Encountering the Significant Dead: a Narrative Inquiry Into Grief and Dreams

Home , Dead Last, If You Change Your Mind, In the Mourning, One Son, Sense of Doubt, She Dreams

MIAMI UNIVERSITY

The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation of Jeffrey R. Schweitzer

Candidate for the Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

______Director Larry M. Leitner, Ph.D.

______Reader Roger M. Knudson, Ph.D.

______Reader Vaishali Raval, Ph.D.

______Graduate School Representative Ann Fuehrer, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT

ENCOUNTERING THE SIGNIFICANT DEAD: A NARRATIVE INQUIRY INTO GRIEF AND DREAMS

by Jeffrey R. Schweitzer

Prominent grief theorists of the 20th century, from Freud (1917) to Worden (1982), have defined the ultimate task of grief and mourning as the relinquishment of bonds with the dead. Over the past few decades, however, numerous studies have shown that the bereaved not only experience the presence of the dead, but that they also tend to find such experiences highly meaningful and even healing. That said, very few researchers have studied the continuing presence of the dead in the context of bereavement dreams. For this narrative inquiry, then, I sought to examine dreams in which the bereaved encounter their loved ones and the significance of these dreams for the grieving process. Approaching the study from a narrative (Chase, 2005) and archetypal (Hillman, 1979) perspective, my three aims were (1) to learn about the phenomenology of imaginal encounters with the dead for the bereaved, namely through dreams, and the significance of such experiences for the grieving process; (2) to examine stories of grief and loss in terms of personal and archetypal mythology; and (3) to explore, and elaborate, theoretical and methodological intersections of narrative and archetypal psychology. More generally, I wished to evocatively represent and better understand this marginalized, yet quite common, kind of grief experience by way of a narrative methodology. I interviewed four women, ranging in age from 18 to 60, who reported encounter dreams amidst the loss of a father, a mother, a grandfather, and a husband. Two of the participants, a granddaughter and her maternal grandmother, discussed the loss of the same person— grandfather and husband to them, respectively. First, all of the women reported at least one encounter dream in which they felt visited by the dead, in spite of being aware in the dream that the loved one had died. By virtue of these dreams, most of the women realized that they could have an ongoing relationship with the dead, even when the manner and frequency with which the dead appeared did not accord with their expectations. Second, to the extent that the loss was experienced as pervasive, most of the women reported significant changes to their identity, values and beliefs, and anticipations of the future as part of their grieving process. Finally, I reflected on these narratives and my analysis of them in terms of mythobiography, a genre of qualitative research involving an imaginative and non-dualistic approach to storied experiences.

ENCOUNTERING THE SIGNIFICANT DEAD: A NARRATIVE INQUIRY INTO GRIEF AND DREAMS

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to the faculty of

Miami University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Psychology

Jeffrey R. Schweitzer

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2014

Dissertation Director: Larry M. Leitner, Ph.D.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ...... v

Acknowledgments...... vi

Introduction ...... 1 Modernist Models of Grief and Mourning ...... 2 Freud ...... 2 Lindemann ...... 3 Bowlby...... 5 Parkes...... 6 Kübler-Ross ...... 7 Worden ...... 9 A Summary Critique ...... 10 Continuing Bonds Theory ...... 11 Phenomenology of Post-Death Encounters ...... 15 An Archetypal Approach to Grief and Mourning ...... 18 Archetypal Psychology ...... 18 Personifying or Imagining Things ...... 19 Pathologizing or Falling Apart ...... 20 Psychologizing or Seeing Through ...... 21 De-humanizing or Soul-making ...... 22 An Imaginal Approach to the Mourning Process ...... 23 A Backward Glance, Dionysos, and Mythic Figurations of Grief ...... 27

Method ...... 28 Storying Experience and Narrative Inquiry ...... 28 Archetypal Images and Mythic Reversion ...... 30 An Imagistic Approach to Narrative ...... 31 Amy and the Orphic Gesture ...... 33 Seeking Participants‘ Stories ...... 35 Inviting and Listening to Stories ...... 37 Inhabiting Stories ...... 39

Results ...... 45

Liza and her Dad: Narrative Collage...... 45 Liza and her Dad: Analysis ...... 82 Introduction ...... 82 Flight, Melting, the Spell of Silence: Images Show What Words Will Not Say ...... 82 Freefall, Beneath the Rubble: Why is it Hard to Talk to Dad, Why is it Hard to Talk? ...... 86 Above the Rubble: Dad and Me, Dad and Not-Me ...... 90 Conclusion ...... 91 Hannah and Ruth: Narrative Collage ...... 93 Hannah and Ruth: Analysis ...... 123 Introduction ...... 123 Remembering Ruth: Artemis, Arrows, April ...... 123 What Does It Mean When You Fall Apart? ...... 126 Grief, Pothos, and Nostalgia of the Orphan...... 132 Conclusion ...... 135 Marion, Rachel, and Tommy: Narrative Collage ...... 137 Marion, Rachel, and Tommy: Analysis ...... 186 Introduction ...... 186 Dionysos and Apollo ...... 186 Beginnings, Fate, Participation ...... 187 Goodbye, Hello ...... 190 Grief as Dismemberment ...... 192 Dionysian Mourning ...... 195 Dionysian Dreaming ...... 197 Spiritual Dreaming ...... 200 Conclusion ...... 202

Discussion ...... 204 Imaginal Encounters with the Dead ...... 205 ―Alive-Again‖ Dreams ...... 206 ―Saying-Goodbye‖ Dreams ...... 207 ―Advice-Gift-Comfort‖ Dreams ...... 208 ―Approval-Disapproval‖ Dreams ...... 209 ―Taking-a-Journey‖ and ―Daily-Activity‖ Dreams ...... 210 ―Prophetic‖ Dreams ...... 211 Dream Characteristics, Complexity, and Possibility ...... 212 Type and Quality of Relationship and Dreams ...... 213 Encounter Dreams and Semblance ...... 215 Mythic Aspects of Grief and Mourning ...... 217

iii

Grief, Hades, and the Underworld ...... 217 Grief, Dionysos, and Performance ...... 220 Grief, Hermes, and the Liminal ...... 223 Reflections on the Work ...... 226 Autobiography and the Imaginal: Mythobiography ...... 230

Appendix A ...... 244

Appendix B ...... 245

Appendix C ...... 246

Appendix D ...... 249

Appendix E ...... 251

Appendix F...... 252

Appendix G ...... 254

Appendix H ...... 255

Appendix I ...... 256

Dedication Amy, and the Others, this is for you.

Acknowledgments I first wish to express the utmost gratitude to my mentors, Roger Knudson and Larry Leitner, for the dedicated, compassionate, and challenging manner with which you guided me through this strange and immeasurably significant rite of passage. Your distinctive teachings have been nothing short of transformative, and I feel honored and privileged to have learned from and with you. To the student members of my listening group, Joel Gaffney and Cat Munroe, I am so appreciative of your earnest commitment, thoughtful contributions, and most importantly, our friendship. To my committee members, Ann Fuehrer and Vaishali Raval, thank you for your guidance and support. Our conversations and the questions that you raised truly enhanced the scope of the project, and my attention to its personal dimensions. I also wish to acknowledge Scott Becker, who read early drafts of the dissertation and provided invaluable insights into the exercise of an imaginal methodology. I am also enormously indebted to Liza, Hannah, Rachel, Marion, and the others whose stories did not appear but certainly influenced the work, for giving so generously, and bravely, of your grief experiences. Finally, to my wife, Michelle, I could not have completed this work without your encouragement, love, and constant willingness to listen and be truthful.

Introduction For this dissertation study, I sought to explore the significance of encounters with the significant dead for the bereaved and their grieving process. Though I cannot speak on behalf of the polyphony of voices that ultimately composed this work, from the beginning, it must be made clear that I approached the subject primarily from the standpoint of an archetypal and imaginal psychology. From this perspective, I did not situate the presence of the dead in the ―parapsychology of spiritism, the theology of afterlife, the morality of rewards, and the scientific fantasies of biochemical chance or evolution‖ (Hillman, 1979a, p. 67), but in the psychology of soul, a third mode of ontology between the sensible realm of matter and the intellective realm of mind, yet continuous with each (Corbin, 1972). In other words, the imaginal realm constitutes ―a world of imagination, passion, fantasy, reflection, that is neither physical and material on the one hand, nor spiritual and abstract on the other, yet bound to them both‖ (Hillman, 1975, p. 68). Accordingly, for this inquiry into grief and mourning, I focused on the process by which the dead become an imaginal presence, and how bereaved persons story its significance. My interest in the subject has originated from my personal experiences with grief as well as my qualitative research on the role of dreams in religious callings (Schweitzer, 2014). Although I have had several encounters with grief and loss in my life, the death of my older sister Amy has been the main impetus for this project. In 2005, she died at the age of 34, the age that I am now. Her death was sudden and unexpected, and one that I continue to grieve to this day. As I shall later expand on in my writing, she played an integral role in my pursuit of clinical psychology and psychotherapy as a profession. Beginning in her teenage years, Amy had been initiated into the culture of therapy and rehabilitation, which I experienced vicariously through her. So, as I grew older, our relationship developed amidst a carousel of treatments, on which she went round and round until the day she died. In life, Amy‘s litany of defeats and constant determination to rise above them revealed for me both the dark night of the soul and the radiant courage of the human spirit. However, in the years after her death and even now, I remember Amy with a mood of melancholy. Though she has periodically visited my dreams, her presence continues to dwell most prominently in this mood and the loving recognition that in life things can and do fall apart. When I interviewed one minister for my master‘s thesis, she expressed how dreams of her brother before and after his death contributed powerfully to her calling and the conviction

1 that our relationship with the dead may continue in spite of their physical absence. In addition, she described her encounters with bereaved persons as a hospice social worker, and conveyed how the presence of the dead is much more common than one may suppose. Given that a disengagement from the dead dominates modern cultural and psychological approaches to loss, the minister‘s narrative was intriguingly atypical and evoked questions about alternative experiences of grief and the unique role that dreams may play. For this introduction, I first will review and critique traditional models of grief and mourning that prescribe a relinquishment of bonds with the dead. Next, I will delineate the continuing bonds perspective as a meaningful alternative and highlight its implications for bereavement. Third, I will review the literature on post-death encounters and present the sparse literature on dreams as a unique type thereof. Fourth, I will articulate the main tenets of archetypal psychology and discuss their implications for grief as an imaginal process. Last, I will pose the main questions that will frame this qualitative inquiry. Modernist Models of Grief and Mourning Freud In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud enumerated ―profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, and inhibition of activity‖ (Rando, 1995, p. 212) as the prime, distinctive features of mourning. According to Freud (1917/1961), the melancholic quality of the mourning response is attributable to the notion that ―Each single one of the memories and situations of expectancy which demonstrate the libido‘s attachment to the lost object is met with the verdict of reality that the object no longer exists‖ (p. 255). In this view, if an enduring attachment to the lost object gives rise to mourning, then it follows that the mourner can only obtain resolution by detaching from the lost object. In particular, Freud proposed that mourning spurred ―the need for decathexis,‖ or releasing the tie between an individual and the objects (including other people) in the environment into which the person invests emotional significance (Sanders, 1989, p. 22). Broadly, Freud conceptualized resolution as a relinquishment of ties, or ―decathexis,‖ that is accomplished by identifying with the deceased via ―hypercathexis‖ in order to emotionally neutralize the hopes and memories associated with the relationship. Contemporary grief researchers have leveled critiques against this model on the grounds that it overly individualizes and dehumanizes the experience of relational loss. Specifically,

Becker (1995) asserted that ―the deceased loved one is reduced to an ‗object‘ which may then be discarded after its qualities are introjected, swallowed up as part of the self-contained individual‖ (p. 13). In other words, the mourner‘s relationship with the deceased is objectified, instrumentalized, and reduced to a form of psychic currency for the purchase of new relationships. More fundamentally though, grief is said to liberate the ego from its attachment to the deceased: ―When the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again‖ (Freud, 1917/1961, p. 245). Freud thus placed the task of mourning in service of the ego system, while asserting that the significance of the lost relationship could be recoverable through the acquisition of a new substitute. As Siggins (1966) astutely pointed out, one cannot adequately understand and fairly evaluate Freud‘s treatment of the subject without referring to subsequent writings, in which Freud provided crucial theoretical appendages to the discussion outlined in Mourning and Melancholia. Similarly, Rando (1995) underscored supplemental writings that bear on the impossibility of a total relinquishment of the attachment to the lost object. Specifically, Clewell (2004) offered an interpretation of pertinent writings in ―The Ego and the Id,‖ wherein Freud ultimately recognized that ―there can be no final severance of attachments without dissolving the ego‖ and thus, ―Freud‘s late theory suggests a different alternative: the mourning subject may affirm the endurance of the ambivalent bonds to those loved and lost others as a condition of its own existence‖ (p. 65, emphasis added). Although the aforementioned alternative does not figure centrally into modernist interpretations of Freud‘s model, it has profound implications in regards to how we understand our relationship with the dead and the duration of the mourning process. Lindemann Arguably more influential than Freud, Lindemann‘s delineation of grief symptomatology widely informed subsequent theoretical formulations (Rando, 1995). In his classic article, ―Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief,‖ Lindemann (1944) characterized grief as a definite syndrome consisting of psychological and somatic symptoms that he patterned from clinical observations collected in psychiatric interviews with 101 patients. Lindemann identified five pathognomic characteristics of grief—somatic distress, preoccupation with imagery of the deceased, guilt, hostility, and loss of patterns of conduct. Lindemann also noted a sixth characteristic in which the bereaved person manifests traits of the deceased, which he said characterized a ―borderline pathological‖ response (p. 10).

According to Lindemann, common symptoms of somatic distress included sighing respiration, a lack of strength and exhaustion, and appetite disturbances. Notably, his patients reported a preoccupation with images of the deceased along with increased interpersonal distance. One patient in particular, a young navy pilot, indicated that for six months he retained his lost friend as an imaginary companion with whom he ate and discussed personal problems. Other patients who reported similar phenomena worried that these experiences marked an incipient insanity. The bereaved person also reported feeling negligent and partly responsible for the death of the deceased. Further, they tended to experience the loss of warmth in relationships, and have outwardly hostile and angry reactions to friends and relatives. Last, they also indicated that their daily activities and routines seemed to lose their significance absent the deceased. According to Lindemann (1944), the duration of the grief response hinged on the efficacy of ―grief work‖ (p. 11), whose three primary tasks include breaking bonds with the deceased, readjustment to the world without the deceased, and the formation of new relationships. Based on his grief work with 13 patients, Lindemann suggested that bereaved persons can successfully resolve grief in eight to ten sessions over the course of four to six weeks. Lindemann plotted this course in terms of ―normal grief reactions‖ (p. 11); in contrast, he characterized ―morbid grief reactions‖ as ―distortions of normal grief‖ (p.11) and discerned two types of reactions: delayed and distorted. Lindemann argued that the absence of pathognomic signs following a loss comprised a delayed grief reaction, ranging in duration from days to years after the loss. Additionally, he proposed a distorted grief reaction, which consisted of conspicuous alterations to the conduct of the bereaved person. Regarding distorted grief, Lindemann (1944) identified nine indicators: ―overactivity without a sense of loss,‖ ―the acquisition of symptoms belonging to the last illness of the deceased,‖ ―a medical disease of a psychosomatic nature,‖ ―a conspicuous alteration of relationships to friends and relatives,‖ ―furious hostility against specific persons,‖ ―a wooden, formal demeanor,‖ ―affect and conduct resembling schizophrenic postures,‖ ―a lasting loss of patterns of social interaction,‖ ―actions detrimental to the individual‘s own social and economic existence,‖ and ―agitated depression‖ (pp. 13-14). Similar to Freud‘s (1917/1961) early theoretical model, the main task of grief work for Lindemann involved breaking bonds with the deceased. Until the breaking of bonds, the bereaved person assumedly could not readjust effectively and begin to cultivate new

