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Shortly after the eruption of the deadly coronavirus pandemic in early 2020, Dr X, one of our very close colleagues in the mental health profession, lost both her father and her mother within a matter of days from this dreadful infection. The father had just celebrated his 99th birthday and the mother had recently turned 98 years of age. Although we all experienced much sadness after learning of this tragic news, it relieves me to report that this very stable, highly sturdy, and well-psychoanalysed colleague revealed that she did not feel at all traumatized by this dual loss as she had already spent many decades on the couch preparing to say goodbye to her increasingly elderly parents. As Dr X confessed to me, ‘Losing Mum, at the age of 98, and Dad, at the age of 99, hardly came as a shock’. Needless to say, our comrade firmly wished that her parents had passed away quietly at home in their sleep, rather than in hospital beds on ventilators, but, nevertheless, Dr X managed to say goodbye and to celebrate the long and rich lives of these much-loved caregivers.
But what do we do when someone far younger than these nonagenarians disappears from our world with no time at all for preparation? And how do we cope should that person be our spouse, with whom we had planned to spend many years more?
Two very brave and highly generous British psychotherapists, Sasha Bates and Juliet Rosenfeld, have recently published gripping memoirs about the sudden losses
of their beloved husbands. I had the privilege of studying these two volumes in preparation for an ‘in conversation’ with both authors at the Freud Museum London, and I must confess that I have never read such touching and such enlightening books.
Sasha Bates had enjoyed a deeply loving marriage to her sprightly and healthy husband Bill, a former actor who eventually became the director of a communications business. A passionate athlete, Bill ate healthy food, such as kale, and he kept himself fit by participating in multip