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Young Senior Elder Member
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 11,298
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Young Senior Elder Member
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 11,298
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We Find A Place
"We find a place for what we lose," wrote Sigmund Freud to Ludwig Binswanger after the death of his friend's son. "Although we know
that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute.
No matter what may fill the gap, even if it will be filled completely, it
nevertheless remains something else."
Some say survivors never recover from a suicide. "Life is back to normal, but normal is different now," says a man whose son hanged himself. "Normal will never be the normal it was before a year ago." A man whose teenage daughter killed herself two years ago says it helps him to think of his grief as a physical handicap: "Some people can't see, some people wan't walk, and I can't seem to enjoy life," he says matter-of-factly.
We never really essentially get over anything. We resolve it in such a way that we can go on."
Certainly, the sheer weight of the pain eases with time. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert describes a young widower's passage from suicidal depression to something approaching normalcy:
Ah well, slowly but surely, one day chasing another, spring on top of winter, autumn on top of summer, it leaked away, drop by drop, little by little; it left, it went away - it sank down, I should say, because there's always something stays, at the bottom, so to speak...a weight there, on the chest! But it's the same for all of us, we mustn't let ourselves go, and want to die just beause others are dead.
The Enigma of SUICIDE by George Howe Colt
chapter 8......A Place for What we Lose.
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