4 relationships. To some extent, he normalized continuing bonds with the dead in his assertion that a preoccupation with the dead is a common, albeit pathognomic feature of the grief response. However, he pathologized signs of mimesis, whereby traits of the deceased appear in the survivor through a process of identification analogous to Freud‘s (1917/1961) notion of ―hypercathexis.‖ In sum, an extended preoccupation or vivid identification with the deceased qualify as unhealthy grief responses because they preclude readjustment by privileging ―imaginary‖ over ―real‖ social interactions. Bowlby Bowlby‘s conceptualizations of grief and mourning span three decades (1969-1980) and appear in his three-volume master work, Attachment and Loss (1969, 1973, 1980). Culled from his systematic observations of infants and young children responding to the loss of proximity to a primary caregiver, Bowlby (1980) identified a separation response syndrome consisting of four distinct stages: (1) numbing and protest, (2) yearning and searching, (3) disorganization and despair, and (4) reorganization. Importantly, Bowlby (1980) posited that the psychological process attendant to these stages is descriptively similar to the subjective experience of grief seen in adults. Bowlby (1963) argued that the separation response exhibited in infancy and early childhood shares striking features with the pathological grief response in adulthood. Rando (1995) delineated several of these overlapping features—―unconscious yearning for the lost person‖; ―unconscious reproach against the lost person, combined with the conscious and often unremitting self-reproach‖; ―compulsive caring for other persons‖; and ―persistent disbelief that the loss is permanent‖ (p. 215). In addition, Bowlby asserts that these maladaptive responses tended to occur among people with dispositions to anxious or ambivalent relationships. In his early work, Bowlby (1961) elected not to include identification as a salient theme in the mourning process, stating that the data ―do not seem to lend themselves readily to the study of identificatory processes and their deviations‖ (p. 319). Although subsequent revisions of ―Processes of Mourning‖ included identification as a theme, Bowlby (1980) carefully qualified the addition by stating that ―the role given to identificatory processes in the theory advanced here is a subordinate one: they are regarded as occurring only sporadically and, when prominent, to be indicative of psychopathology‖ (p. 30). Thus stated, Bowlby‘s position on identification with the deceased echoes Lindemann‘s (1944) appraisal of mimesis—the normal response to loss

5 does not include a continuing attachment to the deceased; therefore, this class of experience signifies pathology. Other than the presence or absence of marked identificatory processes, Rando (1995) posits that the difference between pathological and healthy mourning is one of degree and onset. In other words, the pathological response is more intense and entrenched in one or several of the phases that precede the attainment of reorganization. Conversely, the healthy response ostensibly consists of overcoming numbness to the loss, a preoccupation with the deceased, and the hopelessness engendered by full acceptance of the lost attachment. Resolution means that the mourner has made orderly and timely progress through these stages and begun to establish new goals, activities, and attachments. In essence, Bowlby‘s model recapitulates the assumption that resolution proceeds from severing the attachment to the deceased and forming new attachments. Parkes Parkes‘ studies of widowhood provided additional empirical grounding and generalizability (to adults) for the four-stage model of grief espoused by Bowlby (Glick, Weiss, & Parkes, 1974; Parkes, 1972, 1975a, b; Parkes & Brown, 1972; Parkes & Weiss, 1983). In fact, Parkes‘ findings and theoretical concepts significantly influenced the work featured in Bowlby‘s third and final volume on attachment and loss (Silverman & Klass, 1996). Specifically, Parkes (1972) identified three stages of grief—numbness, yearning and protest, and disorganization— and subsequently added a fourth stage, reorganization. Parkes‘ early work framed grief as an acute stress response consisting of painful psychological, emotional, behavioral, and physical sequelae that coincide with Lindemann‘s (1944) findings regarding the pathognomic characteristics of acute grief. Whereas Parkes first conceptualized grief as a syndrome, he later (Parkes, 1975a, b; Parkes & Weiss, 1983) suggested that the scope of grief is better demarcated as a prolonged process of transition. One unanticipated finding concerned the experiences of presence of the deceased in fantasy and dreams, and the extent to which they persisted for widows (Silverman & Klass, 1996). Parkes had first situated the phenomenon in the early stages of grief, namely the yearning and searching stage, and said that it functioned as a form of reality-testing that facilitated acceptance of the loss and the resolution of grief (Miles & Demi, 1994). To be sure, Parkes defined resolution as detachment from the deceased. Additionally, Parkes (1972) asserted

6 that interaction and identification with the deceased spouse only occurred with a minority of widows: There was nothing to suggest that identification is a necessary part of the process of recovery. It seems, rather, that identification with the lost person is only intermittently effective. The sense of the husband ‗inside‘ is a transient phenomenon…Episodes of comfortable ‗closeness‘ are followed by periods of grieving and loneliness, and it is only intermittently that identification occurs. The London widows seemed rather, to find their new identity emerging from the altered life situations which they had to face. (p. 105) Thus, Parkes dismissed the widows‘ experiences of their deceased husbands on the grounds that they are highly anomalous, facilitative of avoidance, and ineffective in imparting comfort. Two years later, however, Glick, Weiss, & Parkes (1974) found that the widows continued to have a relationship with their deceased husbands: ―In contrast to most other aspects of the reaction to bereavement, the sense of presence of the husband did not diminish with time. It seemed to take a few weeks to become established, but thereafter seemed as likely to be reported late in the bereavement as early‖ (p. 147). As Silverman and Klass (1996) have pointed out, Parkes and colleagues did not substantively revise the theory in light of these data. Moreover, Parkes chose to articulate continued sense of presence experiences under the rubric of loss rather than resolution. Because Parkes and colleagues exclusively associated interaction with the deceased with the yearning and searching stage of grief (that necessarily precedes resolution), the model cannot account for ―functions of the inner representations of the dead husbands…in the ongoing lives of the widows after the resolution of grief‖ (Silverman & Klass, 1995, p. 12). This stubborn refusal to change the theory in light of disconfirming data speaks to the entrenched assumption that grief resolution necessarily hinges on the relinquishment of bonds. Kübler-Ross Kubler-Ross (1969) proposed what would become perhaps the most culturally prominent stage-theory of the human response to death and dying. Drawing from her work with terminally- ill cancer patients and their family members, Kubler-Ross developed a model consisting of five clearly marked stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—through which the dying move in a natural and linear progression, and whose overarching task was of ―working-

7 through‖ grief. Though Kubler-Ross (1969) originally developed the model from her work with the dying, she also claimed that it applied to the experiences of the survivors. The first response, denial, denotes escape from the idea that the loved one is dead. The second stage, anger, is ostensibly driven by fear and frustration, and can manifest as envy, rage, and resentment directed toward the deceased as well as the living (Samarel, 1995). In the bargaining stage, the bereaved person may hope in vain to somehow recover the deceased and inwardly attempt to negotiate such an outcome. The fourth stage, depression, entails an incipient acceptance, whereby the survivor begins to come to terms with the permanence of the loss. Fatigue, guilt, and a fear of death and dying often characterize this stage. Interestingly, an absence of feeling, rather than happiness or serenity signifies acceptance and the resolution of grief (Samarel, 1995). As Hedtke and Winslade (2004) pointed out, the main task of the model, ―working through,‖ borrows from psychoanalytic theory, namely Freud‘s repression hypothesis in emphasizing the necessity of the affective expression of grief. Presumably, the bereaved person cannot truly accept the loss and return to normalcy until his or her grief is adequately expressed. Here, the self-in-grief is constructed in terms of feelings to be ―worked through‖ on an individual basis to restore the rational-self through an acceptance of loss (Hedtke & Winslade, 2004). Although Kubler-Ross (1969) observed that a preoccupation with the deceased is normative among bereaved relatives, the phenomenon merely constitutes another manifestation of grief to be ―worked through‖ toward acceptance: Many relatives are pre-occupied by memories and ruminate in fantasies, often even talk to the deceased as if he was still alive. They not only isolate themselves to face the reality of the person‘s death. For some, however, this is the only way they can cope with the loss, and it would be cruel indeed to ridicule them or to confront them daily with the unacceptable reality. It would be more helpful to understand this need and to help them separate themselves by taking them out of their adjustment gradually. (p. 184) To be sure, Kubler-Ross‘ sympathetic response to this common grief experience highlights the humanistic aspects of her model. That said, the stance betrays an underlying paternalism in its insistence on disabusing the bereaved person of illusions regarding the deceased. In other words, the model harbors authoritative assumptions about reality (e.g., the

8 dead do not exist) that implicitly delegitimize certain forms of mourning (e.g., interacting with the dead). Finally, the passage suggests that it is untenable for the bereaved person to simultaneously have a relationship with the deceased and the living. Worden From a grief counseling perspective, Worden (1982/1991) developed a task model of bereavement that differs structurally from the above-reviewed stage models. Because most stage theories circumscribe grief work as a linear, sequential progression, Worden expressed concern that literal adherence to them could stymie the efforts of inexperienced clinicians and bereaved family members (Rothaupt & Becker, 2007). Alternatively, the structure of Worden‘s model allows the bereaved to complete the tasks in any order with the expectation that the bereaved may return to any given task over time. Worden (1991) enumerated four tasks of mourning for the bereaved. First, he states that the bereaved must accept the reality of the loss: ―The first place of grieving is to come full face with the reality that the person is dead, that the person is gone and will not return. Part of the acceptance of reality is to come to the belief that reunion is impossible, at least in this life‖ (pp.10-11). Second, he conceptualizes the next task as one of processing the pain of grief: ―It is necessary to acknowledge and work through this pain or it will manifest itself through some symptoms or other form of aberrant behavior‖ (p. 13). Third, he posits that the bereaved then must adjust to the environment in which the deceased is absent. Fourth, he conceptualizes the final task as one in which the bereaved ―emotionally relocate the deceased and move on with life‖: ―The counselor‘s task then becomes not to help the bereaved give up their relationship with the deceased but to help them find an appropriate place for the dead in their emotional lives—a place that will enable them to go on living effectively in the world‖ (p. 17). Notably, the task of emotionally relocating the deceased marked a change from the final task of mourning specified in Worden‘s first model. Originally, he identified the ultimate task of mourning as a ―withdrawal of emotional energy from the deceased and a reinvesting it in another relationship‖ (Worden, 1982, p. 15), a feature consistent with the models espoused by Freud (1917/1961), Lindemann (1944), Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1980), Parkes (1972, 1974, 1975), and Kubler-Ross (1969). This divergence from the relinquishment of bonds and mourning as a temporary, passive state constitutes a major shift in contemporary understandings of grief and bereavement.

A Summary Critique Having provided a review and rudimentary critique of traditional grief models that fall under the rubric of ―modernist,‖ I now will make explicit the assumptions that warrant their shared classification. With this summary exposition and critique of modernist ideas on death and grief, I will set the stage for an introduction to continuing bonds theory and alternative conceptualizations of loss and recovery. Hedtke and Winslad (2004) delineated five chief assumptions inherent to modernist perspectives on death and grief. First, they point out that a detachment from the deceased has traditionally constituted the overarching goal of grieving (Attig, 2000; Klass, 2001; Neimeyer, 2001). In other words, the resolution of grief means that the bereaved has severed his or her relationship with the deceased. Consequently, they argue, the goal of detachment implies that an ongoing relationship with the deceased is suggestive of protracted grief or, worse, more pervasive psychological problems. Second, they suggest that modernist discourses sponsor the notion that grief can and must be resolved once and for all (Silverman & Nickman, 1996; Stroebe, Gergen et al., 1992). Relatedly, closure is constructed as the desirable end to grief; therefore, a prolonged experience of grief is pathologized (Lindemann, 1944) or marginalized (Parkes, 1972) in spite of data suggesting that the bereaved benefit from ongoing relationships with the deceased (Klass, 1984, 1988; Schuchter, 1986; Shapiro, 1994). Third, they argue that modernist discourses tend to privilege individual over communal approaches to grief work (Hagman, 2001; Stroebe, Gergen et al., 1992). This notion of individuality applies to the relation of the bereaved to the deceased as well as the community in which he or she grieves. Thus, grief work is construed as an autonomous process with independence from the deceased as the goal. Fourth, modernist models have likened the course of grief to that of medical illness, such that grief comprises a morbid state, whereas its resolution constitutes a resumption of the pre-morbid state as supported by the language of ―readjustment‖ and ―recovery‖ (Silverman & Klass, 1996). Fifth, grief is frequently characterized as a passive process that will run its course (Neiymeyer, 2001; Silverman & Klass, 1996). Thus, personal and social modes of meaning-making are considered less consequential in shaping grief and its resolution. Significantly, proponents of modernist discourses have presumed a universality of grief experiences and fail to consider cultural and historical contingencies that influence differential responses to loss (Klass, 1996; Stroebe, Gergen et al., 1992). As Silverman and Klass (1996)

10 have argued, the models of bereavement that articulate mourning in terms of the individual and prescribe detachment from relationships with the deceased represent artifacts of Western modernity, a period that came into dominance around the 17th century (Stroebe, Gergen et al., 1992), and therefore ought not to be regarded as culturally and historically immutable. Indeed, the inordinate value assigned to individuation is highly specific to the worldview held by Western modernity, wherein autonomy and adaptiveness constitute the hallmarks of social development (Erikson, 1963). It should then come as no surprise that detachment from the deceased and restored functionality have emerged as desirable therapeutic ends in grief work. Another assumption involves the notion that relationships with the deceased are illusory, whereas relationships with the living are ―real‖ and more worthy of our emotional and psychological resources. Thus, the modernist disavowal of an ontological status for the deceased in relation to the bereaved severely limits our understanding of grief and its psychological concomitants to the extent that lived experiences of continuing relationships with the dead are summarily ignored, marginalized, or pathologized. Continuing Bonds Theory Continuing bonds theory is based on the fact that many survivors have ongoing relationships with the deceased and the related idea that this survivor-deceased relationship could be normal rather than pathological (Klass, Silverman, & Nickman, 1996; Klass, 2006). Starting with this basic two-fold premise, I will elaborate the conceptual elements of the continuing bonds paradigm while reviewing studies that have provided support for the theory as well as a push for further conceptual differentiation. In contrast to the presumably bounded self and related valuing of autonomy and independence espoused by the modernist worldview, proponents of the continuing bonds paradigm posit an interdependence of the self, or more precisely, that the meanings comprising selfhood are necessarily formed and re-formed in relation with others (Silverman & Klass, 1996). In regards to grief then, Silverman and Klass (1996) postulate that ―the bereaved remain involved and connected to the deceased, and that the bereaved actively construct an inner representation of the deceased that is part of the normal grieving process‖ (p. 16). Klass (1984, 1988) found that, for bereaved parents, interactions with their deceased children had a central place in their inner lives and the grieving process. Importantly, he also found that the bereaved parents elected to conceal the experience for fear of seeming ―crazy.‖

Based on this reluctance, we can reasonably infer that such experiences are markedly underreported by survivors because they fly in the face of modernist notions of reality and definitions of pathology that these notions demarcate. Like Parkes (1972, 1974), Shuchter (1986) found that widowed survivors actively sustained a connection to their deceased spouses through dreams, sense of presence experiences, and internal conversations. Rizzuto (1979) showed that the process of constructing and re-constructing the inner representation of the deceased can operate interpersonally as survivors remember the dead in dialogue with friends, families, communities, and institutions. Rosenblatt and Elde (1990) specifically focused on the role of family in Western culture in maintaining relationships with the deceased and began to dispel the mistaken claim that continuing bonds proceed solely on an individual, internal level. These researchers studied a group of bereaved families and observed that the grieving process involved keeping memories of the deceased alive by integrating them into relationships with others in the present. To be sure, individual family members possessed idiosyncratic representations of the deceased; however, at the same time, families had co-constructed communal representations of the deceased of which they had a shared understanding. Thus, as Silverman and Klass (1996) have pointed out, continuing bonds can be experienced by the individual as ―existing or proceeding from outside of the self‖ (p. 18) and can change over time as individuals and relationships change. Klass (1996b) found bereaved parents‘ representations of their deceased children transformed over time. More specifically, the bereaved parents‘ described a process whereby representations of their ―psychic world‖ interacted with those of their ―social world‖ toward establishing a more peaceable bond with their children. In particular, parents noted how initially painful and chaotic representations were stabilized and meaningfully externalized through the social validation of other members of the support community. To this point, I have elaborated the continuing bond between the survivor(s) and deceased in purely descriptive terms: an active, dynamic, and multi-faceted process by which survivor(s) construct and co-construct individual and shared representations of the deceased over time. I have argued that this process can operate on a combination of individual, interpersonal, familial, community, and institutional levels, and therefore involve myriad types of remembering practices. Adding to this theoretical description, I now shall discuss the influence of continuing bonds on the grieving process itself.

Crenshaw (1990) has suggested that by commemorating the dead, exploring their values, and resuming their unfinished works, the survivor may acquire an augmented sense of purpose. Similarly, Marwit and Klass (1996) found that inner representations of the deceased can serve as a role model as well as provide guidance and facilitate values clarification and remembrance formation for the survivor. For instance, one participant described how remembering a deceased brother made the participant more appreciative of life. Another participant indicated that remembering a brother has facilitated a greater sensitivity, patience, and willingness to understand others. Additionally, Field (2006) has posited that internal representations of the deceased may function to sustain the continuity of identity and promote inner resources following a loss. From an attachment perspective, Field, Gao, and Paderna (2005) have elaborated the regulatory function of the inner representation in terms of a ―secure base‖ and ―safe haven‖ from which the survivor derives comfort (p. 285). In particular, Gao and colleagues (2005) suggest that experiencing the presence of the dead may ―enable the bereaved to move toward a new life and confront the unknown in the context of continuing to feel psychologically ‗held‘ by the deceased‖ (p. 285). This claim is consistent with Parkes‘ (1970) finding that widows experienced the presence of their deceased spouses as a comforting form of companionship. Similarly, Stroebe et al. (1992) noted how bereaved persons invoked images of the deceased to obtain solace under threatening conditions, such as major surgery. Taken together, I interpreted these findings to mean that continuing bonds with the dead can constitute a healthy and beneficial adaptation to bereavement. Other researchers have pointed to conditions under which continuing bonds indicate a maladaptive response to bereavement. Specifically, Vickio (1999) found that the conflictual nature of the living relationship influenced the quality of the continuing bond. According to Field, Gao, and Paderna (2005), the quality of the past attachment relationship with the deceased significantly affects the mourner‘s ability to integrate the loss. Maladaptive variants of continuing bonds expression ostensibly follow from less secure attachment style pre-existing the loss. For instance, survivors with an anxious-preoccupied attachment style may emphatically seek proximity to the deceased while failing to construct a new life for themselves (Field et al., 2005). Thus, the nature of the ―living‖ relationship with the deceased and attachment style of the survivor may serve to hinder the grieving process.

