Suffering Shapes the Soul

“All I teach is suffering and the end of suffering.”

--Buddha

It is May and I am dreaming—gagging down the concrete of Sophie’s hate. She has trapped me into a thick glass jar, the way a child traps a lightning bug. The walls are cold against my shoulder as she screws the lid down, tight. Averts her eyes. Walks away. Shuts the light out.

I am locked alone, in the dark, which is as claustrophobic as the metal tunnel of an MRI. I begin to vanish, sliding backward into my childhood. I call for my mother, but she doesn’t come. This nightmare is redolent of fear. The weight of its wheels grind over my body. First my mother left me alone; then my son; now, Sophie, my closest friend.

Loss like this can pass through generations of relationships. A child who is abandoned can become an adult who fears abandonment permanently. Over time, I would learn that many kinds of attachment were not possible for me. Loss is part of abandonment, but abandonment is not necessarily a part of loss.

---

I learned about anxiety when I was two. 1955. My mother tried suicide, and I was sent to live with my aunt and uncle; captive in their home of stifled emotions, the crack of his leather belt kept all of us five children moving in perfect alignment.

After I was allowed to go back home, anxiety came regularly, pounding through my stomach—triggered by the physical fights between my parents or the arrival of the ambulances. As the flashing blue lights turned into our driveway again and again, my childhood morphed into adolescence. Acute episodes of fear rolled across me repeatedly whenever my mother tried to kill herself. Suicide rode the waves of milk and Nembutal. Each swallow of the sleeping pills sliced like a sword to my gut, hari kari, as my mother left me once again for the lockup of the hospital.

On the mental ward, she waited on her narrow twin bed, crying into a wad of Kleenex. In the game room the patients played Ping Pong and my sister went to watch. I stayed with Mom, feeding her tissues from the box on the window sill, as if I alone could staunch the tears that ran down her face. Like an adult in a child’s nursery, I blotted them all.

Later, as time passed with each attempt she made, I began to hope for an acknowledgement of all the trauma our family had endured when she left us for a more reliable and easier life in the psychiatric ward—a place where there were no children to feed, dress, bathe, love. Her parents sent a housekeeper to our family and suddenly there was no house to organize. No laundry or marketing to do. No husband, who travelled for work, but who wanted you to get well so desperately that he pressured you to come home before you were ready.

In this place, she saw only herself reflected in the small mirror hanging on the wall over her bed; she was concentrating on her own image. Only Anne. There was to be no apology, no admission that she had made a mistake. The one thing I knew at this young age was that she chose herself over us. I feared that she would never return.

---

On October 4, 1974, fear became reality. My mother killed herself at last, in the garage, with her red Cougar’s engine cranked up.

I was a senior in college, just starting to tackle my honors thesis, dealing with an overload of course work. I was mourning the loss of my boyfriend—a young man who had abandoned me shortly after her funeral. Both of these losses devastated me at different levels. I was trying to cope with my new job as Mom’s literary executor, meeting with the editors at Houghton Mifflin. Proofing galleys for the new book of poems that would come out in the spring; arguments with the obstinate jacket designer; finding the money to pay the mortgage while letting our cleaning lady of the last forty years go because I couldn’t pay her salary; trying to comfort my father, who was shattered despite the fact that Mom had divorced him only two years before; attempting to be a good big sister to Joy, who was far away in a private school in Maine. Every morning I woke up to the world crashing in around me. I was only twenty-one.

All I had left of my mother were memories—some beautiful and some tortured. Later, I would see that the wealth of poetry she had left behind unlocked her mind and her heart, and that helped me to understand her. Some of the time. As the years rolled by, a stormy ocean battering at me, I saw that with her suicide she had chosen to abandon me once more—just as she had when I was two and she sent me off to live with my aunt and uncle who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, love me.

Even while by her side when I returned home, she told her psychiatrist that I was so needy she couldn’t respond to my “demands” for attention. As she rejected me in this even more painful way, she turned to punishing me—not only with her hands but with her silence, as well. Returning home to an unstable and unavailable mother, as well as a father who was not present, I was once again alone, with no one to hug or listen to me.

I didn’t realize it, but I had begun to accept that, little by little, my life might often be marked by the loss of those I loved. My trust in others plummeted. Those incidents of abandonment, which could be small or large, became triggers in my mind and frightened me more than anything else.

---

While my mother was the first who forced me to walk by myself, there were others who were simply taken away by the vagaries of life. However, all of them created new traumas and triggers into anxiety and grief and loss.

