Eulogy For Rose Spiegel, M.D.

WHEN I LEARNED THAT ROSE was seriously ill I thought, “No . . . this can’t be” I think that that denial would have been typical of each one of us, on hearing the news. Not Rose! But it was true; I quickly realized this when I went to Lenox Hill Hospital to see her.

She lay there quietly, not appearing to be in pain or distress. Her forehead was warm; but her hands were limp and icy. Her eyes didn’t blink—but she didn’t seem to be staring into space. She said nothing. Then she turned her head and seemed to look at my cane. I thought, “It’s the Rose I know, wondering what’s wrong with me.” I said, “Rose, you have to get well and go back to work. I have this cane because I hurt my instep and I’m getting better.”

I stood quietly for a few minutes. Then the nurse signalled me out, and as I left, I had all kinds of ambivalent thoughts: “She’ll make it . . . she won’t.” A few hours later her secretary called to tell me that Rose had died peacefully.

So a light, a beacon—one that we assumed would shine brightly forever, one that stood in our minds for “always”—went out.

We never thought it would happen to this incredible woman. She was our colleague, our model, our teacher, our supervisor, our committee member, our questioner, challenger, sometimes medical advisor, our friend for so many years. To some of us, she had been all these things since 1947, when she became the first graduate of our institute, and had begun her remarkable career in psychoanalysis, especially at White.

Her passing is a double blow and shock to us. Her brilliance had its own unique glow, and, at the same time, typified the continuous, growing, searching vitality of our psychoanalytic community. It was her gift to us, one out of her generous basket of many. And those gifts were always available, without the implicit obligation placed on the recipient.

Rose had a bulldog’s tenacious, unshakable hold on the production of ideas and their possibilities, not for their own sake, but for what she considered their