The means by which survivors maintain a connection to the dead constitutes a crucial aspect of continuing bonds theory. Shuchter and Zisook (1988) have proposed that survivors use a wide assortment of methods to sustain relationships with the dead, including ―hallucinatory experiences, verbal communications, and prayers; symbolic representations, which imbue material possessions with the spirit of the deceased; living legacies, which provide continuity through identification, perpetuation, and genetics; and social and cultural rituals, memories, and dreams‖ (p. 269). Rando (1993, 1995) similarly identified dreams, sense of presence experiences, life reviews, dialogues about the deceased, rituals such as memorials, anniversaries, and commemorations, symbolic objects, and identification with the deceased as prime modes of maintaining connection. Vickio (1999) enumerated the following five relationship-building strategies and discussed their relevance for grief counseling. First, the counselor may invite the bereaved to reflect on how the deceased has influence his or her life and identity. This may proceed from a discussion of how the deceased has integrally contributed to the values, goals, and worldview with which the bereaved identifies. Second, the counselor and bereaved may elect to weave aspects of the deceased‘s life into the life of the bereaved. For instance, the bereaved may choose to engage in a particular hobby or activity that the deceased found meaningful. Third, the bereaved could identify symbolic objects like photographs or personal items that would provide a link. Fourth, the bereaved could create and enact rituals in honor of the deceased, such as visiting the place of rest or reciting poetry. Fifth, the bereaved could make dedicated efforts to keep tell the life story of the deceased, such as remembering the deceased with family members. As stated earlier, each of these practices may be enacted individually or interpersonally. In summary, researchers have widely noted the presence of continuing bonds in the grieving process of non-Western cultures (Klass, 1996a; Klass & Goss, 1999), bereaved children (Buchsbaum, 1996; Normand, Silverman, & Nickman, 1996; Silverman & Nickman, 1996), bereaved spouses (Conant, 1996; Lopata, 1996; Moss & Moss, 1996), bereaved parents (Klass, 1996b; Rubin, 1996), and bereaved siblings (Hogan & Desantis, 1996), to name just several salient areas of inquiry. In reference to these studies, Silverman and Nickman (1996) bring to bear an overarching paradox: that the deceased are at once absent and present in the lives of the survivors. In particular, the dead may live on in the waking and nocturnal dreams, remembrances, conversations, identities, values, and works of the bereaved. Even as the dead, by

14 way of inner dialogue, encourage the bereaved to move on, to move forward, and to begin anew, reconstructing a life need not require severing ties with the deceased (Conant, 1996; Klass, 1996b). Instead, a connection with the deceased may remain even though its form may change over time. As Silverman and Nickman put it, the mourning process ―may simply be the period in which the survivor is learning to live within this paradox‖ (p. 351). Perhaps then, the resolution of grief does not proceed from obtaining closure as much as opening ourselves up to a different kind of relationship with the dead. Phenomenology of Post-Death Encounters Despite or perhaps because of their physical absence, the dead appear to remain vividly and uncannily present in post-death experiences. Theorists positing traditional grief models have taken these experiences as symptomatic rather than meaningful in presuming that a failure to sever bonds with the deceased will invariably preclude resolution and perhaps lead to more complicated forms of grief (Stroebe & Shut, 2005). However, the bereaved, through these often ineffable and powerful experiences can forge meaningful pathways of continuing bonds. According to Greely (1987), approximately 42% of Americans believe that they have had contact with a deceased individual. In addition, Cleiren (1993) found that 35% of participants reported feeling the presence of a deceased person. In fact, a large body of studies on grief and mourning has substantiated this subset of grief experience, with anywhere from 39% (Gorer, 1965) to 90% (Heimlich & Kutscher, 1970) of respondents indicating some form of post-death contact with the deceased. In his review of the subject, Klugman (2006) enumerated two types on experiences of post-death contact (PDC). The first set of experiences generally involves the living feeling like the dead are attempting communication or connection. Variations on this type of PDC include the dead taking the form of a guardian angel (Parkes, 1970), dreams of the dead (Gorer, 1965; Heimlich & Kutscher, 1970; Nadeau, 2001; Schweitzer, 2010), visions of the dead (Becker, 2000, 2003; Haraldsson, 1988; Kalish & Reynolds, 1973; Marris, 1958; Parkes, 1970; Rees, 1971), feeling the presence of the dead (Dawson & Marwitt, 1997; Field & Friedrichs, 2004; Haraldsson, 1988); hearing voices of the dead (Marris, 1958; Parkes, 1970), smelling the dead (Haraldsson, 1988; Klass, 1993), having tactile contact with the dead (Haraldsson, 1988), and feeling that the dead will eventually return (Parkes, 1970). The second set of experiences involves the bereaved thinking about or feeling close to the dead. For this type of post-death

15 contact, the bereaved experience the dead through representative objects (Klass, 1993; Troll, 2001), speaking to them (Marris, 1958), or cemetery visitations (Parkes, 1970), to name a few. In summary, though all of the foregoing experiences concern contact with the dead, I characterize the former set as ―presentational‖ (Langer, 1942/1963) in nature, meaning that the dead appear to the bereaved as an autonomous presence, and the latter set as ―representational‖ experiences in which the bereaved relate through the dead as part of a volitional act. For the remainder of this review, I will concentrate on the phenomenology of the former, along with the significance that follows from this kind of encounter experience. In a phenomenological analysis, Drewry (2003) found that eight themes emerged from participants‘ lived experiences of after-death communication. First, several participants reported that the encounters seemed to occur spontaneously and unexpectedly. Second, they recognized the deceased through both sensory (e.g., seeing, feeling, and hearing the deceased) and symbolic (e.g., a picture of the deceased falling to the floor) cues. Third, participants‘ initial reactions to communication were generally characterized by surprise, shock, and self-doubt. Fourth, participants reported that the experience imparted a sense of reassurance, comfort, and hope. Fifth, participants also indicated that the experience promoted forgiveness and/or the completion of unfinished business. Sixth, participants reported a shift in the relationship, such that connection seemed stronger or more harmonious following the communication. Seventh, participants described a shift in their relationship to self, including diminished levels of guilt and anger. Last, participants reported that the experience shaped their attitudes regarding death, the afterlife, and their relationship to the cosmos. In a more recent phenomenological study, Nowatzki and Kalischuk (2009) yielded similar descriptions and themes. They found that auditory and visual encounters were most common, followed by sensing the presence and dreaming of the dead. The bereaved characterized the encounters as highly vivid experiences that engendered feelings of connection, love, warmth, peace, and comfort. In addition, the bereaved reported understanding the encounter in terms of themes such as unfinished business, forgiveness, and assurance. Significantly, the bereaved experienced the encounters as transformative and life-changing in that they promoted a deeper awareness of personal and transpersonal values, death and dying, the afterlife, and continuing bonds with the dead. It should be noted, however, that not all experiences of after-death communication evoked comfort, hope, and reassurance. Indeed,

16 bereaved persons have also described such encounters as painful, frightening, and disturbing (Finocan, 2010; Lindstrom, 1995). Notwithstanding the evocative role of sensory and symbolic cues, phenomenological dimensions of encounters with the dead seem to have an ineffable quality (Steffen & Coyle, 2010) that bereaved persons have described as a ―nearness‖ (Rees, 2001), a ―connection‖ (Sormanti & August, 1997), or simply a ―feeling [that the person is] there‖ (Bennett & Bennett, 2000). To reiterate the previous ―presentational‖ and ―representational‖ distinction, the ―experient does not feel in control of this experience and it cannot be deliberately sought as in ―spiritualist‖ practice but occurs unexpectedly‖ (Steffen & Coyle, 2010, p. 275; see also Conant, 1996). The spontaneous, ineffable, and presentational dimensions of encounters with the dead have powerful affective concomitants, which bear out, in addition to the foregoing studies (Drewery, 2003; Nowatzki & Kalischuk, 2009), descriptions such as ―a sacred thing‖ (Rees, 2001), ―uncanny‖ (Hoyt, 1980-1981), ―awe-inspiring and mystical‖ (Kalish & Reynolds, 1973), ―disturbing‖ (Lindstrom, 1995), and ―terrifying‖ (Parker, 2005). I found dreams of the dead particularly noteworthy, if only for the frequency with which the bereaved report them relative to other types of post-death encounters. Daggett (2005) found that dreams were common and highly meaningful to the bereaved during the grieving process as they provided an opportunity to reunite and interact with the dead. Specifically, through dreams, the bereaved expressed that they were able to say goodbye to their loved one as well as gain reassurance and comfort. They described these dreams as unique along phenomenological dimensions such as vividness, detail, and the intensity of affect. One participant described a series of such dreams as ―incredible‖ and likened them to richly detailed ―photographs.‖ Additionally, in at least one instance, the bereaved described these dreams as intensely embodied, such that the total experience registered with strong emotion. Though the bereaved construed dreams as providing a means for completing unfinished business, the dreams nonetheless remained vivid and poignant for the bereaved years later. In particular, the bereaved reported that such dreams fostered a continuing relationship with the dead, a finding that has found support in other studies of grief (Becker & Knudson, 2003; Belicki, Gulko, Ruzycki, & Aristotle, 2003; Ullman, 2001). In an archetypal hermeneutic study of grief and dreams, Becker and Knudson (2003) noted how one woman‘s experience of her deceased twin sister as

―distinctly and autonomously present in the dream world‖ (p. 706) allowed for her sister to remain a vivid presence in her life. Taken together, the phenomenology of post-death encounters and dreams of the dead, namely, their ineffable, uncanny, autonomous, and inordinately affective characteristics, suggested to me a numinous quality that begged the question of a spiritual or transcendental mode of reality. In the next section, I will introduce the tenets of archetypal psychology with the goal of situating these experiences within an imaginal ontology, one which is intermediate to the physical and the metaphysical. An Archetypal Approach to Grief and Mourning Archetypal Psychology In contrast to scientific or even secular humanistic brands of psychology, Hillman (1975) has espoused that psyche, soul, and imagination are coextensive with the world of myth and alive in our fantasies and dreams as well as our rational ideas, constructs, and axioms (Avens, 1982). In the words of Plato, myth is necessary for ―the enchantment of the soul,‖ and in keeping with the Neoplatonic tradition, archetypal psychology adheres to a tripartite view of ontology consisting of body, spirit, and soul. Importantly, soul is not located ―inside‖ of us, but in participatory relation with the world: ―Psyche as the anima mundi, the Neoplatonic soul of the world, is already there with the world itself, so that the second task of psychology is to hear the psyche through all things of the world, thereby recovering the world as a place of soul‖ (Hillman, 1983a, p. 16). Psyche, soul, and imagination belong neither to the physical nor the metaphysical categories of the real (Hillman, 1983a). Thus, the proponents of archetypal psychology eschew Western dualism by situating soul in the ―metaxy‖ or ―in-between‖ realm, through which the material and transcendent derive their primary reality (Becker, 1995). As Hillman asserts (1975), ―here I am suggesting a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in the processes of the imagination‖ (p. xvii). Hillman (1975) has advanced two main aims for archetypal psychology: (1) to re-vision psychology from the perspective of soul; (2) and to restore soul to the world. Essentially, Hillman takes aim at the hegemony of Cartesian dualism, in whose wake we find the cult of the heroic self, a de-souling of the world, and an ossification of the individual and cultural imagination. In toppling this literalizing style of consciousness, Hillman heralds the capacity of

18 imagination in restoring the anima mundi, a world that speaks, a world ensouled (Hillman, 1983a). Further, Hillman (1975) has characterized soul as ―a perspective rather than a substance, a view point toward things rather than a thing itself‖ (p. xvi) as well as the ambiguous factor that deepens events into experiences and renders significance through its unique relation to death (Hillman, 1975). Last, Hillman (1975) has intimated soul as the ―the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy—the mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical‖ (p. xvi). Having presented a basic overview of archetypal psychology, I will now explicate archetypal psychology by way of four phenomenological modes of psyche—personifying, pathologizing, psychologizing, and de-humanizing (Hillman, 1975). From these four perspectives on soul, I will develop the imaginal background for archetypal approaches to death and dying, grief, and the notion that soul renders significance through its special relation to death. Personifying or Imagining Things Insofar as we, through mythic consciousness, apprehend all images non-dualistically and metaphorically, personifying becomes an essential way of knowing from the perspective of soul. Personifying refers to imagining and relating to things as mythical forms, not merely as subjective symbols, representations, or even ―as if‖ phenomena, but autonomous and ensouled beings. Hillman (1975) posited that personifying is the soul‘s response to the singleness of egocentricity: ―to save the diversity and autonomy of the psyche from dominion by any single power‖ (p. 32). Because the proponents of modern psychology have so totally personalized soul—―I‖ or ―me‖ or ―my‖ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors—the ―little people‖ of soul have coagulated into singular ego composed of literal identifications. Thus, the imaginal mode of personifying rests on the assumption of a polycentric psyche, one that consists of a multiplicity of archetypal viewpoints governing the diversity of experiences that we tend to personalize (Avens, 1980b). Our habitual way of ―seeing‖ cleaves reality into two— the subjective realm of the unitary, rational ego, and the objective world of material, impersonal objects—thus spawning binary questions of truth or falsehood, real or unreal, me or not-me. Oppositions such as these reflect literalisms supported by a totality of the ego, which, according to Hillman (1975), is simply one in a multitude of perspectives. The aim of personifying, then, is to relativize the ego

19 by animating the variety of images that constitute psyche. And so, ―personality may be imagined in a new way: that I am an impersonal person, a metaphor enacting multiple personifications, mimetic to images in the heart that are my fate, and that this soul which projects me has archetypal depths that are alien, inhuman, and impersonal‖ (Hillman, 1975, p. 51). By differentiating, personifying, and mythologizing the archetypal movements of soul, Hillman, following Jung, has posited a polycentric view of consciousness, in which psyche, by its very nature, tends toward fragmentation, dissociation, and multiplicity. The mythical variegation of psychic experience relativizes the singularity of the ego perspective and thus broadens possibilities for significance. Thus, the aim of personifying is to restore diverse, autonomous, and mythical forms or images of the imaginal psyche by vivifying relations with world and personifying our individual fragmentation, ―our many rooms and voices,‖ (Hillman, 1975, p. 3). Pathologizing or Falling Apart In addition to personifying, psychopathology is integral to the experience of soul. Indeed, a focus on suffering, pathology, and the tragic aspects of life underlies the tradition of depth psychology and its insights regarding the soul in extremis (Hillman, 1975). More than anything else in consciousness, Freud (1933) posited that symptoms are most alien to the ego. Significantly, Jung (1929) asserted that the Gods have become the diseases with the rise of modernity and the decline of religion. Taken together, these two insights concerning the intersection of suffering, symptom, and soul mark a major point of departure for archetypal psychology, whose notion of soul-making consists in relativizing the ego and recognizing the archetypal significance inherent to patterns of pathology that seem at odds with it. By pathologizing, Hillman (1975) means ―the psyche‘s autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any of its behavior and to experience and imagine life through this deformed perspective‖ (p. 57, emphasis added). Whereas most perspectives on the imagination characterize it as a creative process, Hillman, and Bachalard (1943) before him, point to the deformative operation of metaphor and the poetic imagination on perception and meaning. Thus, pathologizing works to dissolve literalisms characterized by a singleness of perspective, in accord with cardinal aspects of soul—differentiation, decentralization, and depth. ―Falling apart,‖ in this sense, points not only to a deliteralization of ego, but also a simultaneous reversion to a mythical style of consciousness, whose interiorizing