• Three boyfriends when I was in high school and one in college.

• When I turned sixteen, my aunt Joannie, who was like a big sister to me, killed at the hands of a drunk driver while on her honeymoon.

• In 1980 and 1981, three back-to-back miscarriages rocked me like a series of earthquakes into loss.

• The death of my father’s mother, Nana, who had constantly tried to pull me through the remains of my shattered childhood, and the one who came to my rescue when I was a young woman. This loss left me bereft, and set off memories of my mother’s precipitous exit.

• I discovered Jim’s Uncle Steve, a perennial family favorite, dead in the bed of our home on Christmas day. Stroking his shoulder, I sat with him for four hours, until the coroner came to determine the cause of death.

• When I turned forty-five, my husband deserted me with a traumatic divorce, rupturing our family life, which we had created with such care, and my concomitant desire to resemble my childhood as little as possible. I plunged into darkness.

• My own mental stability became punctuated by emotions that swooped like a crazed flock of birds, from the highs of mania to the bottom-scraping lows of depression. I began to understand what my mother had endured during her truncated life.

• Over the next two years, my interior pain became urgent: I tried to kill myself, three times, and that pulled me into the mantle of my mother’s mental illness; suddenly suicide seemed like a valid choice for some people. People who seemed unable to survive the traumas of their lives, despite their best intentions.

• Bewildered at my attempts to die, my sons came to visit me in the hospital, just as I had done so many years earlier with Mother. As I lay there in the bed, I turned my face away from them. I stayed silent. I, too, had made the choice—to abandon my family. At some point, I would read Erica Jong, who said “you can’t leave your children the same legacy [that you were left with],” and I knew then that I had passed the trauma to Alexander and Nicholas. I would never rid myself of the guilt.

• Gulliver, the Dalmatian of my soul, my dearest companion after the divorce—the one who curled around me and licked my tears away, the one who brought me peace—died of an unknown illness. I was devastated: Gulliver had saved me from my depression before. I was empty now. He was gone forever. Yet another time, I wanted to give up on life.

• My father was spiraling down from undiagnosed dementia, deafness, COPD, crippling emphysema and bone on bone arthritis—all forcing him to give up his hobbies and his friends. His impending loss triggered my anxiety, and one day, while I brushed my hair in front of the mirror, I wondered how I could live through one more death or desertion, even one that had been anticipated. During my last visit to him, he died. My mourning, triggered by all the losses that had come before, was more than acute.

• Shortly after these broken connections, my best friend had a recurrence of her melanoma; after ten years of remission, it became metastatic. Christy was ground down by a pain that was agonizing. Riddled with anxiety and with her suffering, I listened as she screamed from her deathbed. My grief lasted for many years: I couldn’t put it behind me and once again I was alone and lonely.

• My sweet girl, Breeze, dam of two more of my Dalmatians—Cody and Mac—died at sixteen years old. We nicknamed her “Bright Eyes” because she always looked up at us with such a loving gaze. She had a special sparkle and a mischievous expression.

• Cody, Breeze’s first son, whom I bred and hand-raised long ago, is now acutely ill—running downhill, refusing food and losing his balance frequently, threatening to leave us any time. I have called and registered with a vet who performs euthanasia in the home. And yet, Cody goes into the yard with my husband and enthusiastically chases his toy. Now we wait. I cry every day, bury my nose in his fur, rub his ears, and look deeply into his eyes.

---

It became critically important for me to find a new, skilled psychotherapist—to begin to forgive my mother for her suicide. My inability to do so had haunted me for too many years, and I was finally facing up to the fact that I had not healed despite the four decades that had ensued since October 1974, despite nearly constant traditional psychiatric therapy. I started with a new therapist, who practiced EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy. This treatment provides desensitization, through tapping oneself, or auditory cues, and helps to guide the brain as it processes distressing memories, negative beliefs, and emotional blocks. I also began another memoir, and tackled Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide. The book helped me to remember what it had all felt like then, and what it still felt like as I wrote.

A little bit of relief came as I began to cope better with my sorrow for Christy and even, at last, for my mother. I had made a new friend—Sophie—who would turn out to be one of the most important people in my life. We were both members of “Suicide Survivors,” a group that met in the basement of a local church, and the bond between us grew and grew over the next few years. I was still working on reconciling myself with my mother’s suicide; Sophie was trying to do the same with her father’s.

