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My article is a very personal one. It is based on my recently published memoir, City of One, which tells a story of parental death in childhood. I will use this opportunity to interweave some of the conflicting viewpoints on childhood mourning, both from psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic writings, with my own experiences. My memoir touches on many of the themes that appear in the professional literature, and follows them from my earliest childhood memories through my life today.
My first exposure to death came when I was three years old and my father was fatally stricken with a cerebral hemorrhage caused by an undiagnosed brain tumor. My half-brother was five, and my mother was two months pregnant with my younger sister. My father had been the sole wage earner, and had left little money. My mother's parents moved in with us to help out with finances and child care. Two years later, my grandfather died suddenly, and shortly after that, my mother developed breast cancer. She underwent multiple surgeries and other disfiguring treatments, until she succumbed to lung metastases when I was eleven. Of the four adults who had raised me, now only my grandmother remained.
Throughout this entire series of events, my mother and I maintained a pact of silence. As a child, I believed this protected us, and that we would simply fall apart and stop functioning if we discussed our experiences with illness and death, however obvious their impact on our lives. I quote from the memoir.
I stared down her housedress as she bent over to bathe me. One breast moved with the motion of her scrubbing me. Where the other would have been, there was just a scar. Something frightening had happened; I just didn't know what. I could see the evidence—the bandages covering one part of her
* Columbia University Department of Psychiatry at New York State Psychiatric Institute.
Paper presented at the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, New York, NY, January 7, 2000.
Page 137body and then another, the swollen arm—