20 of the world bespeaks living depths, ―powers, daimons, and Gods‖ with whom the relation is participatory and revelatory of archetypal presence (Hillman, 1975, p. 105). Although death from a medical, scientific, and biological point of view is singular, final, separable from life, and ultimately unknowable, archetypal psychology imagines that the soul undergoes manifold death experiences and that for ―psyche, neither is immortality a fact, nor is death an end‖ (Hillman, 1965, p. 66). Quite separate from the modern notion of death and dying as finality, the variegated images, dreams, and fantasies of death and dying are plentiful, and often begin where life ends. The psychic experience of death is not dependent on or suggestive of literal death. Instead, images of death and dying are requisite to psyche and soul insofar as they reflect the essential sickness, decay, and morbidity endemic to those archetypal patterns (Hillman, 1983a) that counterpoise the fantasies of life, health, and immortality that would sooner have them sink beneath the surface of awareness. To the extent that pathologizing is a twisted and descending pathway of soul-making, images, fantasies, and dreams of the death experience provide initiation into the imaginal underworld and promote awareness of its mythical ―powers, daimons, and Gods,‖ divinities of the depths and vales, and the particular claims that they lay upon our lives as well as the archetypal patterns around which they constellate (Hillman, 1975, p. 105). Pathologizing and death awareness force us to see through a glass, darkly, the tragic relation between the ―mortal and immortal,‖ that natural crisis of soul (Hillman, 1975, p. xi). Psychologizing or Seeing Through Whereas personifying reflects the imaginative psyche or mythical structure of archetypes and pathologizing, the affective psyche or infirmity of archetypes, psychologizing speaks of the intellectual psyche or logos of archetypes: Archetypal psychologizing means examining our ideas themselves in terms of archetypes. It means looking at the frames of consciousness, the cages in which we sit and the irons bars that form the grids and defenses of our perception. There is a psychic factor, an archetypal fantasy, in each of our ideas which may be extracted by insighting for it…Through psychologizing I change the idea of any literal action at all—political, scientific, personal—into a metaphorical enactment. (Hillman, 1975, p. 127, emphasis added)

Importantly, psychologizing does not imply a shift from the concrete to the abstract. Rather, it involves moving from the literal to the imaginal. Indeed, our ability to ―see through‖ is impeded both by the concrete and abstract manner with which we apprehend. Respective examples include our notions of biological death and mathematical truth. Once we can recognize our most entrenched ideas as fantasies and not literal truths, then we can approach them imaginally, with an eye toward their archetypal significance. It is in this way of deliteralizing and seeing through ideas that we are psychologizing and more keenly aware of how the ideas that we ―have,‖ have us. At first glance, the action of ―seeing through‖ would suggest that psychologizing ultimately bears down upon essential truths at the center of our ideas. Even though psychologizing examines ideas in terms of archetypal patterns toward the ―heart of the matter,‖ the aim is an aesthetic one that does not arrive at definite conclusions. As Hillman (1975) points out, psychologizing as a metaphorical activity of soul necessarily wends an errant path that can be best described as circular and without end (Avens, 1982). In short, psychologizing opens up to depth by approaching ideas as metaphors through which we provisionally view reality. To this point, psychologizing is not in the service of what we see, but how we see (Casey, 1974). Because metaphor and ambiguity are part and parcel of psychologizing, it provides initiation into imaginal consciousness, from which perspective we may see the reality of fantasies encapsulated, and encrusted, by our ideas (Hillman, 1975). In sum, psychologizing is a process by which one reflects on how he or she habitually defines experience, and in so doing, recognizes the metaphorical character of our relation to experience itself. De-humanizing or Soul-making In the preceding sections, I have delineated personifying, pathologizing, and psychologizing as distinct yet interrelated modes of soul-making. Hillman (1975) has differentiated these modes to respectively highlight the diversity and autonomy, the deformity and infirmity, and the errancy and circularity inherent to soul, psyche, and the poetic imagination. Encompassing these three modes of soul is the notion of soul-making or polytheizing. Hillman (1975) makes polytheizing synonymous with soul-making because he imagines soul as plurality of animated perspectives as opposed to the view of a unitary ego. Throughout, I have made several references to the impersonal, inhuman, and mythical figures of soul—powers, daimons, Gods, and ―little people‖—to underscore that archetypal psychology is

22 not merely espousing a secular, polycentric view of consciousness, but, more radically, a polytheistic psychology that imagines Gods as ever present ―modes of psychological existence,‖ such that every experience constitutes a peculiar mythical enactment with its own archetypal basis (Hillman, 1975, p. 168). By way of personifying, pathologizing, and psychologizing, we make soul or deepen experience by discerning the Gods in what we once personalized, ―our‖ thoughts, feelings, fantasies, and symptoms, and imagining the mythical and cosmic perspectives that have come to predominate life as we know it or have ceased to know it. Soul-making also means dehumanizing psyche or dissolving literalisms that support the primacy of the ego, which flattens the imagination by its rigid attachments to the ―real‖ (Hillman, 1975). Avens (1980b) asserts that the purpose of soul-making consists in returning to the first metaphor of human existence: ―that we are not real‖ (p. 72, emphasis added), or rather, that existence is fundamentally imaginative and constituted by images. Importantly, soul-making does not dissolve the ego, only reveal that is one, albeit Herculean, among a multitude of perspectives or fantasies of the soul. Because Hillman (1975) regards soul as primordial and images ―tell the tales of our soul‖ (p. 217), then soul-making necessarily proceeds from our relation to image, or better, how we may artfully and precisely craft soul: ―Because our psychic stuff is images, image-making is a via regia, a royal road to soul-making‖ (p. 23). Insofar as soul-making necessitates letting go of our claims to the ―real‖ in the service of images, such crafting of soul is necessarily a mournful art and brings to bear the unique relation of soul to death. An Imaginal Approach to the Mourning Process Though bereavement following the death of a loved one remains my broad focus, I wish to distinguish the view of archetypal psychology with those that take death literally. For, in our culture, most discourses of death correspond quite literally with a cessation and absence of the physical body and, by extension, the inexorable passage of our loved ones from the world into the unknown. Indeed, Hillman (1979) drew an important distinction between the physical body of material life and the subtle body of psychic life. For Hillman, the subtle or imaginal body consists in the underworld images of soul, those shadowy figures that we encounter in dreams. Such figures need not ―represent‖ objective persons in themselves nor point to subjective manifestations of our complexes. Rather, Hillman (1979) imagines persons in dreams as embodiments of archetypal patterns arising in the imaginative psyche. By approaching the dream

23 this way, we have already begun to deliteralize death because a profound shift in perspective has occurred, from the literal and material to the imaginal and psychic. (Hillman, 1979). As I have presented it here, an imaginal approach to symptoms, post-death fantasies, dreams, and visions of the bereaved remains phenomenological and archetypal, such that I aimed to apprehend these experiences in both the subtle particulars of their images (an imaginal inquiry into formal causes) and against the backdrop of ―larger, transpersonal pattern[s] of meaning and purpose‖ (an imaginal inquiry into final causes) (Mogenson, 1992, p. 140). Using a narrative and archetypal hermeneutic approach, Becker (1995) concluded that grief and mourning can constitute an initiatory, poetic, and archetypal process through which we may sustain an ongoing imaginal relationship with the dead as well as discern the mythical background of our lives and relationships. In particular, he argued that grief can constitute an initiatory process, whereby the bereaved undergo a ―psychological‖ death. Insofar as the dead are both absent and present for the mourner, they are they are initiated ―into metaphorical awareness‖ (Becker, 1995, p. 195) that displaces ego consciousness. While threatening, painful, and potentially devastating from the perspective of the ego, the process of grief and mourning may enliven the imagination and engender ―a deeper appreciation of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, including the connection between living human beings, between the living and the dead, and between humanity of the world‖ (Becker, 1995, p. 187). Indeed, speaking of and imagining the dead as autonomous, animate presences can ultimately usher ―a renewed dance of life‖ (Becker, 1995, p. 204) because psyche personified expands immeasurably the possibilities for relationality and intimacy precluded by a dualistic worldview. In short, the mourning process has the potential to reconnect us with the anima mundi, the soul of the world, which overarches the interconnectedness of both humankind and the more-than-humankind. Toward a more conclusive statement of mourning from an archetypal perspective, I will further explicate the significance of ongoing imaginal relationships and the paradoxical relationship between mourning and ―enlivenment‖ (Becker, 1995, p. 206) through a rediscovery of the anima mundi. As Hillman (1979) underscored in his polemic regarding our estranged relation to death, theological, moral, parapsychological, and scientific perspectives diminish the psychological significance of images by explaining them away. For instance, a dream in which the (apparent) mourner fully embraces the (apparent) deceased may represent the grace of God or self-forgiveness or communion with the spirit of the deceased or a sense memory evoked by loss

24 and grief or a wish-fulfillment. Each one of these interpretations re-presents the dream image, such that what the image signifies to the dreamer is singular and predetermined by the explanatory system through which he or she apprehended it. In short, the image and psyche are not allowed to stand alone. Unless accorded a conceptual or metaphysical meaning, the image ostensibly lacks reality. Paradoxically, the sense of connection afforded by images of the dead is severed by the very psychological move that seeks stridently to assign meaning. I therefore argue that the dreamer, and images of the dead, would be better served by an aesthetic appreciation for the unique particularity of the dream in which they meet, rather than its interpretation. In other words, the pertinent distinction is whether one relates to the deceased as symbols or as images. As stated by Hillman (1977), whereas a symbolic approach to the dream image has generality as the aim (e.g., the dream train signifies initiation of a heroic journey), an imagistic approach works to preserve the peculiarity and autonomy of the dream image (e.g., a hulking, whistling, gray and jagged dream train). As Mogenson (1992) asserted, the mourning process marks the end of a material relationship and the beginning of an imaginal one. We preserve the vitality of our encounter with images of the dead by relating to them as imaginal presences, that is, autonomous of our representations, emotions, memories, or wish-fulfillments and possessing intentions that are alien and mysterious to us and yet multitudinous , without bottom, and rife with significance. Importantly, though the images that animate bereavement bear likeness to the dead, they are gradually transformed into imaginal presences by virtue of their appearance in the underworld: The more I dream of my mother and father, brother and sister, son and daughter, the less these actual persons are as I perceive them in my naïve and literal naturalism and the more than they become inhabitants of the underworld… Gradually the family moves from being the actual persons I must resist and contend with, to living ancestors, ghosts or shades, whose traits course within my psychic blood giving me support through their presence in my dreams. (Hillman, 1979, pp. 96-7) For one to literalize images of the dead as actualities precludes an ongoing imaginal relationship because this type of relation to image prioritizes what ―I‖ require from it, or rather, it bespeaks an interpretive stance that views images through the lens of ―my‖ complexes or projections.

Thus, by flattening the particularity, peculiarity, and autonomy of the image through personalisms and ready-made symbolisms, one, in effect, can sever the imaginal relationship. In material absence, the deceased become imaginally present and thus require an aesthetic response, a ―greeting of angels‖ (Mogenson, 1992, p. 117). From the archetypal perspective, these images of the significant dead are not merely messengers, but the message itself in their sheer imaginal presence (Avens, 1984). As Becker (1995) stated, ―Better to paint or draw the image, to write an elegy, or to engage the image of the deceased in dialogue, than to question its source, its cause, or meaning‖ (p. 193), for underworld images recede from the light of the dayworld. Whenever we seek to cradle the dead back to life, we discover that they vanish from our grasp. Whereas proponents of modern discourses on grief define resolution as an acceptance of loss and detachment from the deceased, from an archetypal perspective, grief may allow us not only to re-imagine our relationship with the deceased, but, more broadly, our estranged relation to the anima mundi, a world ensouled. In recounting his own immersion in the depths of the underworld, Romanyshyn (1999) offered the following poetic reveries that illustrate poignantly how grief can provide a harrowing bridge to the anima mundi: The water was as black as the night sky. Frozen between a desire to lean in its direction and into its dark oblivion and a fear that I was quickly losing the power to choose to back away from the abyss, I felt something which I had not felt since the moment when my wife died, several months earlier. For the first time since her death, I felt touched by something outside of me. Moved in this moment by the simple presence of the world, I cried. Tears washed down my face, and I realized that I was weeping for something beyond my own sorrow. At the extreme limits of my own grief, a grief older than mine, a sadness at the very heart of things, where the ocean seemed like the tears of the world, mingling with my own, forging a bond of kinship rooted in sorrow. For so long I had lived with my grief as if I were a ghost, an invisible presence haunting the outer margins of the world. But I felt witnessed by the world, seen in my sorrow, no longer completely alone. And out of this darkness, I heard words, spoken by the night itself, by the ocean and the blackness surrounding me: ―We are all so far from home.‖ (p. 9)

To be sure, this one account of despairing grief richly evokes the ambivalence of terror, beauty, and awe attendant to the soul in extremis. Though he refrains from physically falling into the ocean, the depth of his suffering and attendant reverence echoes a descent into the imaginal abyss of the underworld. The ghostly invisibility and heartfelt kinship with the world expressed by the bereaved bespeaks one of many archetypal constellations inherent to the underworld and grief process alike. One in particular, the Hades-Dionysion union, illustrates how soul can emerge out of loss and ruin. As Hillman (1979) put it: ―The images in Hades are also Dionysian—not fertile in the natural sense, but in the psychic sense, imaginatively fertile…There is a dance in death. Hades and Dionysos are the same. As Hades darkens Dionysos toward his own tragedy, Dionysos softens and rounds out Hades in his own richness‖ (p. 45). In other words, the images of Hades, from a Dionysian perspective, also resonate with a robust vitality that enlivens and bring us back to life. Much as descent into the underworld places us in contact with the infirmity of soul, so too does it reveal the abundance of soul: ―Through mourning, our dead bring us, and the world, back into life‖ (Becker, 1995, p. 206). A Backward Glance, Dionysos, and Mythic Figurations of Grief To this point, I have covered three major topics in my critical examination of the psychology of grief and mourning. At the outset, I reviewed and deconstructed dominant stage theories of grief and mourning, while highlighting how their prescriptions regarding responses to loss derive from a distinctly modernist, materialistic, and dualistic worldview. In particular, I noted how these theories each posit that a detachment from the deceased indicates a successful resolution of grief. Next, I presented continuing bonds theory, a model whose assumptions fly in the face of its intellectual predecessors so far as an ongoing relationship with the deceased may be regarded as meaningful and healing for the bereaved. In particular, I outlined the phenomenological dimensions of post-death encounters in general and dreams in particular and noted how these may serve as powerful pathways to continuing bonds. Third, I summarized an archetypal approach to grief and mourning and showed how it coheres with continuing bonds theory in its imaginal remembering of the dead, most potently in the realm of dreams. Additionally, I explored how the ontological assumptions of the archetypal perspective, namely the imaginal and its form of radical relativism, advance a uniquely non-dualistic stance that effectively deliteralizes both material and rational perspectives. To end this introduction, I now

27 return to the work at hand to map out the area of inquiry, identify its emergent tensions, and describe how they will guided and informed the work. For the present study, I took as a starting point the apparent tensions among dominant cultural and psychological discourses that prescribe a relinquishment of bonds with the dead as the goal of grief and mourning, and dreams in which the bereaved encounter the dead. This point of departure raised several tensions regarding the locus and purpose of our response to death. Indeed, the grief and mourning experiences of the bereaved seem to vacillate between the individual and cultural, the literal and imaginal, the personal and transpersonal, the dayworld and underworld, and suffering and healing. Not only did I discern in these themes the multilayered aspect of grief and mourning, but also the ways that the bereaved can be metaphorically confused, dismembered, and dispersed by the experience. Instead of apprehending these as conceptual opposites to be integrated, I elected to take a Dionysian approach to story in attending to the strife and seeming contradictions that can arise in narratives of grief and loss: ―Dionysian consciousness understands the conflicts in our stories through dramatic tensions…we are composed of agonies not polarities‖ (Hillman, 1983b, p. 40). Therefore, I viewed the images, stories, and other mythic figurations emerging from this process as constituting the unfolding drama of the grief experience, where death and relations with the dead shift from a literal to metaphorical significance. Method Storying Experience and Narrative Inquiry Narrative epistemology provides a distinct ―way of understanding one‘s own and other‘s actions, of organizing events and objects into a meaningful whole, and of connecting and seeing the consequences of actions and events over time‖ (Chase, 2005, p. 656). This way of knowing assumes an internal relation between life and story, such that the meaning of life cannot be discerned except through the stories we tell about it: Life and story ―are part of the same fabric, in that life informs and is formed by stories‖ (Widdershoven, 1993, p. 2). Regarding its temporal character, the narrative act involves a ―backward glance‖ toward ordering past experiences into a meaningful present. That said, insofar as narrative models espouse persons in process (Kelly, 1955), the emergent story also extends into the future by articulating what the person may become. Narrative, then, may frame and be framed by our questions about life because through questions ―we reach out for and attempt to clothe with some

