a “first-world problem”—which it certainly was. Still.
The renovation had been carried out by a motley crew of contractors (they looked just fine when we hired them) who were toe-curlingly slow, always short of money, occasionally stoned (otherwise, what was the excuse?), and frequently just missing in action. We adopted them as family. Because, why not? We adopted virtually everyone who came within our sphere.
As Susie and I sat on the gleaming white-ash floor that Saturday evening, all of our belongings were still in a rented metal pod on the front lawn. Construction dust clung to every crevice. But the ordeal was over. On this particular evening, we had been out to celebrate its completion.
Susie had just turned sixty-eight, but looked, well, really, fifty-two. She had a beautiful, round, full, and now deeply lined face, with soft, welcoming, somewhat limpid brown eyes—and short, pert, black hair with not a single strand of gray (a point of pride). Susie was as down-to-earth as anyone you know—straightforward and altogether without pretension. (This excellent quality came from her mother.) I lived up in the air with my thoughts and my writing, my projects and my occasional grand plans and schemes. Susie grounded me.
(“Sue,” I said often, as part of a conversation that occurred repeatedly during the first year of our co-housing arrangement. “Let’s move to a bigger house—one of those awesome brick Georgian houses down on Marion Avenue. We could pick one up for, like, a song.” Susie would inevitably give me a long, knowing glance from behind her Albany Times Union, morning edition. One of the dogs would likely have snuggled into her lap. “Steve, my dear,” she would say, clearly fighting back an eye roll. “How many times have we been through this. The taxes will eat us up. We’re just fine where we are.”)
Sue is a creature of common sense. She’s happiest when digging on her knees in the garden, dirt clinging to her overalls and hair, or wrestling with her attempts to weed out the packed-to-the-rafters garage, a Sisyphean task she’s determined to complete before she dies. She prefers to spend at least half of each day helping the so-called “elderly” (many of whom are much younger than she) all around Albany through her work with a community caregiver organization.
I remember that Saturday night after-the-renovation moment clearly: Susie and I sat together quietly for a while with the dogs. Relieved. Expectant. Catching our breath. Ready to settle back in.
The dogs, by the way, were—and are—an integral part of our life together, and as such they deserve an early introduction.
Squirt was at the time an eleven-year-old, fluffy, gray miniature poodle, a rescue who had come to us dreadlocked, filthy, and bewildered, apparently having lived for some months under bridges in downtown Albany. He immediately took to his thousand-dollar medical makeover, his new haircut, and his new home, instinctively searching out any pillow made of silk, and adopting it as his headquarters. (Now that he had found his way to doggie heaven, he wasn’t going to eschew any luxury.) During his first two years with us, Squirt gobbled up anything he could get his chops on—the spectre of recent hunger no doubt still haunting him. Now, sated, he seems to eat only chicken or steak cooked by Susie.
Timmy, a thirteen-year-old West Highland white terrier, was also a rescue; Susie had adopted him just before my arrival on the scene six years earlier. Timmy had his own problems: he had come to Sue with a form of doggy PTSD, and a strange sleep disorder that caused him (when awakened suddenly) to nip at guests—or the mail carrier. Aside from that, he was widely adored. In our neighborhood he was known as The Mayor because of the commanding way in which he pranced down the middle of the street—owning it. (“I’m here. Deal with it.”) His favorite hours were spent burying bones in piles of laundry or under curled-up corners of rugs—and then, after some thought, anxiously retrieving them and beginning the process all over again. (Thought bubble: No, not safe there. Better try again. No, not safe there. Etc.)
2
As Susie and I sat in silence, I realized that there was something beautiful about an empty room.
“Sue,” I queried. “How do you think we should place the furniture? I mean, for example, where would you put the sofa?” I was now poking around the new living room with a tape measure and shuffling around the crated works of art.
Sue weighed in only absentmindedly because she knew that the furniture would eventually end up the way I wanted it anyway. Decorating the house had become my domain.
