#1 Telling My Story

I grew up in a traumatic narcissistic family cult. My father, a grand and imposing genius, orchestrated and constructed the lives of his wife and daughters. His wife, dutiful, supported his grandiose sense of importance, neglecting her children. Her neglect was made worse by her depression. Grief is something I have always known. I carry a grief for a loss of my own personhood begun the day I was born, and a childhood appropriated by my parents. That grief is stitched into every thread of my existence. I lived a fabulous childhood, all over the world, experiencing incredible places and having amazing opportunities. The only condition was that I never show myself in full view of my family. What was required of me in order to participate, was that I remain the dutiful, well-behaved child who reflected my father’s illusions, designed and cultivated in order to prop up his sense of insecurity and his own early childhood neglect. I never dared show my true nature because it was always belittled and attacked.

In high school I developed eating disorders as I struggled to separate myself from the self my father had constructed for me. Ultimately, the struggle to gain autonomy was too much and I took a massive overdose and leaned into the oblivion that would allow me to escape the constant pain. I survived my suicide but would forever be punished for having spoken up. I was shamed and wore a family scarlet letter; I was the failure; too sensitive. I moved on with my life, went to college, married, had a child, and built a home, carrying my shame and my assigned worthlessness with me.

My son was diagnosed with autism soon after my first husband left me following an affair.  In many ways my son’s diagnosis saved me from the despair of the divorce.  His condition gave me purpose and a reason to get out of bed when I couldn’t imagine having the motivation to do so otherwise.  My son’s diagnosis helped me escape a lifetime of numbness and taught me the power of connection. My son’s diagnosis was, in many ways, the beginning of my life, because while I could betray and abandon myself to my family cult, I could not do that to my child. He deserved better even if I hadn’t.

In 2014, my second husband had emergency heart surgery to replace a bi-cuspid heart valve he didn’t even know he had, let alone that it was failing. When he awoke from the anesthesia his entire personality had shifted and I lost my husband in the blink of an eye, even as his body continued to share my life and my home for many years to come.

In 2015, my mother died unexpectedly of a stroke.  She had been living with Alzheimer’s and we had expected that to be the cause of her death, a slow and agonizing decent.  Her death taught me things I had not expected to learn, most significantly, how this quiet woman resided so deeply in me and how much the things I admired in her were actually things I knew in myself.  In many ways I came to know her more richly after her death.  The grief, at first overpowering and unbearable, became a place of learning for me and I found grief not to be only a searing pain and a longing ache, but also a place of discovery.

Five years later, my father, seemingly immortal, was given a sudden diagnosis of cholangiocarcinoma, or cancer of the gall bladder.  It is a rare and terminal disease, not usually detected until it has become overwhelming to the body, in my father’s case, causing multiple tumors on his liver.  At the age of 93 he fully expected to overcome it and continue his work.  I did not, and so moved in with him at my childhood home to care for him in the last months of his life.

This of course was occurring while the world descended into the strange psychedelic world of COVID. My personal grief became utterly confused and intertwined with a global grief as we all struggled to find a new way to live intractably governed by fear and distrust.

While all these losses were occurring, I also was experiencing a different kind of loss.  My husband, no longer the sweet and gentle man I married, irreparably damaged by childhood abuse and trauma, descended into a kind of mental illness he was powerless to recover from.  Unable to bear the horror of his own family and instead of learning skills to bear the unbearable, he began creating elaborate constructed realities in order to cope.  Triggered by his near death experience and heart surgery, he began a 7-year descent that took our little family of three into a multitude of different directions, until ultimately the constructed reality he chose to live in was one where I was what was the thing most unbearable and his abusive family essential.  While he did not die, the grief I experienced losing the man I loved to insanity and altered realities, was as devastating as the previous losses. One month after my father died, my husband left me, declaring me, the person who had patiently nursed him through unemployment, heart surgery, and multiple hospitalizations in various mental hospitals, unbearable. He threatened me, and accused me of horrible crimes. He divorced me in two states, using the most vicious of lawyers, preventing me from collecting my belongings, finally shipping me the contents of our house in mismatched, unlabeled boxes, important files and trash intermingled. My new home felt like it was being crushed by the weight of his newly acquired superiority and entitled disgust and repugnance for me. 18 months later I still could not bear to finish the process of sorting through thirty years of history and garbage. I stash boxes in corners and try to live around the visible disorder.

Strangely, the loss of my husband was tempered by the fact that his personality had died in 2014, so in essence I had already grieved the loss of him, but the divorce triggered chaos that I still struggle to organize. I had to suddenly buy myself and my son, about to graduate college, a new home. I had to live without my belongings, piecing together tax returns and doing battle with insurance companies who wouldn’t send me paperwork unless I received them at the home my husband was threatening me from. I lost my father, my husband, my marriage, my community, my friends, my art network, my gardens, my routines, my hidden copses in the trees, my familiar hikes, my favorite shops, my history, my dreams, my hope, my plans, and everything in between in one minute a month after my father had died.