28 familiarity the unknowns which lie ahead of us‖ (Mair, 1977, p. 282). In sum, with its historical and teleological characteristics, the narrative act encompasses both the continuity and change attendant to lived experience (Josselson, 1995). In structure, the narrative form does not consist of a chronology of events over time. Instead, as Chase (2005) argues, the narrative form communicates and coheres around unique points of view that encapsulate our reasons for living. Thus, the narrative transcends a mere description of events because it expresses the beliefs, feelings, wishes, and desires of the teller and the community and locales in which a story unfolds. In this way, the narrative form has the potential to illuminate the particular textures and contours of human experience. Having provided an overview of how narrative frames experience, I will now explicate four analytic lenses that guide narrative inquiry as a form of qualitative research. According to Chase (2005), narrative inquiry treats story as (1) a verbal action that is (2) contextually situated, (3) socially interactive, and (4) applicable to the researcher, insofar as the researcher narrates the researched. First, narration is a form of telling that produces and communicates the narrator‘s particular version of experience. Thus, storytelling is an active, creative, and purposive process that yields an array of perspectives on self, other, and world. Second, stories are produced within the context of the narrator‘s local community as well as a broader cultural and historical location. Given our embeddedness in multiple life contexts across multiple points in time, narrative research situates the meanings and patterns of story in a particular place and time. It follows, then, that the context out of which the story arises enables and constrains the reality produced. Third, narrative construction is essentially a social process, whereby self-referential and dialogical meanings upset conventional notions of authorship (Arvay, 2001) toward the emergence of a polyphonic text. Moreover, insofar as narrators perform stories in a particular setting, for a particular audience, with a particular purpose, the same story may be told in different ways depending on the social context. Fourth, the foregoing claims necessarily apply to the narrative researcher, whose own storied self unavoidably yet crucially bears upon the reality he or she seeks to understand. Taken together, the four analytic lenses highlighted by Chase (2003) indicate that ―researchers develop meaning out of, and some sense of order in, the material they studied; they develop their own voice(s) as they construct others voices‘ and realities; they narrate ―results‖ in ways that are both enabled and constrained by the social resources and circumstances embedded

29 in their disciplines, cultures, and historical moments; and they write or perform their work for particular audiences‖ (p. 657). As suggested by these premises, we have now entered the hermeneutic circle, where the mutually affective relation between the researcher and the researched raises critical questions regarding the interpretive process in narrative research. Having circumscribed narrative as a distinct epistemology and mode of qualitative inquiry, I now turn to the notion of image as product of a distinct ontology and mythic reversion as a mode of archetypal hermeneutics. Archetypal Images and Mythic Reversion The essential relation of image and psyche is a central tenet of Jungian psychology (Hillman, 1983b). Insofar as Jung postulates the presence of psyche and archetypal principles in our thoughts, feelings, moods, actions, and dreams, fantasy images compose not only what we see, but how we see (Casey, 1976). On the elaborations of archetypal psychology, Avens (1980a) argues that Hillman dramatizes Jung‘s position by espousing that psyche itself is an image in the primordial reality of the imaginal. The primacy of the archetypal image in our lives reflects Hillman‘s notion of ―imaginal reduction‖ (Avens, 1980a, p. 34): To live psychologically means to imagine things…To be in soul is to experience the fantasy of all realities and the basic reality of fantasy…In the beginning is the image: first imagination then perception; first fantasy then reality…Man is primarily an imagemaker and our psychic substance consists of images; our existence is imagination. We are indeed such stuff as dreams are made on. (Hillman, 1975, p. 23) In Hillman‘s view, the fact that imagination is existence means that we are always inside one or another archetypal configuration or fantasy (Hillman, 1975). Thus, images under-stand us in the sense of providing the mythical ground to our lives, albeit a ―groundless‖ ground, for myth opens up to depth and depth is a metaphor that entails no base (Hillman, 1979a). By image, Jung did not intend ―the psychic reflection of an external object,‖ or memory or perception, ―but a concept derived from poetic usage, namely, a figure of fancy or fantasy- image‖ (Jung, 1990, p. 261). Manifesting in dreams and waking experience, an image is ―a condensed expression of the psychic situation‖ in both its conscious and unconscious aspects (p. 262). Taking this notion of image and psyche to a more radical degree, Hillman (1975) posited that human nature is essentially imaginal and polycentric, such that our notion of self and psyche

30 are themselves images and, moreover, that images are more akin to presences than a poetic concept or ―figures of fancy.‖ This, in conjunction with Watkin‘s (2000) description of image as autonomous, imaginal other, paves the way for a vital distinction in how we respond to images: either literally and dogmatically or metaphorically and imaginatively. In ―sticking to the image,‖ (Hillman, 1975) the latter attitude fosters a deepening and elaboration of the image that not only preserves its multiple implications, but approaches it as an imaginal other with whom we may relate aesthetically. From the notion of aesthetic relation with image arises another distinction— meaning and significance—―the first is what we give [the image]…the second is what it gives to us‖ (Hillman, 1980, p. 37). With the co-extension of psyche or soul and the world of myth as his point of departure, Hillman (1979) adopts a method of mythic reversion in connecting archetypal images to their mythic background: ―Reversion is a bridge…a method which connects an event to its image, a psychic process to its myth, a suffering of the soul to the imaginal mystery expressed therein‖ (p. 4). Through the principle of resemblance or likeness to mythical and metaphorical persons, places, and plots, Hillman re-imagines the psychology of dreams and death in terms of Hades and the underworld. In other words, mythology proceeds from a rigorous attention to the phenomenology of image. As Hillman argues (1979), a poetic and mythic approach poses two distinct advantages: (1) ―it makes us look again at the phenomenon: what is actually dreamed, actually stated, actually experienced, for only by scrutinizing the event at hand can we attempt to find which of many archetypal constellations it might resemble‖; (2) and the method, in principle, precludes the formation of a singular explanation by vigorously promoting a ―return to multiple possibilities, correspondences with images that cannot be encompassed within a systematic account‖ (p. 4). Thus, this method is at once phenomenal in its attention to the peculiar appearances of image and archetypal in seeking the mythic persons, places, and plots that amplify and resonate with those particulars. An Imagistic Approach to Narrative Having delineated the experiential and hermeneutic facets of story and image, I now consider their union in a qualitative methodology. Whereas we re-present, structure, and delimit experience through story, image refers to experience in its immediate presentation, prior to our interpretation of it. In accord with the archetypal perspective, I take for granted the primacy of images. Images come first, not temporally, but ontologically. Archetypal significance is in the

31 appearing and shaped necessity of autonomous images (Hillman, 1978): ―all is given at once, all parts are co-relative and co-temporaneous‖ (Avens, 1980a, p. 44). Interpretation, however, transforms significance into meaning. Insofar as interpretation occurs in a wider social and cultural context, words and stories emerge as vehicles for structuring and communicating meaning. Through words and stories, ―the image is transposed into [a] verbal coherence‖ (Berry, 1982/2008, p. 66), whereby experience is transformed sequentially into dramatic plots featuring the teller and the assorted cast of characters that comprise his or her community. Insofar as stories evocatively present the dramatic leitmotifs of lived experience (e.g., love, loss, fortune, betrayal), they possess an arresting quality for both the teller and the audience that bespeaks the presence of archetypal significance: ―We cannot hear a story without feeling caught; we cannot tell a tale without feeling ourselves in some part…Personal events, moods, jealousies, and even symptoms, when reflected through a story, gain weight and distance‖ (Berry, 1982/2008, pp. 68-69). In this way, even the most mundane, routine, and trivial aspects of daily existence can be meaningfully storied, though always within at least one or another archetypal image. That said, insofar as the narrative form engenders a sense of continuity and identity, the teller runs the risk of overly delimiting and personalizing the story and, in so doing, obscuring the multidimensional and impersonal aspects of its archetypal significance. In sum, an imagistic approach to narrative acknowledges the inherent tensions between meaning and archetypal significance, words and images, and what can and cannot be said in the story form. More specifically, this approach to narrative may provide a compelling and complementary perspective for understanding the experience of grief and loss in its personal, social, and archetypal dimensions. Whether of valued persons, places, or things, manifestations of loss can forcefully dismember coherence in our lives and identity because our relationships with cherished persons, places, or things comprise the very assumptive structure that frames our stories (Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Neimeyer, 2001). From the narrative perspective, we are of our stories; and through the eyes of Hades, we are of our images (Avens, 1980a). Thus, we live by stories and images that tell dramatic tales—comedic, romantic, ironic, and tragic—of relationality, of experience, and of soul as we walk the borderlands of life and death. Of our existential dramas, parting with a loved one—a parent, a spouse, a friend, a child—in death and loving in absence, is among the most archetypal of paradoxes. To the extent that the deceased were central figures in the life story of the bereaved, the loss constitutes a yawning discontinuity,

32 whose essential absence occasions the influx of images, dreams, and new stories. From this perspective, then, I view grief and mourning as a process by which the bereaved navigate the upheaval and gradual reconstruction of their storied selves. Amy and the Orphic Gesture In taking an imagistic approach to narrative, and examining grief as a process of soul- making, I have situated my methodology and dissertation in the genre of imaginal psychology. Though my ultimate purpose is to listen with an archetypal ear to laments of the living and the significant dead, I first must do so with the grief in which I find myself, a wound that has inexorably called me to the work. For Romanyshyn (2007), ―research as vocation places the researcher within a context that is larger than his or her intentions for the work. Indeed, the work is the site where the complex patterns of the researcher‘s history and the unfinished business of the ancestors meet, where the complex and archetypal dimensions in the work meet, where the time-bound and the timeless qualities of the work encounter each other‖ (p. 124). Toward initiating this process of differentiation, I pause to consider ―my own‖ unfinished story, its archetypal background, and the ways that I feel called by the work. Here, I remember my relationship with my sister, Amy. Seeing her name, speaking it to myself silently… Something speaks back. A warm stone rising in my throat, As tears well in my eyes. Six years. Six years ago, my sister died. Six years ago, my sister died of a drug overdose. Six years ago, my sister died and it still hurts like hell. As I reflect on the origins of the work, I see the face of my sister and her brown eyes staring back, through me, past me. Amy is here and yet not-here. My wife calls, noticing I seem far away. What‘s the matter? Where are you? I am in a noisy restaurant with my parents, having passed a major milestone in my graduate schooling. What is supposed to be a celebratory dinner instead feels solemn, somber even. Somehow, the conversation turns to the future and my next topic of research. Immediately, I say death and dying, but haltingly and vaguely, as if I am echoing words whispered in my ear.

Amy and I had a complicated relationship. Though eight years younger than her, I often acted like an older brother, particularly as I entered my teenage years. Having abused drugs and alcohol from an early age, Amy completed her first rehabilitation program at 18. Over the course of the next 15 years, she would cycle in and out of countless mental health care facilities and hospitals, where she received the full gamut of psychiatric diagnoses, medications, and psychological and behavioral treatments. Sadly, few of these treatment experiences would foster lasting change. Amy remained tormented, confused, and adrift throughout much of her life. Loving my sister, concerned for her well-being, and fearing for her life, I adopted the role of healer, using philosophical, literary, and poetic musings as a salve for her wounds. When the salves didn‘t work, I listened more and offered support. When the listening and support didn‘t work, I cried and pleaded. When the crying and pleading didn‘t work, I distanced myself from our relationship. That‘s hard to say. When Amy died, We were largely estranged. That‘s the hardest to say. In the fall of the year that she died, I applied to clinical psychology programs while working at a treatment facility where she had done relatively well ten years before. In the latter months of winter, more numb than eager, I awaited invitations to interview. Meanwhile, my family looked upon the process hopefully as my acceptance would signify some kind of bittersweet synchronicity and subsequent clinical work an affirmation of Amy‘s life. By the time spring arrived, I hadn‘t received a single invitation and that possibility faded away. But it never mattered to me; at least, not in the way that my parents hoped. Nothing seemed to matter except that Amy had left the world. She suffered for most of her life and, in early death, had attained a tragic ―freedom from,‖ though to what I cannot know. This notion of ―freedom from‖ consoles me, until I imagine forwards and lament the possible lives Amy will never experience. Looking back on my own life, I‘ve grieved, mostly in silence, for the past five years and through the eyes of grief I now experience life from a more tragic perspective. I see loss in the fleetingness of experience. But in this kind of suffering, I have also experienced value in what I can only describe as its depths and how loss opens up life even as it takes away.

After reflecting on the attendant value of suffering, I realized how the work may comprise a double elegy, addressing the loss of the loved one as well as the dying significance of loss itself in the modern age. Concerning elegy in the former sense, however, and Amy in particular, my path to the work bears likeness to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and its ―archetypal themes of love, loss, [and] descent‖ (Romanyshyn, 2007, p. 55). Son of Apollo and of the Muse Kalliope, Orpheus is a poet and singer whose songs honor memory and induce in listeners an awakening of soul to its ―forgotten inner melody‖ (p.55). In Ovid‘s telling of the myth, Orpheus‘ union with Eurydice begins ominously as Hymen, God of marriage, neither smiles nor gives his blessing during the ceremony (Morford & Lenardon, 2007). Shortly afterwards, as Eurydice wanders through the grass, she is bitten by a snake and collapses in death. On learning of Eurydice‘s fate, Orpheus weeps and sets upon the underworld in search of her. Although Orpheus ultimately does not succeed in bringing Eurydice back to the upper world, he learns to see life through the eyes of the underworld by a process of dismemberment and transformation. I take this myth and its themes as the archetypal background for the work insofar as it parallels my ongoing process of reckoning with loss. In particular, the myth echoes my desire to reclaim a relationship with Amy, and, in the process, confront my own relation to death. Thus, I have felt caught in the turning point of the myth—between needing to bring Amy back ―home‖ and, in failing to do so, meeting her again, albeit on different grounds. Having shared my personal and mythic relation to the work, I now return to the question of implementing an imagistic approach to narrative in the study of grief and dreams. In the remainder of this section, I will explicitly lay out what this method entailed. First, I describe the assorted means by which I recruited participants. Second, I outline my procedure for what were preliminary and central phases of the interview process. Third, I describe three interrelated modes of narrative analysis—interview reflection, the research group, and iterative listening/reading—that guided the inquiry process. Fourth, I present narrative collage as a mode of representation that is conducive to an imagistic approach to narrative. Last, I reiterate my goals for the inquiry and furnish a set of criteria by which I and the reader can evaluate its quality. Seeking Participants’ Stories In seeking participants, I concurrently utilized three separate procedures: (1) flyers; (2) snowball sampling; and (3) Miami University Mass Survey. First, I created a flyer (See

Appendix A) to solicit prospective participants. The flyer included the title of the study, an overview of its foci, a brief description of the data collection process, and contact information. I posted flyers in popular businesses and locales within Oxford, OH. In addition, I sought permission from the director of the Miami University Student Counseling Service to leave flyers at the reception desk and/or waiting room. Second, I utilized a snowball sampling technique, in which participants recommended persons that would be appropriate for participation. The snowball sampling technique was particularly effective in recruiting family members of participants. Third, I administered a brief screening questionnaire (See Appendix B) to a group of Miami University undergraduate students, for whom participation in research studies was part of a course requirement, through a system of mass data collection referred to as Mass Survey. I contacted eligible student participants by email to set up a follow-up telephone screening. I developed two general guidelines for the telephone screening (See Appendix C) that determined inclusion for the study. First, the participant must have had at least one encounter with his or her loved one through the medium of dreams. That said, previous studies support a variety of encounters with the dead, such as seeing or feeling the presence of a loved one while awake; therefore, I was amenable to hearing about these experiences as well, so long as they were in addition to at least one encounter through a dream. Second, the participant must have demonstrated that the dream had held some significance for them in the grief and mourning process. Given the preponderant role of narrative in the study, this particular guideline begged the question of time insofar as I regarded grief, mourning, narrativity, and significant dreams as extended processes. Moreover, even while I was interested in the phenomenology of encounters with the dead and their immediate significance for the bereaved, I also wished to explore whether and how their significance changes over time and the ways that the bereaved negotiate their idiosyncratic experiences in relation to communal and cultural discourses. Thus, I considered the passing of time from the death and the encounter with the loved one as salient factors. Therefore, in the screening process, I verified that prospective participants had at least three months from the time of their first post-death encounter to reflect on its significance. Once eligibility had been ascertained, I scheduled an interview with the participant. In total, I recruited eight participants for the study: one by flyer, two by snowball sampling, three by Mass Survey, and two, unexpectedly, by personal contact. The two participants recruited by personal contact—one a friend and the other an academic

