The Bereavement

continued

been strangers. You lost your parents as surely as though they had died in a car crash." Worse than a car crash for my emotional health, he believed, since the "bereavement" went unrecognized.

Would this small episode really be enough, I've wondered, to account for lifelong feelings of insufficiency? I think of people I know who suffered actual trauma early in life-whose parents really did die, or who were abused, neglected, abandoned-yet emerged as self-respecting adults. Could a mother and father's absence for just a few months really cast such a long shadow?

Dr. Kazan, at any rate, believed it could. "Babies, you know from having three of your own, are self-centered little creatures. To a baby, especially right around the first birthday when we start becoming aware of ourselves as separate persons, if the mother goes away, it's his fault. The message to the psyche is, I'm not good enough."

Meanwhile, in Europe, Mother had become pregnant again. Ill, unable to keep down the unfamiliar French food, she spent miserable weeks in a hotel room, and a worse week in a rocking berth coming back across the Atlantic. Her parents brought me to the pier in New York to meet the ship. When Mother and Daddy left,I had been crawling. While they were gone I'd not only started to walk but, as Mother recalled, was running up and down the dock, both grandparents in pursuit.

"I looked over the ship's railing and saw you," she told me once, many years later, "and I just groaned."

I understood that groan; at the time of this conversation I was chasing my own toddler. And I understood a little more about the melancholy that enveloped me as a child. That groan, the sense of being unwelcome in my world, can still echo in my inward ear like an old cracked record, even today when the music of my soul is very different.        <<< end