Actually, a part of me wanted to leave the room simple and bare—just as it was that evening—and perhaps with our big, elegantly tattered oriental carpet (from Susie’s grandmother), stacks of pillows on the floor, and several oversized contemporary paintings. It would be a work of art in its spareness, I imagined. But that would not do. The whole idea had been to create a functional space in which our family of friends could gather. A home for our tribe.
Our tribe. Over the previous six years, Susie and I had pulled together a small clan of adopted family members. It was quite a mix. It featured an aging but still-very-studly marine (a hundred push-ups a day) with a huge truck and a tiny Chihuahua. Any number of recovering alcoholics and recovering what-have-yous. A handsome thirty-four-year-old carpenter with whom I was having the most intense bromance of my life. A well-known local writer and columnist—beautiful, fashionable, and always the most well-informed person in the room, with big opinions and self-acknowledged neuroses. A much-admired local English professor who had been a classmate of mine at Amherst College back in the ’70s. A feisty and formidable landscaper named Kathleen, who did our gardens and had become like a sister to us. (I called her Mary Ellen and she called me John-Boy—a reference, egad, to the warm and fuzzy 1970s television series The Waltons.)
Why did they all gravitate toward our house? Simple: Susie was the Great Earth Mother. The Goddess of Safely Held and Soothed. The world’s most Complete Container. And—no small thing—a Kick-Ass Cook. She simply could not cook anything bad. And she loved nothing more than to feed folk, and animals. Very few people ever left our house without a plastic container full of food. So from the beginning, a central part of the renovation plan was a big, new dining table and area that could seat up to 12 guests. That table would be where much of the action would happen.
I remember that Saturday evening time on the floor distinctly because it marked a turning point. Susie and I had been living together for six years. This renovation was an outward and visible sign of a new chapter in our friendship—an expression of a real commitment as partners. Not sexual or romantic partners, but deep friends, in it now for the long haul. We’d spilled blood over this renovation, and the process itself had turned us into a new kind of family.
Ours was an unconventional partnership, perhaps. (But really, when you dig down into any partnership, you realize that there is no such thing as a conventional one. Look around. Ours was just perhaps more obviously unconventional than most.)
Here’s how the story began: Six years earlier, at fifty-nine, I had been in a three-months-long depression. My mother had died the previous year, at eighty-seven, and apparently it had taken me an entire year to actually feel all that I needed to feel about her passing.
On the first anniversary of her death, deep in one of the worst New England winters in two decades, my grieving became intense, and to me, inexplicable. I mean really, I’d already lost so many of my closest friends and family—some of whom you’ve already heard about—and had weathered those storms so well that I had fancied myself a kind of expert at grieving.
But this. This was beyond grief. It was real clinical depression, and that was an entirely new ordeal for me. I had never been clinically depressed, and I could barely believe it was happening to moi. (Moi who ate oatmeal every morning of my life, didn’t drink alcohol at all, and did yoga five times a week.) I watched with black dread as the clouds descended. It was a mean, anxious, agitated depression—the worst kind, as anybody who’s been through it knows. Agitated depression is a notorious hell realm. It involves a kind of epic disruption of the nervous system. I could not even relax into the doldrums of sadness and lethargy like any normal depressed person. I could not, in fact, bear to sit still. I could not be soothed. I walked miles a day (really, like ten), worked out hard at the gym and cycled for hours—trying to shake it off, trying to change my brain chemistry. I meditated. (That was a no-go.) I did hot yoga. Only momentary relief. Nothing could penetrate my hyper-aroused nervous system.
What was going on with Steve? Everyone had his opinion. My twin sister, Sandy, said to me, “You know this is about Mom, don’t you?” (I wasn’t sure. Was there something still buried about that relationship? Was it even possible? Hadn’t everything been psychoanalyzed out?) David said to me, “You’re not sad at what you’ve lost—you’re angry at what you didn’t get.” Susie weighed in, as well: “You’re enraged,” she said. “Seriously pissed off.”