36 acquaintance—both volunteered for the study on hearing me first describe it in conversation. Out of the eight total participants, seven were female, and they ranged in age from 18-60. The sample consisted of three college students, two graduate students, one psychotherapist, one academic teacher and researcher, and one retired schoolteacher. All of the participants reported at least one post-death encounter with a significant person in their life. However, I ultimately elected to exclude one participant for analysis because she did not have dreams of her deceased loved one, and a second participant who, though he once dreamed of his uncle after his death, did not endorse grief in connection with his loss. Of the remaining six participants, I analyzed the stories of four, two of which were told by a granddaughter and her grandmother, whose experiences I presented together in the third and final narrative collage in the results section. After first meeting me for an interview, two of the college students presented the study to members of their family, who expressed interest in participating and were therefore recruited by a snowball sampling technique. One pair consisted of the aforementioned granddaughter and grandmother, and the other, a mother and daughter. Although the latter pair presented a highly compelling set of narratives, I ultimately chose to write-up the granddaughter and grandmother‘s stories because of the variety of post-death encounters that they experienced. In summary, I assembled and analyzed three narrative collages for four female participants, ranging in age from 18-60, narrating grief and post-death encounters associated with the loss of (1) a father, (2) a mother, and (3) a grandfather and a husband. Inviting and Listening to Stories I invited screened participants to respond to a total of three prompts prior to engaging in the interview process (Cress, Harrick, & Fuehrer, 2003; Del Castillo, 2010). First, I provided participants with the following writing prompt that focuses on the loved one with whom he or she has had an encounter: Tell me about the loved one whom you have lost and a time when you were vividly aware of what he or she means to you. Second, I provided an additional writing prompt that pertained to the dream(s) in which the participant encountered his or her loved one: Now, tell me the dream(s) in which you encountered your loved one. I invite you to write down your dreams, one at a time, and to do so in the first-person, present tense, and in as much detail as possible. Third, I provided an image prompt that applies broadly to the participant‘s relationship with his or her loved one, the dream encounter, and experiences of the grief and mourning process: Sometimes, when words fail us, images can more fully express the depth and

37 power of our experience. I invite you to collect images (e.g., photographs, paintings, drawings, etc.) through which you connect or have connected with your loved one, your dream encounter(s), and/or significant aspects of your grief and mourning experience. While images embody the ineffable aspects of experience, they also, as Harper (2002) notes, foster intimate dialogue when shared: ―Photographs appear to capture the impossible: a person gone; an event past. That extraordinary sense of seeming to retrieve something that has disappeared belongs alone to the photograph, and it leads to deep and interesting talk‖ (p. 23). Thus, the particulars of experience elicited by the foregoing prompts had the dual function of (1) opening up and animating the participants‘ stories and (2) providing a set of anchor points around which the telling could proceed. Importantly, another overarching goal of this procedure was to engender a shift in responsibility from the researcher as ―questioner‖ to the participant as ―storyteller‖ (Chase, 1995). For all participants, I conducted two interviews, each of which lasted approximately 90 minutes. All of the interviews were face-to-face, except for the interviews with Marion and the first of two interviews with a participant whose narrative was not included in the final analysis. I conducted these three interviews over the telephone due to geographical distance. All of interviews, face-to-face and telephone, took place in my research space, which is housed on the third floor of the Psychology Building at Miami University. Once the participant had written and submitted the above-referenced preliminary materials, I scheduled an initial interview. At the beginning of the initial interview, I presented participants with three forms: a general informed consent (See Appendix D), a consent to record dreams (See Appendix E), and a consent to use photographs (See Appendix F). Prior to signing these forms, participants were given the opportunity to ask questions about the study. Although the format of the interviews was unstructured and open-ended, I utilized a set of research questions (See Appendix G), based upon the work of Finocan (2009), to help in framing the content. I refer to the format of the first interview as the Initiation and Exposition phase because I aimed to gain access to the participant‘s story and encourage the exposition of its persons, places, and plots. Thus, in terms of narrative specificity, the intended trajectory was to move from the particular, as evoked by the writing and image prompts, to the general. In other words, the purpose and activity of this phase of the interview process was one of map-making, where responses to the writing and image prompts constitute cardinal points that will provide a sense of

38 direction and bearing in relation to the broader story. At the outset of the first interview, I briefly discussed with the participant her response to the first writing prompt and then encouraged her to elaborate the meaning of her relationship with the deceased by way of memories, stories, and objects. With few exceptions this process transitioned into the story of her loved one‘s death, her grief, and post-death encounters during that time. On the rare occasion that that the interview did not naturally take this course, I facilitated a transition into the discussion of these topics. Apart from this caveat, my primary role in this phase of the process was one of an active listener. I refer to the second interview as the Exploration and Weave phase because my goal was to navigate more intricately the storied territory that we have already mapped and then attend to the weave of particular narrative threads. My purpose for this phase of the interview process was to focus on (1) the idiosyncratic themes of the story with respect to both structure and content as well as (2) the overall arc of the story told by the participant. In regards to the first, I attended to the manifestation of turning points and fault lines, where, for better or worse, the story presents a marked shift in tone, perspective, or voice. According to Josselson (1995), one can conceive of these narrative (dis)junctures as ―keys to meaning-making…the heartbeat of psychological organization, the point[s] where the tectonic plates of experience move into contact with one another…the key to psychological entry into another‖ (p. 37). This particular approach to narrative inquiry is both imagistic and Dionysian in that it envisions archetypal significance in the dramatic tensions, crises, and agonies that comprise the pivotal moments of the story (Hillman, 1983b). To this end, I presented to the participant salient themes from the first interview and invited her to elaborate on their significance in turn. In addition, insofar as I aimed to have an understanding of the overall trajectory of the story, I talked with the participant about how this set of themes characterized or contrasted with the overall arc of her story. At the conclusion of the second interview, I provided participants with a debriefing form (See Appendix H). Inhabiting Stories Immediately following the interview process with the participants, I took time to reflect on the exchange and write down my initial impressions, reactions, and observations. Through this structured reflection, I aimed to articulate the general tone of the interview and my own contributions to it and how they shaped the process. In addition, I attempted to recall in detail notable instances of non-verbal expression, such as bodily gestures, pace of speech, and eye

39 contact as of these signs can provide windows into the participant‘s embodied experience of his or her narrative as well as the storytelling process. Soon thereafter, I transcribed the interview and noted my observations of non-verbal expression to provide an embodied context to the telling and the text. Once I transcribed the interviews, I convened a research group consisting of myself, two graduate students, and a psychologist. Prior to meeting, I distributed to the group members responses to the writing prompts and the interview transcriptions. We then met weekly for 90 minutes sessions to (1) discuss our initial impressions of the transcribed texts and (2) listen to the interview, from start to finish, stopping periodically to discuss our reactions and interpretations. Immediately following the research group, I reflected on the process and wrote down additional impressions, reactions, and observations, to identify emergent interpretations of the group as well as to further track the evolution of my own stance toward the presented story. In addition to these two modes of analysis, throughout, I engaged in an iterative process, in which I continually re-read and re-listened to the transcripts. I did so with the assumption that stories often contain multiple dialectics, reflecting the complexity of lived experience and the multiform aspect of grief. By attending to dialectics of the individual and cultural, the literal and imaginal, the personal and transpersonal, the dayworld and underworld, and suffering and healing, I aimed to identify dynamic and meaningful tensions inherent to the structure and content of the story. More broadly though, an iterative process served to refine understandings that arise in the dialectic of the general and particular or how the whole story is meaningfully related to its parts. In addition, outside of the frame of the story, an iterative process allowed for refined understanding in the dialectic between the researcher and researched, insofar as they bear a mutually affective relation. Thus, this process helped to elucidate the ways that I am affected by the text and the text is affected by me and other members of the research group. Performative Writing and Narrative Collage In this section, I outline my approach to representing the participants‘ narratives as well as the interpretations that I constructed in collaboration with my research team. Following the work of Kotre (1984), I have written up each participant‘s narrative in two distinct sections: (1) an autobiographical narrative collage, itself interpretive, and (2) my interpretation of the narrative. In this section, by way of offering a working definition, I will situate narrative collage in the genre of performative writing and consider how its aims and structure accord with an

40 imagistic approach to narrative. Second, I will delineate the methodological process by which I deconstructed the narratives and reconstituted them as collages. Third, I will discuss how the content and structure of the collage informed the interpretation section. Finally, I will furnish a set of criteria by which the reader can evaluate the quality of the narrative collages. Performative writing is a method of inquiry and representation concerned with figuring the evocative aspects of the work. In short, the performative researcher is one who shows rather than tells. Pollock (1998) characterizes performative writing as polyphonic, reflexive, and evocative, and defines it generally as ―an inquiry into the limits and possibilities of the intersections between speech and writing‖ (p. 75). Alternatively, I have approached performative writing as a convergence of image and word, a process of image-making (Schweitzer, 2014), insofar as I viewed stories as both a text of lived experiences and a set of imagistic frames from which experiences gain perspective—stories, then, are in the former sense, reflective, and in the latter sense, imaginative. Thus, my approach to performative writing is to evocatively draw out the particular imagistic frames of the text by amplifying and poeticizing the various moods, scenes, and contexts (Hillman, 1977) around which events of the story turn. For Denzin (2001), the method of narrative collage is a novel approach to performative writing insofar as the textual image has primacy over temporality. In other words, the boundaries that separate past, present, and future are purposely collapsed to depict the non-linear manifestations of lived experience. It is then possible that ―more than one voice can speak at once, in more than one tense. The text can be a collage, a montage, with photographs, blank spaces, poems, monologues, dialogues, voice-overs, and interior streams of consciousness‖ (p. 29). In as much as discontinuity can characterize the phenomenology of grief, the method of narrative collage has the capacity to represent its distinctive variety of fragmentary experiences. As Dillard (1982) points out, ―The use of narrative collage, then, enables the writer to recreate, if he wishes, a world shattered, and perhaps senseless, and certainly strange. It may emphasize the particulate nature of everything. We experience a world unhinged. Nothing temporal, spatial, perceptual, social, or moral is fixed‖ (p. 24). Following Dillard (1982), narrative collage, with an emphasis on ―the particulate nature of everything,‖ takes as its focus the array of images— strange, beautiful, grotesque, mysterious—that give countenance to the grief experience. It weaves together a pastiche of moments, moods, scenes, and contexts (Hillman, 1977) in ways that honor the aesthetic textures of experience and produce ―enabling fictions,‖ openings to ―a

41 place where the raw and genuine find their articulation through form, through poetic expression, through art‖ (Pelias, 2005, p. 418). From the three modes of narrative analysis discussed in the section Inhabiting Stories— (1) individual reflection, (2) group listening and reflection, (3) iterative, individual listening and reflection—I accumulated and developed a bank of narrative and imagistic elements that held significance for me in the scope of the inquiry and the participant with regard to the particular stories from which they were drawn. These elements were not categorically defined, but included observations about what the participants, and their stories, said about the deceased, grief, dreams, and imagination, and how they said it. Additionally, the research team and I concerned ourselves with the particular characters, scenes, plots, and moods that composed the story, its overall trajectory, and the relation between the two. Drawing from the banks of narrative elements and images, for each participant, I listed the images/metaphors, characters, settings, scenes, plots, and moods that comprised her story. To organize this data, I created an analysis key for each participant, which included the important images and themes that I and the listening group discerned in the narratives (See Appendix I). In structuring the overarching plot, I asked, ―Around which particular images, what imaginal joints, does the story appear to turn and how does the story cohere, if at all, in the assemblage of its images?‖ Furthermore, I wondered how these images pertained to the participant‘s storied relation with persons, places, and events in their grief experience. Given the primacy of images in structuring the autobiographical collage, they are featured prominently, in both visual and textual, poetic form, in the three stories that follow. Next, I extracted from the transcribed interviews discrete scenes that resonated with the central images of the story and its overall plot. Each collage consists of a series of chapters corresponding to these selected scenes, with the exception of the last, which I elected to structure dialogically. In most cases, the paragraphs that comprise the scene represent intact passages from the participant‘s interview. Often, however, I elected to rearrange their sequence in the service of constructing a more coherent and compelling narrative. Thus, the chapters do not necessarily proceed in chronological order. Except for false starts, fillers, arbitrary repetitions, which were ―cleaned up‖ to enhance readability, and the use of bracketed statements to improve intelligibility, the text of the autobiographical collage is entirely in the words of the participant. Last, I adopted the technique of poetic condensation and

42 repetition to highlight portions of the text that held the most significance in the context of the inquiry and the particular stories in which they appear. My broad purpose in this study was to inquire into the experiences of persons who have encountered a deceased loved one in dreams as part of his or her grief and mourning process. My primary aims for the study were: (1) to learn about the phenomenology of imaginal encounters with the dead for the bereaved, namely through dreams, and the context and significance of such experiences; (2) to examine stories of grief and loss in terms of personal and archetypal mythology; and (3) to explore, and elaborate, theoretical and methodological intersections of narrative and archetypal psychology. Although I created the autobiographical narrative collage in accord with all three aims, the last, representing extraordinary experiences, had primacy insofar as I privileged the voice and first-person experiences of the participants. In the interpretation section, however, I extracted from the narrative collage thematic elements that I construed as the participants‘ most significant experiences, while adding to the broader conversation regarding grief, dreams, and imagination. In addition to the role of dreams, I also examined the variety of ways that the bereaved mythologize the significant dead, and how the living relationship can enable, constrain, and broadly characterize the grieving process itself. Thus, I conducted the interpretive analysis in accord with the first two aims. Insofar as narrative collage is a largely aesthetic methodology, I established a set of evaluative criteria to guide my choices in writing the text and provide a means by which I, and the reader, could judge the quality of the work. To do so, I turned to the work of Goodall (2008), and adopted the following criteria: (1) coherence; (2) experiential anchoring; (3) transference and immersion; (4) engagement of the intellect and emotionality; and (5) finesse. Coherence denotes the integrity of the narrative collage as a unified whole and the extent to which the individual chapters flow and hold together. The second criterion, experiential anchoring, refers to richly detailed and vivid accounts of lived experience that facilitate access to the story being told. This relates to the next criterion, transference, or the degree to which the storytelling, whether through experiential anchors or other literary devices, immerses the reader in the life world being presented. Fourth, a balanced synthesis of intellectual, emotional, and subjective elements works to ensure quality in tone and perspective. Last, finesse refers to the skill with which the author transitions from real to storied time. Given that the entirety of the narrative collage is presented in storied time, I will instead define finesse in terms of the transitions from passage to passage,

43 within each chapter, and chapter to chapter, within the story itself. Now, without further ado, I present the following three narrative collages with accompanying analyses.

Results Liza and her Dad: Narrative Collage I. I remember when I was really young, like six or something, [my dad] was building a fence in the backyard and using the sledgehammer to do so. He somehow hit his thumb and cut it wide open so the bone was showing. I remember him peeling back the skin and you could see the bone. And, he took a staple gun and stapled his thumb back together. He‘s like, ―I‘m going to the hospital,‖ and just wraps up his very bloody thumb in a handkerchief and drove himself to the hospital. And I remember thinking, ‗He is the strongest man in the world.‘ He provided an entire framework that I got to grow up in. I got to grow up in this perfect house in the woods in New England. I got to have this paradise of a childhood because of the visions that he had in his life about what he wanted. I got to have all of this stuff. He was a provider in every sense of the word that a person can provide. And I remember thinking, ‗He is the strongest man in the world.‘ I made [a] painting that I was working on while he was sick. And, I remember finished, it was a picture of a man swinging a woman, kind of like how you give someone an airplane ride by holding onto their wrist and their ankle and then you spin. Like a helicopter. So, it‘s a man, kind of helicoptering a woman. And I kind of made it look a little bit like my parents when they were younger. He‘s swinging her in the air and she‘s on the top of the arc on her way to being crashed down to the ground, right at that moment of perfect freefall. And [when] I finished that painting, I remember my aunt was downstairs visiting, when my dad had slipped into a coma, the day before he died. And I remember feeling, ‗My whole life got taken away from me.‘

II. My dad had this dream a few weeks before he passed away. He recounted it one morning to my mom and me at the kitchen table. I was making him toast. He had stopped making his own meals only about a week before because the medication made him lose his fine motor functioning. But he dropped and broke several jars of mayonnaise and jelly [and that] had been a great source of frustration for him. It was hard to relinquish his right to make a sandwich. I‘ll paraphrase as best as I can. He says, ―I was making a sandwich, but it kept falling apart. I couldn‘t keep the sandwich together. Every time I held on to the bread, the inside would fall out. It was very frustrating. Suddenly, I realized why I couldn‘t keep it together. It was a water sandwich.‖

And, as he said this, he laughed and laughed. Not only did my dad not laugh much, he was pretty reserved. And, this was a kind of laugh we had never heard him make before. It was almost a helpless giggle, the way a child would laugh. I shared the story with my therapist a few months later and she made the connection of how the body is bread and the spirit is water. His body could no longer contain his spirit. Even though it was a time of restlessness and agitation he must have been coming to terms with it and being more at peace with what was happening and how quickly it was happening. And, not only was it like I‘d never heard my dad laugh like that, but my mom and I were both there when he told us the story and loved that. I don‘t think he‘s ever even told me one of his dreams before. Maybe this was like the first time that had happened. I think he was just so tickled by the total absurdity of the situation of trying to eat a water sandwich, because he himself was so rational, so just the idea of him doing that really tickled him. I tried to catch…I tried to make it a happy image. I really tried to get the look on his face,

