It was an ordinary day at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The children were learning, the teachers were teaching. Life was at its best in the simplicity of everyday classes guiding the small children one step further in the long journey ahead of them.
Then, in a brief and unthinkable moment, there were 20 small corpses and six adults dead. A frenetic shooter had wiped out their lives in less time than it takes to think about it. The children's journey was not to be completed, their lives taken away. Their wounded, unresponsive bodies would never again stir with the natural excitement of a living child. Earlier in the morning when their parents took them to school, they were talking about their friends, their homework, their plans for the day, their little faces smiling, questioning, engaged with the life of the moment. That is how the parents entrusted them to the school.
A few hours later the police brought the parents to recognize the children's lifeless bodies. The unfathomable silence of death stared at them from their sons' and daughters' completely unresponsive bodies, cold, and possessed by the horrifying rigor mortis announcing decay and final disappearance. The horror of death, in particular unexpected and senseless death, especially that of a defenseless and innocent child confronts and defies every resource of the psyche to face and grasp it.
In 1915 Freud in Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, described:
our complete collapse when death has struck down someone whom we love—a parent or a partner in marriage, a brother or a sister, a child or a close friend. Our hopes, our desires and our pleasures lie in the grave with him, we will not be consoled, we will not fill the lost one's place.
Death and the dead person are not representable. We register the unresponsive dead body but cannot imagine a dead person, a dead child. The unconscious, Freud says, does not register death. It makes sense to me that is the case from the psychoanalytic point of view. The dead are more than their living bodies: They have become an essential and irradicable presence in our representational reality of affectively invested objects. They are part of ourselves as much as we are part of ourselves. Confronted now with their physical disappearance, we must find ways to reorganize ourselves and find a way of burying the body without losing the person.
The immediate presence of chaplains of all faiths in times of tragedy testifies that people need their presence, in spite of Freud's agnostic efforts to convince us that we must accept death as the natural part of life. It is not only a religious need that welcomes them: It is a psychical need as manifested in culturally varied beliefs about some type of afterlife. The deceased person that continues living in the bereft's mind must be located in a resting place. My work with mourning patients years ago taught me there is a “geography of the dead,” a realm where the grieving may place at rest what still “lives” of the loved one whose body, whether in a cemetery or reduced to ashes, has lost all possibility of a much needed relatedness.
The simple fact is that no matter how much company or consolation we offer to a bereft parent s/he is alone in confronting the unbearable silence of the dead child. Each person begins the process of mourning from complex layers of actual and intrapsychic situations in relation to the lost child. The first issue is the anguished questions: Why was the child killed? Why my child? Did I protect him well enough? Did I love her as much as she needed? Did I do well by her? and other burning questions. The painful search for answers seeks witnesses to assist with the responses. Sooner or later, the questioning reaches, in those who believe, the divine being.
God, the personal god of each person, is called upon to witness and to answer for the divine participation in the tragedy, either to be blamed or to request assistance and fortitude. Neither the divine being nor the chaplains that represent God's presence can answer these deeply painful questions. Therapists have no answers either. All these helpers can do is to be there and to walk with the mourning person the meandering path of her or his process of making peace with the bodily absence of the dead child and the non-erasable life of the child in the parental psyche.
…we must find ways to reorganize ourselves and find a way of burying the body without losing the person.
The child of the mind has to be mourned at many complex affective and factual levels: the state of love between parent and child at the moment of death, the lost joys, the reawakened guilt, the heartbreak of the lost dream for his future life, the sadness of never seeing her life developing to adulthood, the never to be conceived grandchildren and other regrets. The divinity too has to be confronted and the therapist is well advised to allow the person to walk the uneasy path of facing the disruption of whatever relation the father or mother had with his or her personal god. The task is to witness the pain, the conflicts, the rage, the blaming, the disappointment, the longing for protection, the wish in the believer to entrust the psychic child to God, and many other similar issues. Our witnessing requires that we aid the person to achieve a critical and difficult reorganization of the life that was known until the tragic moment: to help each parent to find a resting place in relation to all involved, the child, the parent, the divinity, the bereft family, the community, and even the perpetrators.
This mourning process calls for all the empathy and tact a therapist is capable of. Freud's recommendation of never imposing one's view stands firm in here. The therapist must enter the internal reality of the person with the profoundest respect, with true suspension of unbelief, and the disposition to go with the parent to any psychical reality that would allow her or him to find an internal space to be at peace with the dead child. Truly, a most difficult task.
When the criminal, senseless, and tragic death of many people, particularly the completely innocent children, confronts the community, it faces the unbearable loss of societal protection and experiences the protracted fear of the unexpected repetition of
Ana-María Rizzuto, M.D., is a training and supervising analyst at the PINE Psychoanalytic Center. Her books include The Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study and The Dynamics of Human Aggression, co-authored with W.W. Meissner and Dan H. Buie.
unpredictable murder This condition could create phobic avoidances that cripple everyday life. The therapist faces here another issue not less difficult than the others that Freud clearly pointed out to all of us: Life offers no insurance against pain or death. We all must learn a measure of living dangerously without demanding absolute protection against the power of natural disaster or human destructiveness. Witnessing here calls for elaborating preexisting internal conflicts that add fear to potential dangers and a good amount of empathic and well-founded reality testing to help the person to return to the routines of daily life.
The hardest task in this double witnessing about internal processes and actual reality is the capacity to remain fully present to the bereft persons at the moments when their pain and the communal pain cut to the core of our own being because we too are grieving the dead children. Remaining psychically present to the parents during those excruciating moments offers the living witnessing they need to tolerate, elaborate, and integrate their own pain.