It took me a couple of years to realize that all three assessments were correct. It turns out that grief for an ambivalently held love object is particularly perilous. Sadness, disappointment, unresolved longing, rage (rage at the end of any hope for a happy resolution), and even hate are all jumbled together. Whereas ordinary grief is like falling into a fast-moving river—and the successful negotiation of the process is simply learning to “let go” into the current—this form of grief is like falling out of your canoe into raging, boulder-strewn rapids. Survival is not assured.
Psychologists now call this experience “complicated grief disorder.” Remember our earlier description of unfortunate children with disorganized attachment disorder? The child turns in circles, not knowing which way to go. The child stares at the wall, frozen with terror. The child is overwhelmed. Disorganized.
Complicated grief, as I found out, is remarkably like this.
Later on, I would come to a clinical understanding of what was going on for me. I would come to understand this “complicated grief” with some perspective. But for a while I was just trying to survive without going crazy. I had to stop work on the book I was writing then. I spent long hours hiking alone in the snowy Berkshires, sometimes howling like a wolf (true) or sobbing, my tears staining my red North Face jacket, and snow and ice clinging to the bottom of my khaki pants. I hung out probably way too much at a conservative Catholic monastery, where I’m sure they thought I was a psych patient escaped from the local bin. (I didn’t try to dissuade them.) I said the rosary Sister Benedicta had taught me back in graduate school. I was looking everywhere for a safe harbor. I could not find one. I couldn’t even seem to access Armeda in my visualizations. My friends began to look at me with real concern.
Susie called me during this time. (Someone—probably Sandy—had called her. “What can we do about Steve?”) Susie, mind you, is an RN who had worked for thirty years at the VA with veterans suffering with PTSD. She was uniquely suited to understand my situation. “Come over to my house in Albany,” she said to me on the phone. “I’ll cook for you; I’ll take care of you; I’ll get you better.”
That’s how it all began.
I had known Susan Griffiths for most of my adult life. She was, in fact, David’s only sister. As such, she had been like a sister to me for forty years, from the time David and I had become partners during graduate school. Susie’s kids were like nieces and nephews to me. Susie’s son Matthew, now grown and married, had snuggled into bed with David and me from the time he could crawl. I had always been “Uncle Steve” to Susie’s children, and I still was.
When I woke up that first morning at her home (Susie had generously given me her big four-poster bed), I opened my eyes in a kind of fog. Where was I? Staring back at me from the wall across the room from the bed were, ack! pictures of Leroy and Florence Griffiths—David and Susie’s parents. My ex-parents-in-law. Holy shit! I rubbed my eyes. Was this a dream? Roy and Florence? (Leroy and Florence had been like parents to me when they had been alive, especially during the thirteen years David and I had spent together.) I had a long moment of confusion. Where was I?
Then I got it: Oh my God. I’m back.
I’m back in the Griffiths family.
5
I was sick with a cold, and ridiculously weak (later on, we discovered that in addition to everything else, I had undiagnosed Lyme disease) that first morning at Susie’s house. So I spent a couple of hours in bed just musing. I felt warm and comforted—safely held and soothed in the big bed, surrounded by images of Susie’s family. It was the best I’d felt for months. I realized that I did indeed have a family—this family that I had cultivated for so many years in my twenties and thirties. I’d almost forgotten about it: Florence. Roy. David. Susie. Matthew. The little dog, Timmy. Here was a real safe haven. Here again was the family I had adopted early in my life, cultivated carefully for a time—and had wisely kept.
And what a family it was.
Sue’s father, Roy Griffiths (and his father before him), had been a baker, a cook, and had run a high school kitchen. He was a smart guy with some creative aspirations that he never quite realized. (He was probably the first guy in America to try selling frozen cookies. But he was about ten years ahead of his time. The home freezer had not yet become popular—“otherwise, he’d have been a multimillionaire” goes the family narrative.) Roy was the guy with the massive shed out behind the house, filled with tools and a complete woodworking shop, and plans for all sorts of improvements to the house. He was the guy, too, whose workshop kept getting farther and farther from the house, so that he could avoid his wife, Florence, as much of the day as humanly possible. (Florence—not to be evaded—eventually had a phone system wired into the shed. “Roy, what are you doing back there? Roy! Roy?! Pick up the damned phone!”)