47 like that moment right between total confusion and perplexedness, and then the moment of being perplexed and suddenly it dawning on you that something very funny is happening. Like, the moment of realizing that you had severely misjudged a situation. The consequences are not great when it‘s a water sandwich. All you‘ve done is get the bread wet. It‘s not that I have made a horrible mistake, it‘s just this moment of, ‗How is this possible that this is happening? Why would I put water on a sandwich? Why would I have thought that that would have worked?‘ I was trying to get that moment of self-recognition and kind of the beautiful, miraculous absurdity of all this water rushing out of this bread. III. Well first, it was originally prostate cancer that he was diagnosed with. He had gone in for, not for chemo, but for some other treatment late 2008, early 2009, and he had been really responsive to those treatments. It seemed that it had been cleared from his system. So, everyone was really relieved and happy about that. Now that I‘m thinking back a little more, this was sometime in 2008 [that] he had gone through a round of some sort of treatment that had made him gain some weight and lose a lot of his hair. I remember I flew home to surprise him for his birthday and that was April of 2008. I remember he was mowing the lawn and my mom had picked me up from the airport and drove me home and she distracted him so I could sneak out of the car and go up into my room. And, she was like, ―Oh, yes, come see something upstairs.‖ I was hiding behind a bed or something and I jumped out and he was really surprised. I remember thinking in my head, ‗He looked very physically different than when I saw him four months earlier,‘ and I remember thinking, ‗Maybe this surprise is not entirely pleasant to him.‘ I remember thinking that he looked like he was self-conscious over having changed physically,

so much, so quickly. He wasn‘t prepared to see me. I don‘t really catch my dad off-guard very often. It wasn‘t like he was making an unpleasant face. It was just that I very rarely see him not composed. He was definitely surprised and laughing, almost like it was an embarrassed laugh. It was around May, I want to say late May of 2009, that he was out on the golf course with his friends and he just collapsed. I remember I was in Los Angeles and I was having a real day of fun with my co-worker and her girlfriend. It was very rare that I was having a day to go out and have a day of fun. We snuck onto the roof of some hotel and went swimming. Then I got a call from my mom. I was drinking Tecates in a salt water pool on a roof in Los Angeles and I was like, ‗This is the funnest time ever.‘ And, I got the call from my mom. [My dad] had sort of a seizure on the golf course and they rushed him into the hospital. And, they did a brain scan and found out that the cancer had spread, more or less, all over his body, no longer just the prostate. So, at this point he needed to go into chemo therapy. And, it was tough as chemo always is and it really took a lot out of him. But, again, he was really, really responsive to everything. I remember going home that summer for a friend‘s wedding feeling like he was doing pretty good. [Later that summer] I had an art show out in North Hollywood, near Los Angeles. So, I had four new sculptures for it that were really important and it was a really big deal having this show for me. And, my dad and my mom flew out for it. They flew out for the opening. It was really special because my mom had visited me in Los Angeles a couple times, but my dad had never been able to. So, it was really nice getting to have him there for what was really a very proud moment for me. Having the show and having him, it was kind of like,

‗Look, your daughter is doing well.‘ I felt like I got to show him a really best case scenario picture and that felt really good. The whole time I‘d been there I‘d been working as a baker and doing my art studio stuff. My mom gave me a lot of guff for not having a more traditional job. She was always very worried that I should be doing ... you know, being a teacher and getting married and just having more of a stable thing happening and I would get mad at her. She didn‘t really like it when I made art work that was ―not nice,‖ and we just had a lot of trouble communicating about a lot of things. I would get really defensive and mad at her. My dad would always, whatever, however weird [my artwork] was, he would always display it proudly and was always really supportive of everything. [He] never really asked, never really gave me any reason to think that he doubted that I would do okay in art. He would always wrap up conversations with, ―Are you eating well? Are you exercising? Do you have enough money?‖ and leave it at that. He would never, never undermine me in any way. Then it was just a couple months later that I was doing a show with the Arts Commission and it was, again, as big a deal as things had been for me. I felt like I was at a point where things were really crossing over. I was going to start being able to function more as a serious artist. Things were really picking up and I was under a lot of pressure from my mom to come home. She was like, ―You gotta come back to New York, I think you‘ve gotta…‖ And, the way I heard that is, like, ―Give up the dream, like grow up, come home, do something real with your life.‖ So, I‘m obviously, really reacting against this. I was just under a very serious deadline with this show and I was missing work for it, so I didn‘t have enough money to pay my bills. Things were really in friction and I remember getting into very bad conversations with my mom and my brother, but eventually I was like, ‗Okay.‘ So, I took six weeks off of work to come home. IV. The day I got home to New York I was having lunch with my dad, my mom was at work. I think

50 my dad made us tuna fish sandwiches. We‘re eating lunch and then I get up to wash the dishes. He was being a little weird. He was just ... he‘s always quiet and I‘ve always felt my dad and I don‘t really have the same natural rapport. My mom and I can talk for hours and hours and hours, we just talk to each other very easily. My dad, I always knew that he loved me and had no doubts about any of that, but we just didn‘t really talk as much. And that always bothered me a little bit: Why is it hard to talk to dad? We‘re having lunch and he was being really unusually quiet. I remember at one point he‘s raising his sandwich to his mouth and kind of one eye was droopy. He had one lazy eye and he was moving very slowly. I asked, ‗Dad, are you okay?‘ And he‘s like, ―Yeah, fine.‖ And, then I was washing the dishes and then I walked into the other room and then I heard a crash. I ran in and he was on the floor and he was having a seizure. He‘d fallen off his chair and he was having a very, very dramatic seizure. My first response is I don‘t want to call 911 because he‘s going to get mad at me. Because my dad hates anybody to make a big deal over things, particularly over him. So, as an

51 adult seeing him in a seizure, I‘m immediately just like, ‗He‘s gonna be so mad at me if I call the ambulance.‘ But, obviously, I‘m like, ‗But I have to.‘ So, I called the ambulance. They came. He was still seizing, I think, by the time they got there. They got there very quickly. And, I had called my mom so, I think, she left work and got there right as the ambulance was about to leave. So, I rode in the ambulance with the guy and my mom drove behind us. When he came to, he was upset he was in the hospital. He was like, ―This is really too much of a big deal, we shouldn‘t have to do this.‖ ‗Dad, are you okay?‘ And he‘s like, ―Yeah, fine.‖ and then… I think that in watching him get weaker and weaker I was trying to deny as much as I could that it was happening. I was there full-time. I didn‘t have the luxury of having a job to go to during the day or have anything to escape to. I was just physically with him all the time. And, it was really sensitive. I didn‘t want to have to acknowledge that he couldn‘t do stuff for himself because it was embarrassing. I wish that I‘d been more natural about it. It was embarrassing. I think I was embarrassed because I thought he was embarrassed. And, you know, I was doing everything for him, but also felt embarrassed that I was because I knew he didn‘t want someone else doing things for him. V. After that, his decline was fairly rapid. I feel like I had one normal afternoon with him and then he got much worse, very quickly. I think it was mid-November I got back and by early December he was starting to have a much harder time with things. A lot of it was just not wanting to upset my dad too much. He‘s really a very independent person and all these changes we had to make were basically just taking away his ability to do things for himself, little by little. That was probably the hardest part because he‘s pretty much the most competent person that I have ever met. So, to see him suddenly not be able to do things for himself was really, really hard. I mean, it was terrible. I know my mom‘s birthday was really tough. He was in a wheelchair by that point. He wasn‘t really comfortable walking anymore. I remember we all went to the mall on my mom‘s birthday because he wanted to buy her a present. He was on medication that made him really

52 impatient and a little bit impulsive and a little bit illogical. So, it was really, really an ordeal going to the mall, pushing him around in a wheelchair, because he‘s really so impatient about stuff and he wants what he wants right away. We went to Costco and he got one of those carts, where he got to drive it… he drives more aggressively than anyone I‘ve ever met. Like, he will change lanes in stop dead traffic. He will not let driving space be wasted. So, he, in one of those driving carts in Costco was like running people over. It was pretty crazy. I remember that night getting home and realizing that I couldn‘t go back to Los Angeles right after Christmas. I needed to stay longer. I told him, and I said, ‗Yeah, dad, I‘m going stick around awhile. I‘m not going to go back right away. You know, I‘ve got someone covering for me at work. And, I have someone subletting my bedroom and I can have my roommates find a new person. It will be okay.‘ His eyes teared up a little bit. It was really appreciated for me to stay. Things were changing very, very rapidly all the time. My brothers had worked out schedules. They were up whenever they could. [My older, middle brother, Aaron] was working and in grad school and [my oldest brother, Tim] was working. At a certain point in early December, my dad stopped being able to…he would get up, but he would fall. So, my mother and I were not strong enough. My brothers made fun of me because once I was helping him walk from the living room to the bathroom, he started to fall and I wasn‘t strong enough, so we both fell. And they said, ―Look what you did you little jerk!‖ So, we started having a wheelchair and at a certain point he stopped being able to get in and out of the chair. Because he had prostate

53 cancer he had to go to the bathroom almost all the time. So, it was just up and down to the bathroom every 15 minutes. So, it was a lot of getting up and down. I remember like everything was a big, everything was just a really big hard decision. We realized he can‘t go up and down the stairs anymore. Do we move the bedroom downstairs? Do we do reconstruction on the bathroom upstairs? Like, we were talking about remodeling the house and stuff. Everybody had a different opinion about what was supposed to happen. Aaron is very difficult when it comes to making family decisions. [He] always needs to be very contrary to what the rest of us say. So, there was a lot of Tim and Aaron getting into disagreements about what‘s supposed to happen. My mom felt like they were usurping control and making decisions for her and she didn‘t like that. [My youngest brother, David] and I are fairly mellow about stuff, at least I think so, so it was really my mom and [my two older brothers] getting into a lot of disagreements. And, I feel like it was usually Tim who had the most reasonable and pragmatic ideas of what needed to happen. And often he had to really convince my mom to make certain changes. The hardest part of this was not knowing how long it was going to last, not knowing how bad it was going to get. At a certain [point], you know, like in the conversations with the doctors, you realize that it‘s not going to get better. It‘s just a matter of how long it‘s going to be. We never had that conversation with my dad. It was just lonely, it was just happening. And, I felt horrible that my life was suspended and I always had it in my head that I‘ll go back to Los Angeles, this, that, or the other thing will happen, but it was always like, the end of the sentence was what I couldn‘t say, ‗After my dad dies.‘ Because by the end of January we all knew that that‘s what was happening. But, it‘s like if you

54 said it out loud…It‘s like, you‘re supposed to keep on believing that it‘s going to get better, and if you say, like make an acknowledgment, you break the spell or something. VI. This dream happened when my dad was sick. At this time there were new developments everyday to adjust to. One of the harder things to adjust to was that he would get up several times during the night to use the bathroom. But he would fall down even in the bedroom, the bathroom or the hallway. My mom and I both slept very lightly and we were both awake at the first creak of the floorboard. We had to hide though so my dad wouldn‘t know we were lurking because he hated it when we would hover. So, bedtime was a time of hyper-vigilance and anxiety, not much rest. I would try to recount these changes to my boyfriend, Mark, in Los Angeles, for whatever reason I didn‘t like the way he empathized. He struck me as very useless so I found myself going to other friends for support. I was probably being hard on him and did not give him a lot of cues about how he was supposed to be, but he was not doing a very good job of being there for me during this period. So, that‘s the context. Now, I will tell you the dream. It‘s nighttime. I hear my dad struggling, gasping for breath in his bedroom. I run down the hall and turn on the light. He is in bed and his skin is very red. His skin is so thin that I can see right through it

to the red underneath. And, he is scratching and pulling at it. I‘m very distressed, because he‘s going to break the skin if he keeps doing that. I‘m trying to stop him, but he keeps scratching at himself. Mark is just down the hall. I see him walking and I scream at him to stay where he is and not come any closer. I think Mark is just going to mess up the situation even more. I‘m so angry that he isn‘t better at solving problems and I can‘t count on him to do the right thing. My dad was gasping and not really understanding me. It‘s like he‘s having a seizure. He‘s in his own world and can‘t hear or see me and all I can do is minimize the damage until it runs its course. His eyes start to bleed. Something is wrong with the skin of his eyelids and the skin all over his body is getting thinner and thinner very quickly. Now I‘m really scared because I can‘t undo this bleeding. Skin is tearing and I don‘t understand where the skin is going. I‘m so angry, because I want Mark to be able to do something, but I also want him to not be here. So, that is that dream. It was really, very scary. I tried to do a drawing of that in my sketchbook after I had it,

56 but it was like I was starting to draw, then I was like, ‗I can‘t have anyone come in and see this image.‘ It was like I couldn‘t do it. I had the hardest time recalling the details of this dream. Like, I first wrote it down and I thought there was something with a hole in this throat, but then I remember that, ‗No, it was his eyes that were bleeding.‘ There was definitely blood coming out of his eyes. I mean, it was like I was frantic in the dream. I mean, like I was obviously supposed to be doing something to help him, but I have no idea how to stop that. It was something that I had never seen before. And, [in the dream] he was not reasonable. It‘s like he was a baby. I couldn‘t tell him to stop because there was no ... I don‘t think he knew I was there. It was really like he was in his own little world as this was happening. But he was really distressed too, like he was really having a hard time breathing. It was just everything was sucking into him almost. So, I just felt helpless and powerless. Even Mark came obviously to help, but he‘s not making the situation any better. But, it‘s like you can‘t be mad at someone, like they don‘t know what they‘re doing. And, here I just remember it was the feeling of, ‗What do I do? Do I call the ambulance? Do I, how do I, do first responder stuff with this? I have someone down the hall, who should be able to help, but I just don‘t think he‘s going to be able to. I think he‘s like needing help himself and I can‘t do that.‘ All I could do was just watch it happen. VII. On the morning my dad passed away my mom woke me up at six. He‘d been in hospice care for three days. We set up the hospital bed in the living room and my mom slept next to him on the pull out couch. We‘d moved their mattress downstairs a month earlier, because it was too hard for him to take the stairs. My dad had been very difficult about taking his medication. He made complicated charts about what he was taking and when, but the charts were confusing. He would get lost

writing them. Order of operation of simple things became very hard. He would write letters to people, but you could see how confusing even that had become. For example, he had written a whole letter on the outside of an envelope then had folded it up and put it inside another envelope, which he then continued to write on. He kept on staring at something like a pair of scissors or a carton of ice cream and a spoon, just staring at it with a perplexed frustrated expression, ‗I know you do something. I know there‘s something I‘m supposed to do here. I just can‘t remember.‘ One letter I found on the table was addressed to me and I opened it a few weeks after he died. I was holding onto it saving it for the right time wanting to savor whatever words he had for me. When I finally opened the envelope, which was addressed to me in Los Angeles, inside was a letter I had written him a few months earlier. And that was one of the hardest, most unfair seeming things. Anyway, he wouldn‘t let my mom help him with his medicine. He was stubborn about it, but he also could no longer keep track because the medicine had a sort of dementia inducing quality when it came to his logic. So, eventually he let me be in charge of his medicine. In the last three days he had slipped under and I was giving him morphine under his tongue every few hours and I would wash it down with chocolate ice cream. My mom woke me at six because my dad was moaning in his sleep. My mom left to go take a shower and I gave my dad his morphine. And I haven‘t felt Catholic in long time, but during this time it was hard to not go there for support. I had a moment when I said to God, ‗He‘s ready. He‘s loved in this world, let him go be loved in the next. Please take him.‘ And I kissed my dad on the forehead and said, ‗Okay, you can go. You can let go.‘ Then I laid down and went to sleep next to him on the pull-out couch and then I had this dream. In the dream,

I‘m in the living room and dad is rolling himself around in a wheelchair, which feels really significant. He‘s really happy and with it. He says to me, I‘m really proud to have you as my daughter.‘ And I‘m kind of tongue-tied. I say, ‗I‘m really proud to have you as my dad.‘ And, he looks around and says, ‗Tell David that he has to go back to school.‘ And I say, ‗Dad, he did go back to school. He‘s actually at Columbia, your old school. He‘s on the honor role.‘ So, satisfied with that answer, my dad says, ‗Okay. Take me swimming; I want to go to the water.‘ [The dream ends] An interesting detail of this dream is that the computer speakers are playing Animal Collective very loud. And my dad doesn‘t like this music and I keep trying to turn down the volume, but I don‘t know how, so it‘s a little distracting from the moment that we‘re having. Like, this is a really emotional dream that I‘m having and Animal Collective is blasting in the background. It‘s totally stupid. So, I‘m having a conversation with him and I know it‘s like a very significant conversation we‘re having and I keep being like, ‗Hold on a second as I‘m trying to turn it down.‘ But anyway, I wake up from this dream and I hear that the machinery that goes with the

59 hospital bed. I hear that going, but I don‘t hear the sound of his breathing. And I know that he‘s passed on. I don‘t want to be the one that gets up and makes sure though. I know that he‘s died, but I don‘t want to get up. So, my mom is now sleeping next to me and I decide to just stay in bed and I just kind of dozed back off. And then a little bit later, she woke up. And I kind of woke up and I watched her walk over to the bed and I watched her realize that he died. That feels really crazy that he said goodbye to me and to know that I was the only one that got to have that experience of him during that moment. Because I saw him and then I went to bed and it was probably only for like a half hour during that time that I had that dream and I woke up very clear that he really had come and said a goodbye. It really was [a beautiful dream]. It felt really ... I think that a lot of that my feelings that day were really just very peaceful because I kind of felt like I was the person that gave permission for it to happen. Like, I got a closure I felt like no one else got to have. And, I don‘t know how long it was before I told anyone in the family about that dream. It‘s funny, I don‘t remember where I told them about the dream or even if I did. I know I‘ve told people about the dream, but I don‘t know if I told my brothers about it. I think I have, but I don‘t really know. VIII. And, I remember finished, it was a picture of a man swinging a woman, kind of like how you give someone an airplane ride by holding onto their wrist and their ankle and then you spin. Like a helicopter. So, it‘s a man, kind of helicoptering a woman. And I kind of made it look a little bit like my parents when they were younger. He‘s swinging her in the air and she‘s on the top of the arc on her way to being crashed down to the ground, right at that moment of perfect freefall.