Our attachment grew intense, accelerating as the months passed, even though we were dealing with our common loss in radically different ways. Through the slow work of my therapy, I was discovering that forgiving Mom was bringing me freedom and relief. But Sophie wasn’t anywhere near finding that sort of peace about her Dad’s death. I stopped trying to talk about it all with her and decided to just let her work it out on her own; I knew that I should simply cherish the fact that Sophie understood me in ways no one else ever had. I had to respect the way she was attempting to come to terms with his death—rather than insisting that what was right for me was right for her. What could matter more than our love for one another?

---

In 2022, just after I turned sixty-nine, my older son, Alexander, killed himself, alone in a hotel room with an overdose of Fentanyl. He was just forty years old. The note he left read: “This is the only way. I love you all.” I surrendered to the abandonment that had indeed become the metaphor that described my life.

Two months later, the coroner’s report recorded “suicide” as the cause of death. I wanted to think Alexander had found peace at last, after years of suffering from bi-polar disorder since he was an adolescent. I had been beaten down over the years by his emotional pain. Hoping. Trying to help. Listening. Driving him to therapist’s appointments. Comforting him through his pain and his erratic behavior.

As I counseled him, I understood all too well what was happening. I saw myself in his troubles and his talk of suicide and that, of course, brought Mother home to me. How would I ever recover from this? Would I ever be myself again? Would my life ever resume? As I sobbed in private, my body shook with the anxiety, the grief, the sure knowledge that I hadn’t been a good enough mother to save him.

Over the years, as he’d struggled with his depression, we had often discussed my mother’s suicide. I always tried to remain calm and objective; but he was an unusually empathetic child, and clearly understood what it meant for me to have had an extremely unreliable—and sometimes unavailable—mother.

However, I believed everyone had the right to choose death if they were in pain, and told him so. Did I make suicide sound too reasonable an option? When I had tried it myself, did I just confirm what he was struggling with at the time as a teenager? Hadn’t I felt about his illness as I had about my mother’s and my own, even though I never wished for the suicide both of them chose as a final solution?

As he grew through adolescence and eventually finished his applications to college, he was sometimes depressed enough to threaten to kill himself in the car in the garage. That felt as if he were being manipulative and I got angry, telling him that I didn’t know if I could survive if he did what my mother had done, to bear the terrible parallel. And then he would promise that he wouldn’t ever choose suicide—but in the end, he broke his word.

When he left me, I couldn’t remember when I had last seen him. I couldn’t remember his face. I couldn’t remember what jacket he’d worn, what supper he’d eaten in the restaurant where we met for a few hours during one of our last visits. When he’d called me for the final time—though I did not know it was final—he said, in a subdued voice, that he was not doing well. “I’m depressed,” he told me. “I’m just so sad.” I told him I was fixing dinner, which was a lie. “Can we talk tomorrow?” I asked.

But when I’d called him the next day, he hadn’t picked up the phone. I was swamped with doubt and reluctance: by then I didn’t want to hear his pain. Didn’t want to try to fix it. I shut him out of my life because sometimes he was so hard to deal with. In the end, I turned my back on him; I was so weary of the sharp ups and down of his emotions. I left him to die alone, just as I had my mother. And now…he was gone.

I was more alone than I had ever been in my life. My son had abandoned me as surely as my mother had. But I faced the fact that I had also abandoned him.

Sophie supported me throughout every detail of his death, by my side day after day. Despite the florist’s delivery driver ringing the doorbell over and over in the first few weeks, some friends began to fall out of my world. It was Sophie who cut through my grief with pats on the back, endless tissues and mugs of tea. It was my second husband, who held me when I woke in the night with nightmares of loss that terrified me. It was Nicholas, who sent me love from his home, far away, and phoned nearly every day, week after week, becoming a lifeline into my family. Somehow, with these support systems surrounding me, I became convinced that I must somehow survive the trauma of my son’s suicide.

---

Early in October of 2024, I had a Zoom session with a psychic, hoping to learn more about the losses of those I loved. She recounted a curious tale: my mother had spoken to her and asked her to bring an apology to my sister and me. She wanted to know if Joy and I would forgive her suicide.

A few nights later, in the midst of an early autumn cold snap, Sophie and I were having a glass of wine in front of a fire at her place. I told her about the exchange I’d had with the medium. “What do you make of it?” I asked her. “Have you ever thought about forgiving your Dad?”

“What do we have to forgive them for—they were the ones who hurt us!” Sophie exploded.

“I want her to forgive me,” I answered.

“For what?” she asked with anger.