Roy had tried his best to help David and me with fatherly advice while we were in graduate school, making loving—and practical—suggestions about our careers. He once suggested that we become long-distance truck drivers. “Hell. It’s secure. Lots of money. You can make big bucks.” David had recently graduated from Brown University, I from Amherst College. We looked at each other, puzzled, and put the truck-driving gig on the back burner, just in case grander plans did not work out. Who knew? They hadn’t worked out for Roy.
Sue’s mother, Roy’s wife, Florence, had been a school nurse. She was warmhearted and strong and determined as an ox. Once, early on in my relationship with David, Florence threw me around on a cabaret dance floor while we were on a vacation together in Florida. We danced (well, she danced, and I hung on) a strange, lopsided version of the polka, and some kind of weird waltz. There was no question that Florence was in charge—even though she did not have the remotest idea what the steps were. I realized then that in addition to powerful shoulders, my new mother-in-law had a will of iron. When we walked back to the table together, Roy—understanding that I had just had “the Florence experience”—said with a guffaw, “She’s all guts, isn’t she, Steve?” This was new territory for me. Not my high WASP family. It was fun. It was alarming.
Before I dragged my depressed and confused ass to Susie’s that winter, I had called David to tell him that I was going to stay with his sister for a while. “Susie’s gonna cook for me,” I recounted. “She says she’ll get me better.” David (we had long since reconciled from our breakup and by this time had been good friends for years) said to me, “You’re only gonna want to stay a week or two. You won’t be comfortable there at all. You’re gonna want to get back home quickly.”
Hmmm. Not really.
Instead, I snuggled in. It was heaven. Timmy-the-dog burrowed into bed with me. I was surrounded by my books. I had meals in front of the television with Sue. For months, we spent our evenings watching Hallmark movies, and I frequently cried unabashedly at the most pathetic scenes, holding tight to Timmy.
I was finally convalescing.
The medicine at Sue’s was simple: I felt safely held and soothed. Secure. Loved. I had found asylum. I exhaled.
Within two weeks of my residency at Susie’s, I had a momentary flash of insight: I should stay right here. There is something here that I desperately need. How can I convey this to you emphatically enough? Susie and I simply clicked. We loved living together. Who could have imagined? It was just a great fit. She: nurturing, loving, easygoing, very social—welcoming everyone. She: laughs easily and is flummoxed by almost nothing in the wide world. She: a nest builder par excellence. I: neurotic, highly disciplined, wedded to a schedule, generous, fun, yes, I think, and funny, but also very focused on my work; pretty social, like Sue, but also with a strong introvert side, needing lots of quiet and space. I: not emotionally avoidant per se, but certainly careful about distance. I: controlled, and maybe wrapped kind of tight.
Who can explain these things? It worked between Sue and me. It just worked.
Susie was the classic “found object” about which Winnicott writes at length. Remember our lesson from earlier in the book: The object cannot be forced on the child. The child must find the object himself. Why? Because the self and the love object fit together according to rules, laws, and subtly communicated psychic DNA that not even the most sophisticated computer system could sort out. The right object is found when our internal radar says it is found. Period.
No one from the outside can really tell what love object actually fits. Only you can tell. Only you know who has the key to your particular heart (Winnicott would say, your particular “object needs”). Only you know a perfect fit when you feel it. This is surely why they call it chemistry. The surprise: It’s very likely to be absolutely nothing like what you imagined it would be. Nothing at all like your fantasies. You simply can’t make these things up.
7
Within six months, I had sold my house and moved permanently into Sue’s raised ranch in suburban Albany. At first, it was all about sharing space—sharing a lovely friendship, sharing the dogs, sharing our history together as family. And let’s face it, for me it was about feeling safely held and soothed.