In between these catastrophic losses I was also experiencing the losses that occur every day.  I had miscarriages and an accident that left me in a wheelchair for a time. I lost homes when I divorced, chose to move, and had to move.  I lost friends who stopped speaking to me, had intimacies broken, and affections abandoned.  I lost hopes and dreams faster than I could hope and dream them anew.

A year after my divorce, as I tried to settle into my new house, now populated by the many mismatched boxes, I went overseas to rebuild my work in Asia stalled out by the travel embargoes of COVID. It was a joyous three months and I stopped looking so haggard and began laughing again. As I returned home, exhausted and cautiously hopeful, I was met by a sister blinded by impotent and unresolved issues with our father and profound self-absorption, who felt unable to work with me and our other sister, and who decided that she “had” to break up our family foundation so that she could have “autonomy” to do the charitable work she wanted to do, destroying both our parents’ gift to us and the world, and damaging all the work I had just done in Asia. Like a set of dominoes put into motion, our entire family was destroyed. I could no longer swallow my own disgust after a lifetime of her bullying and stopped speaking to her. I had endured a lifetime of rage she had visited on me for the crime of being born; her need to murder my soul palpable in every interaction so that I barely reacted anymore to the cruel and diminishing things she said to me every time we spoke. Her response to my no longer answering her incessant emails and texts was to launch a “family reunion” that summer. My family celebrated their unity and took family photos pointedly erasing my absence. It was as if I never existed. Three generations of my family gathered without me and all I could think of was the adage, “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound?” I had been completely erased by my family in a single weekend. They had apparently not even noticed my estrangement from them. These losses and betrayals both deep and small, are the kind that one never gets over, because the build-up to the rupture occurs over decades and is accumulated in so many myriad forms it is like an ocean accumulated by individual drops of water.

I had taken a lover after my divorce, an old friend who had declared his love for me, a love he had carried for over 15 years. I felt grateful and joyous to have the opportunity to explore love again at middle age when I had given up that love would ever find me or me it. We had a passionate, playful, joy-filled two years experimenting in a non-attached, pure love that was not about possession and ownership until the consequences of his choice had repercussions we could not anticipate. My lover and I ended our relationship in order for him to manage the chaos that his choice to leave his marriage had created. While not as great a loss as some of the previous losses, I felt the brunt of this one possibly more than the others because it has come so honestly and purely and there was no hate or anger or cancer to precede it.

And then, the most glorious of losses a mother can endure. My son bought his own house, and moved on with his life, bravely having hope in his own future, and dreams of his own.

After a decade of never-ending waves of emotional destruction, after a decade of coping through becoming numb and powering through it all, I suddenly could no longer cope. I had used numbness as armor to survive and deal when, in fact, I was feeling with excruciating pain. But I knew I could no longer live if I remained numb. I was alone, and scared, and hopeless, and broken and I could not move forward. I was suicidal. I could not find a reason for anything. I could not imagine a future, could not imagine building anything knowing it would also be destroyed like everything I had already built. I could not feel at all. I knew I needed help because the suicidal thoughts made emotional and rational sense and I could find nothing to give purpose to getting up in the morning and continuing to breathe. After a life like mine, death made more sense than remaining alive.

Then the crying began. Uncontrollable crying all the time. In the grocery store, in meetings. Halfway up the stairs. After being numb for so long the feelings were unbearable. I now understood why I had been numb. Anguish overwhelmed me in waves within waves. I could not breathe, I was sick. My body hurt where the emotions were situated. Holding this much pain, holding this much pain that had occurred for no good reason, was dizzying. I prayed for the numbness to return but it would not. I distracted, I wrote, I paid my bills, I tried shocking my body into being present and alive by swimming in the cold Atlantic waters naked. I drank, I smoked, I danced. Nothing provided me relief from the unrelenting numbness, the pain, and the despair. I needed help, I could no longer keep myself afloat.

I leaned on my friends, my son, my therapist, the kindness of strangers, the landscapes I nestled myself into, finally reaching out to a friend with an intimate knowledge of grief. Not only had her daughter and nephew died, but she knew a variety of her own losses, and she worked with parents who faced their children’s suffering and death. She not only knew grief personally, she chose to walk in the world of grief embracing its wisdom. Knowing she could give me no answers, I asked her for signposts, lifelines, things that would help me find my way through towards integrated grief. She led me in the direction of a few ideas, and I have picked up those threads to find my own path towards the integration of my grief.

This is my story. I am writing it hoping that it will have an ending. Hoping that this won’t just be a litany of pain. I suppose this blog is my first act of faith in a long time.