“I left her alone to die. And that’s a tragedy.” I fell silent then, thinking that one of the most critical lessons I had learned from my more recent therapy was to accept our need to forgive important people in our lives, as well as to be responsive to their need to forgive us. Otherwise a lack of empathy—upon which all forgiveness is based—bites us in the butt. I had to face that despite my respect for Sophie’s feelings, it was sad that my best friend could not discover this release and the corresponding peace it might well bring her, so I didn’t respond. This lack of acceptance, I thought, would always limit her.

Empathy brings the one who comforts the gift of a “softer” heart, as well as a resilience that can shape character. Using empathy, you do not look away from others in pain—you are instead able to identify with their experiences, which are similar to yours.

---

By October, I realized that Sophie had been moving away from me ever since my EMDR therapy had begun to prove fruitful; hadn’t she been putting distance between us for a while and withdrawn in an even more profound way? We never spoke again about our disagreement at her house, and she would not discuss it further when I tried to venture to the topic the following day. Shortly afterward, she bombed our friendship into oblivion by refusing to speak to me at all.

Initially, I thought her silence was temporary, and waited to let her explain why my emotions had alienated her so violently that night. Her answer came in a text: “I’m done. Let’s not talk for a loooong time.” The woman with whom I had had such an important and fulfilling relationship for years cut me out of her life as easily as slicing a pie. Afterward, as the months of our estrangement began to mount, I counted each one. Still, I thought it better to let her heal, in silence, as she had asked, yet was certain that she must have known the obvious: pushing me away was triggering my sense of abandonment and loss. She knew that those emotions would set off an explosion inside me.

Thanksgiving went by with its cranberry and stuffing but our family table was empty of Sophie; then Christmas with its lonely sparkling tree; then New Year’s and the ubiquitous ball dropping in Times Square. As every day marched onward and our separation grew deeper, I hurt more and more. Finally the pain of it froze me in place like a granite statue.

Where was she? Who was she? What did I mean to her and she to me? A best friend, a mother, a companion, a sister, a teacher, someone with whom to laugh. I had loved Sophie as faithfully as if she were my family. How many nights did I wrestle with dreams of her as I twisted in the rat’s nest of my sheets?

February dragged in with Alexander’s birthday on the 5th. Unlike other years when Sophie and I would get together to mourn his loss and celebrate his soul, she neither called nor texted. Once again, her silence hammered into me. I broke down under this cruelty: had she forgotten about him, or had she just not cared about how upset I would be? Eventually I broke down and texted her, reminding her of the date. “What would it have cost you to text me?” I typed furiously. “Absolutely nothing.”

I hit the send arrow.

No answer.

In March, the buds on the cherry trees began to swell, but my world grew bleaker. I started to cut Sophie’s image from my life as if I were scissoring a paper doll into the trash. At last, anger flared beside pain as I began to raise my head up and fight against my isolation. In therapy, my therapist and I worked increasingly with EMDR over the loss of my closest friend. Finally, I decided that I was no longer going to sit and wait for her return. Last week, in the beginning of May, I realized that eight months had elapsed without her. We used to talk every day. I wondered how many days had gone by since we last picked up the phone. There are too many to count. Maybe I don’t really want to know.

I understand now that Sophie could not empathize with the pain she was causing—and will not allow me to apologize for whatever I have done. Over my coffee in the morning, one of the times when we most often called one another, I daydream about what I would say if she reached out. “I’m so sorry that I upset you. I would never intentionally hurt you. Please tell me what I’ve done wrong—please forgive me.”

Maybe someday Sophie and I will reach some kind of detente. I hope I will eventually forgive her for all her silence, even if we remain buried under it for a decade, even though I am too angry to do so right now. Maybe my own sense of empathy will rise up and save me from losing her forever. However, I realize she may never forgive me. Whatever I have lost in the midst of all this, I will have to find again somewhere else, maybe even with someone else. I am in the middle of learning how to let go.

I push myself up and out of that glass jar in which she had imprisoned me, taking control back—knowing now what healing will mean for me: endless attempts to put the hurt behind me, to conquer my anger and learn to live with the loss of all that is past and all that is to come. Vowing never again to abandon this power, I have now discovered that to protect it is the reward, as well as the curse, of being an adult.

In the end, suffering can be an opportunity that shapes the soul. Buddha said: “All I teach is suffering.” That suffering can end is the first “noble truth” of Buddhist philosophy. It is an unavoidable experience if we are human, though not a permanent one. Suffering doesn’t have to be a dead end—but can be a doorway into growth instead.