By the time of the renovation, six years after my arrival, it was fully about sharing our lives. We had slowly and almost unwittingly become partners in life. Not sexual partners, I say again. I was fully gay. She was fully straight, divorced, and had been happily single. But neither of us was interested in flying solo all the way into old age. Voila. Life had presented us with an innovative solution. The surprise blessing of a found object! As one of my friends said (trying to find a recognizable touchstone for this relationship), “You’re Will and Grace.” Well, okay, yeah. Older. But actually, way better.
The renovation had sealed the deal. I now owned half the little house on Westmorland Terrace. We shared everything fifty-fifty. We would soon be calling each other “Honey” and “Dear.” (Not yet—or hopefully ever—“Mother” and “Father” as my parents did in their old age—or, God forbid, “Mommy,” as Ronald Reagan reportedly called Nancy.) Jokes abounded: When I was waking up in the recovery room after a colonoscopy, the nurse went into the waiting room to find Sue, and said, “Mrs. Cope, you can come in now.” And over and over again. At church. Mrs. Cope. At the dry-cleaners. Mrs. Cope.
Well, Sue was not quite Mrs. Cope. But almost. And certainly as near to Mrs. Cope as I would ever get.
No one could quite believe our arrangement, of course. (I just now have on my night table a brilliant book entitled Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages, by Katie Roiphe. Susie and I could have been marriage number eight in this book.) Actually, I myself found our arrangement to be perfectly natural. But Susie continually marveled. For the first two years—really, two years—she regularly said, “I still can’t believe we live together.”
8
Of course, Susie and I had a tremendous amount in common. Anybody could see that. We had both been in failed marriages. We had both been pretty seriously traumatized by divorce. We had both flown solo for decades after our divorces. But, still, we both loved companionship. We were both social beings, and loved that our house had become a social hub. We loved that there were people coming and going all the time. We loved to give big dinners around the dining room table—and to “talk, talk, talk,” as Forster’s character Maurice had so wisely said. We loved to give movie nights. And we loved that the little house was full not just of people, but of animals as well.
At the same time, both Susie and I yearned for our own space. We had our boundaries well set, and the renovation clinched it. I basically lived upstairs in a suite of rooms, and she lived downstairs. We each had our own domains. But, still, magically, we lived together. It was a small house, but it worked remarkably well.
9
None of this could possibly have been planned. In late middle age, Susie and I had developed an almost effortless partnership. With David, quite honestly, everything had been difficult, an almost constant battle. In the weeks after breaking up, I remember saying over and over again to my friends: “But I tried so hard.” And over and over again: “I tried so hard.” As if it were all about trying. And I really had tried hard. But no one had told me that it didn’t have to be so hard—and that probably all of that trying was the red flag David and I needed to see that the project was doomed.
And now this: a relationship that was actually happy. A relationship that was fun—fun almost every day. An easy, natural partnership—for the first time, really, in my life. And I hadn’t done anything in particular to earn it. I mean, I hadn’t really even pursued it. Rather: life had done it. (One of my best friends, Adam, always says: “let life do it.” Well, life had done it.)
Susie and I both agreed: It was “a God thing.” Only God could have put the puzzle pieces together like this. We say it now to our friends who don’t understand: “It’s a God thing.”
10
John Purnell, in the months before his death, had, I believe, some of the happiest times of his life. He marveled at his own late-in-life transformation. He laughed. He played. He cavorted. He romped. He joked. His sense of humor soared. Everyone, both my friends and his, noticed it: this guy, this priest guy, was fun!
John and I, at the time of his death, had been best friends for six years. I’m convinced that our friendship—and really, his friendship with both David and me, and our whole circle of friends—had changed him. Had called him forth. Had sustained him. Who knew? I had been his “found object”! Turns out, all he needed was a best friend—a deep experience of containment, of twinship. (As he himself had put it: “Daily nearness to love.”) And we had found one another.
Just weeks before John Purnell died, he and I had finished serving a particularly moving mass together at All Saints. We had both cried in front of the altar. Unabashedly sobbed, really, out of joy. This was a common occurrence for us at mass. At the gate of heaven.
As John took off his vestments later in the vestry, he winked at me.
“Weeping may endure for a night,” he said, quoting scripture, “but joy cometh in the morning.”