How Freud helps me to mourn my husband’s death.

- How Freud helps me to mourn my husband’s death | Life and style | The Guardian
Augusta Ford was used to dealing with grief and loss in her work as a psychotherapist. Then her husband died. Would her years of experience help in her own grieving process?
One mild December day in 2013, mid-afternoon, he was diagnosed with a symptomless cancer. I had finished with my patients and checked my phone at 5.30pm to see what we were doing for supper. I knew he had been to see our GP the previous day seeking an ultrasound for a sore knee (the result of decades of intense sport and exercise) but had not quite registered that he had also asked our doctor to feel an odd little pearl-sized lump in his neck. His text read: “5.30pm need you to see Dr with me. Please come.”
I ran from our house to the surgery, without a coat, leaving music practice undone and my children unexpectedly playing Minecraft on a school night. Twenty minutes later, our life was completely different.

He decided not to tell anyone and, reluctantly, I agreed. We told our children, families and a few close friends. He was going to be all right, he said to me often and forcefully, and to tell people about it would only stop him doing what he wanted to do. I see this now as an important form of denial, which enabled him to split off the gravity of his situation. I also see now that, from the very beginning, I never really believed he would survive.

In the remaining 14 months of his life (for that was all he got) we lived as usual – with hope, with work, with plans, with a building project, with holidays, with buying a new house for our future. We had children, so there was no choice. You cannot do the school run with death in the air, as you squabble about Today or Heart on the radio.

He had treatments and then ... an all clear! We celebrated and then quickly forgot, continuing as before, as if nothing had happened. He was so bloody lucky, he often said. He started a new company and worked 17-hour days. Back in life again.
I saw my patients as usual, trying to achieve the free hovering attention that Freud described as necessary. By and large, I succeeded. When my husband died, I stopped work for several months, and told patients the “close relative” I was caring for had passed away, and I needed time off.

Life for therapists changed with the internet and my patients returned having read my husband’s obituaries. I accepted their sympathy and kindness. And got on with the sessions. My professional worry was their concern for me, that I might not appreciate their anguish and pain, because of what they knew had happened to me. No matter, said my supervisor, we work with what we have in the room.

As a psychotherapist I work with grief and loss routinely. I noted that in the 14 months between finding out that Saul had cancer and his death, cancer kept on entering my consulting room, too, in the material brought by patients. The situation at home became more serious, but each time I sat down for a session I realised I was able to forget what was going on in our bedroom and kitchen, the hours of fearful discussions between Saul and me. I could still work with other people’s sadness and anxiety.

My training, and my own years of analysis, meant that I was able to distinguish between my own tragedy and those of my patients. I was and am so grateful for the balm of work. I have been asked, and continuously ask myself, whether this training, this work, is helping me now, as I am confronted with the greatest loss I could have sustained. I think the answer is yes. I became aware in the hours shortly after Saul’s death as I sat motionless on the journey home from the US that I felt I had witnessed the Death Drive for the first time. I remember trying to calm myself by remembering in what year Freud had written the paper first proposing the Death Drive. It was 1920, originally described in Beyond The Pleasure Principle where he wrote of the “opposition between the ego or death instincts and the sexual or life instincts”. The death drive, he is saying, is the opposite of the human tendency towards survival, sex and the other life-producing drives.
This was the familiar presence I had felt in the room with him that morning: “a death instinct, which is to lead organic life back into the inorganic state”. Saul had gone from being alive to being dead and this was the only way I could understand it. Death is impossible to comprehend. Six hours before, my husband had been alive, warm, brown-eyed, handsome, breathing, looking at me. Now he was dead. How can a human being make sense of this?

When I returned to analysis three days after Saul had died, I told my own analyst that I thought he had always known Saul was going to die, but he had listened to me all year as I tried to pretend, hopefully, that this was not the case. “All I had was the information you gave me,” he said. It was then that I realised I had been complicit in denying the possibility that Saul would die. It had simply been unthinkable.

A few weeks after Saul’s death someone emailed to say that I should feel free to call them, “when the midnight horrors struck”. I have not experienced midnight horrors, or panic. But I recognise that I am in a state of deep, deep grief and mourning. Dreams quickly came - and still do - where Saul walks ahead of me and then away from me. One night he passed the end of our bed, ignoring me, busy going elsewhere. I did not bother to interpret these too deeply. A walk next to our house in the neighbouring park and he is just ahead of me, I call him and he does not look back, but disappears into the crowds thronging the central thoroughfare.

What has brought me comfort, in this bleakest time of my life, is not faith but having a precise clinical framework to refer to, to explain what is going on. Most importantly, at this stage, I know that there is a difference between mourning and depression. I am not depressed, for this sadness takes place in my conscious mind. In depression, a loss is grieved that feels impossible to understand. Thus, in the consulting room, a patient will often say they have no idea why they feel as they do, and weeks and months go by while we wait to find out.

I am sad, extremely sad, with good reason. This long and painful process is that of saying goodbye for ever to someone who is no longer alive. I will never see Saul again and I must now learn to fully believe that.

Freud has precise instructions for the mourner. In 1917, in his elegiac paper Mourning and Melancholia, Freud articulated the first description of the difference between depression and mourning. I will continue to want my husband back but after a while the reality of his absence will permeate and I will stop clinging to him; hoping he is still alive and with me, when he is not and never will be. Freud remarks that it will be a painful, time-consuming process but, at the end of it, “the ego becomes free and uninhibited again”.

I am a long way from there, but the trajectory that Freud describes began as Saul left me for ever under the stark strip lights of that foreign hospital room. I had to believe he was dead, but to accept it has taken much longer. His absence is still such a gigantic presence. I try to explain this to my sons; this is why we feel so sad, why the house feels so strangely empty.

The psychotherapist me does have some certainties. I will not always feel this bad and I know now that the internalised Saul I carry around with me gave me a blueprint of a relationship. I have known deep happiness in the couple state, thanks to him. We were profoundly happy, so there is little ambivalence to be borne, no anger about having loved him more, or wishing I had been loved more. I am aware of what I had, what it was and how we were. This I hold tightly in certainty. My good object.

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