In the year, and maybe even close to two years after he passed away, I just really lost a lot of my facility with words. I really had a hard time accessing emotion and accessing ways to describe things. So, most often when someone asked me, and not just something about my dad, but asked me anything, to have an opinion on anything, it was really hard for me to access what I thought or what I felt. I felt very, just flat-lined, definitely [a feeling of numbness], I mean, I would fluctuate a lot between [that and] being super emotional. And, there are some people that I could just talk and talk and talk about stuff with. But in general, I feel like I really dropped off from being able to relate to people. I know when I went back to Los Angeles ... I left after three months because I was just like, ‗I can‘t be here. This doesn‘t make sense. None of this seems real. I can‘t care about other people‘s problems. I can‘t care about work, I just can‘t.‘ It was very hard for me to be empathetic to other people. And it was really hard for me to connect to anybody. And I had a lot of friends that really were so wonderful to me, but I wasn‘t really in a position where I felt like I could reciprocate or pull my weight in any way.

I stopped listening to music for a long time. I think I would just listen to one album on repeat because I couldn‘t really make decisions about music, like music didn‘t really make a lot of sense to me. And I lost my job at the bakery and I moved and I think I‘ve had like probably ten or eleven jobs in the last two years. A lot has happened since, obviously, I‘ve made a lot of major life decisions and changes and now I‘ve now moved across country several times. And, I‘ve gotten a lot better at being connected and emotional and feeling again, but I know for a long time it was just I got really depressed. I wasn‘t able to make artwork. It was more just the feeling of like, ‗There is no point in communicating anything.‘ I just felt like there was no point in making artwork because there was nothing really worth sharing. You know, I kind of lost my sense of humor in a lot of ways. Like, my ability to make jokes was just gone. So, it was pretty terrible. It was like, ‗I don‘t make art anymore. I don‘t have a sense of humor anymore. I‘m not flamboyant, I don‘t have my personality.‘ So, it was really like all the things that make me who I am were no longer with me. And it was very difficult to uproot and move to a new place and not have any of my normal resources with me. I have equated [grief] to feeling like my personality and myself was buried under a lot of rubble, like a building had collapsed and I was someone trapped under the rubble. I know that I‘m still down there somewhere, but I can‘t access [myself]. I have no idea how to get to it. I have a close friend who had lost his mom many years ago in his early twenties and he said that he doesn‘t remember the two years after. He says he really can‘t remember anything that happened for a two-year period. Knowing that that was kind of what happens to people, I‘ve tried to take an attitude of not taking too much pressure on myself, like knowing that I just have to keep doing things to stay alive. Basically, I was trying to operate with the attitude of, ‗I need to get as much groundwork laid for myself, so that when I do come back to life in two years, I‘ll be in a good position to be alive.‘ So, yeah, I feel like there was a disconnect between my body and myself. I knew that

I wasn‘t going to see myself for like two years. And it really sucked. Yeah, it really sucked. But I kind of knew that this can‘t last forever. I eventually have to start being some version of myself again. But, it‘s really hard to operate that way for two years. He passed away at the end of January of 2010 and then I stayed home through February and then March 1st went back to Los Angeles. As soon as I arrived, my boss at the Cake Gallery was like, ―I‘m really sorry, but I had to replace you with the other girl.‖ And, I was like ‗Why did you not tell me this on the phone before I flew back to Los Angeles?‘ Then I like, you know, I had no money at all. So, I needed to find a job, like right way. And, it was kind of the worst thing in the world because I could have at the bakery gone through a much more normal grieving process because I would have just been baking cakes by myself as usual. But instead, I needed to make a new game plan, convince potential employers that I was like a normal human being, and it was just like, ‗A month after your dad dies you can‘t do that.‘ IX. I feel like when I do something that is very competent I‘m channeling [my dad]. I feel like that when I set goals and stick to them and work very hard. I think I associate big acts of reinvention with him. I remember, I think when he was in his twenties or early thirties, he got some job. He was hired

63 for a job that involved using computers. And, they asked him if he knew how to use computers and he said, ―Yeah.‖ And, he basically left the interview, went someplace, I don‘t know, a library, and he basically went and learned, taught himself all these programs before going into work. That was just his way. He would say, ―Yes, I could do something,‖ and then he would just make it happen. So, I had a couple misguided attempts to do that right after he died. He had a conversation with me before he died. He asked when I was going to get a real job. And, I said, ‗Well, you know, I‘ll go back to the Cake Gallery when I go back to Los Angeles. You know, I‘m applying for grad school.‘ I was at the time applying for grad school for fine arts. It didn‘t pan out, but I was like, ‗So, maybe that will happen.‘ And, he goes, ―No, no, I mean, a job where you get paid $100 an hour.‖ I was like, ‗Dad, I don‘t know what job that is. I‘m not sure what job pays $100 an hour.‘ And he goes, ―Like at the telephone company.‖ And, I was like, ‗I don‘t know dad, I‘m probably not going to work for the telephone company.‘ I walked away from that conversation and I was like, ‗Oh my God, my dad really wants me to get a real job. He‘s serious.‘ So, I had a couple misguided attempts to do that right after he died. I don‘t know how this happened—I think I answered a Craigslist ad that was falsely advertised—but I started working at Barbizon, which is a modeling company that advertises in the back of Seventeen magazine. I don‘t know how this happened, but suddenly, I was working in intangible sales. I would dress up in an all black power suit and have my hair gelled and heavy make-up on and call teenage girls at home and say, ‗Do you want to be a model? Come interview at my office. I‘m a Hollywood agent.‘ And, it was awful, but I got a job interview at this place because I thought it was a job working with kids. But then it turned out to be this. But, then I was like, ‗Oh, this is what I‘ll do. I‘ll be a professional person in sales. That will be my job. That‘s gonna be my new adult thing.‘ I

64 remember having a conversation with my boyfriend and he was like, ―It‘s really heart-breaking that you think that this is what you have to do, to take that route. This is not what you have to do.‖ But I did it for six weeks. It was terrible. I had a total breakdown about it. But, you know, it was not really a time of me thinking logically. This job was awful. We had to close sales by tricking people and it was terrible. I remember it was right before we had one of our big pushes, 100 people were about to come in and I had to one-on-one interview people and close sales right there. It‘s like, ‗I can‘t do that.‘ So, suddenly I just started crying and my coworker‘s like, ―What‘s the matter?‖ She quickly pulled out make-up and put a new face on me, and I‘m like, ‗I just can‘t do this.‘ And she‘s like, ―Drink some water, take a pill.‖ And I‘m like, ‗I can‘t do this.‘ And, I get it together for a second. And, then a family walks in, it was a teenage girl and her parents and brother, and I look at them and I just start bawling. And, I ran out the room fast and I run up to my boss and I‘m like, ‗I can‘t do this. I have to go. No one is going to buy a development packet from a crying woman in shoulder pads and high heels.‘ I think that was the moment where I realized, ‗This is totally preposterous.‘ X. This dream happened around that time. I want to say maybe April or May. And, I think I had a few dreams that were similar to this. And, I‘ll share that later, but this is the only one I can really remember, remember. So, in the dream

the doorbells rings and I go to answer it and I can see through the window that it‘s [my dad]. And, obviously I‘m really surprised and shocked, because even though I‘m dreaming, I know that he‘s no longer alive. But, the door is stuck and I can‘t unlock it. I‘m desperately trying to open the door. And I‘m screaming out the door, ‗Don‘t move, just stay there. Stay there please!‘ And, he‘s like, ―Just go around. Just go around the back and let me in.‖ And, I‘m like, ‗I can‘t, I can‘t.‘ But I‘m totally frantic because I‘m afraid that if I let him out of my sight he‘s gonna disappear, like it‘s a total fluke that he is actually here with us, like it‘s a glitch in the Matrix. And, I know that he could disappear just as easily as he appeared so I‘m not going to take that risk. So, I‘m just absolutely so scared that he‘s going to disappear again and I‘m gonna break this spell and this magic moment and it‘s gonna be over. So, I don‘t know how it happens, but then finally he‘s inside the hallway with me. And, he‘s laughing. He‘s just laughing hysterically and his body

66 is really skinny and rubbery. He‘s moving like he‘s a rubber toy. He can‘t really support himself. He‘s got a big head and a really skinny body. He keeps falling over, but he‘s laughing. So, I have to kind of hold him up and then his body gets really small. He becomes almost like the size of a baby, but with a regular-sized head. And, his body and his face are really, really bright red. Everything is just really red. But, again he‘s laughing, it‘s like he‘s hysterically laughing.

And, he‘s like, ―I‘m not going to leave, don‘t worry.‖ And, I‘m like, ‗Okay, I‘m just worried that you‘re gonna disappear.‘ And, he goes, ―No, no, no. I‘m not going anywhere.‖ We‘re in the kitchen and there‘s a lot of light coming in. It‘s just very bright, cheerful. And there are others around. Like, it almost feels like a party. And he just keeps assuring me, ―No, don‘t worry.

I‘m not going anywhere.‖ [The dream ends] It‘s like he‘s telling me that he‘s not left me. It feels very powerful that I still get to see him. When I wake up from having a dream like this I just feel very heart-warmed that I got to see my dad again. Like, it‘s really filled with such a blessing to be able to have such a space where he still is physically there. I get to say things to him and I get to hear things from him. And, I mean, any time I have him in a dream, I am always immediately like, ‗Hop to it,‘ like, ‗Oh my God, this is really special.‘ Like, ‗He‘s making an appearance. He‘s here. Pay attention.‘ Even in my dreams I can understand how special that is. And, it could mean a variety of things. You know, I often wish I would get directed by him. Or direct reassurances from within dreams, but I think I‘m just always feel really good to get a visit, you know? I know that whenever my dad did appear to me in a dream, I would wake up and feel like it was just like a really special, almost like, you know, religious-type event that I really needed to sit with and spend time with and like treat as a special occurrence, because it was. I mean, I guess I‘m probably thinking that, because he‘s dead, it is his actual self visiting me in a dream. Like, it really feels like an actual visit. But, it‘s weird because I can‘t control what that visit is going to look like. I can‘t control how long it‘s gonna be. If he‘s gonna stay in the same form. Like, any other thing could happen in that environment because it‘s a dream and it‘s just completely unpredictable. So, there‘s always a certain level of anxiety when he‘s a in a dream, because I know it‘s a dream and like even in a dream there‘s a lot of urgency to make the most of this very rare special event. So, I feel like a lot of pressure actually with that. XI. It was around October [of 2010] that I really started to get depressed, like in more of a scary way. And, my friend, my friend was working at a branding agency, and she was like, ―You know, you should really try to get an internship with us,‖ like, ―I think you‘d be really good at this.‖ And, I‘m like, ―No. Honestly, I don‘t know how to use a computer even. I‘d be worthless there. I‘m not going to get into this New York design world. I don‘t have the foundational skills.‖ You know, Tim was awesome. He taught me how to use Photoshop, Flash Innovation, and basically I was like, ―Maybe I can get this though.‖ So, I get this internship and I moved down to New York City and I‘m staying with people for three months while interning. And, again, it‘s awesome that I have something to be doing like 50 to 60 hours a week. And, it‘s me

69 getting to go through the motions of something and me trying out a career, but it‘s obviously not going well. And I‘m still…my brain is not working the way it‘s supposed to work. And, I‘m just staying on different couches. Not getting a lot of space to process anything. I was constantly trying to take on new things because what I was doing was not working. I found myself suddenly living in New York City and not really having the kind of job skills that one needs to survive in New York. And you‘re a much harsher judge of yourself when you‘re living in New York than when you‘re living in Los Angeles, protected by a big group of friends and having this great life where you‘re making art and where you‘re having just basically a great life. Suddenly I‘m in New York and I don‘t know people. I‘m meeting new people and they‘re like, ―What do you do?‖ And, I‘m like, ‗I don‘t ... nothing, I guess. You know, I‘m an artist, I guess. Not really making anything right now. I was a baker for a long time, that was a lot of fun and now I‘m a babysitter, sort of.‘ You know, it was just like I felt really shitty about who I was and what I was doing. Completely adrift, and, you know, I‘m still trying to establish some new life in New York and meeting people, but I don‘t really have an identity that I‘m comfortable with at all. Even up until this past year, if you asked me what kind of stuff I liked, I would give you an answer that was circa summer of 2009. It‘s like I really feel like the things I do and the things I enjoy, my personal tastes, I feel like even still I don‘t feel fully reconnected to what it is I like and what it is I like to do. Because, the reality is if you asked me, ―What do you like to do,‖ I‘d tell you what I think I like to do, but the answer is

more that I haven‘t done anything that I like in years. So, it was really hard for me know how to be with new people because I kind of was just like a big bummer. Or, I felt like a big bummer. I felt like I shouldn‘t ... I understood that it was okay for me to be going through this grieving process, but it wasn‘t okay for me to be doing it in New York, where I was. I just felt like there was no space for me to decompress and go through what I needed to go through. Like, I had time [at home] to do nothing, but it was awful. So, I thought that going to New York would make it better, by doing something. But, once I got there it was like, ‗No, this is even worse.‘ And, then I got an apartment finally, but then I lost my job. You know, I had that internship and it went on and on for months and finally, I was like, ‗I‘m trying to be a team player. I know you‘ll hire me when you‘re able to afford to, but like I need now money to pay rent.‘ And, then they just they were like, ―Tomorrow‘s your last day.‖ So, it‘s like, ‗Fuck, now I‘m living here. I have no money.‘ So, it was just really awful searching for jobs, but having no fucking idea what I wanted to be doing, because I didn‘t want to be doing anything. I just wanted my old life back. I just wanted to work at an X-rated bakery and make art and have that be okay. And, I knew I needed to do something else to move forward, but nothing was appealing to me. It was a really long process of learning how to reconnect with something that was exciting to me, learning to reconnect with myself. It was around the time, a year after my dad passing away, that I was such an incredible mess. I would be at the office and my boss would come in and, he was a man with two children, and sometimes I would feel like, ‗Trevor‘s a great dad,‘ and then I would just start crying. There were only five people that worked in the office and I was constantly running to the bathroom to cry. It was really obvious. After I lost my job I went through two months of working weird jobs here and there making ends meet. I have no idea how I was making ends meet. It was just happening. For the first time I felt like going and asking the doctor about being on anti- depressants because I was so depressed I couldn‘t even move off the floor. Sometimes, I‘d lie down on the floor and I just couldn‘t even bring myself to like go through any of the motions of the day. And, then I started to have anxiety attacks and not being able to breathe and it was just super, super terrible. And, again, I don‘t know

how that period ended, it just kind of did. XII. I think that‘s been one of the hardest things in the couple of years since losing him is feeling a little bit like the carpet [has] been pulled out [from] under me. The source of stability that I‘ve had all my life is no longer there. Like, really my whole life, I‘ve never had to wonder whether he was going to be there to take care of me, even through adulthood. I always knew that if something went terribly wrong in my life my dad would be there with the drop of a hat to help me fix things. And, you know, there was a lot of a sense of like, ‗This isn‘t fair.‘ It just felt really unfair that, not just that my dad passed away so young, but that I felt like my whole life got taken away from me. It‘s just like my life was not going to continue like I thought it was going to. Like, when at my dad‘s funeral, I walked down the aisle right behind his coffin, and they played that song [Pachelbel‘s Canon] that they always play at weddings when a bride walks in: ‗Do-do, do- do.‘ That song played. And, I was like, ‗This is so fucked up that they‘re playing the wedding song as I‘m walking down the aisle at St. Mary‘s with my dad.‘ That‘s only supposed to happen once and that‘s supposed to happen when I get married. Like these realizations [about] that stuff that is not supposed to be a question. Like, when I get married my dad is supposed to be there to walk me down the aisle and that‘s never been a question for me like that‘s how it‘s supposed to go. It wasn‘t supposed to be a question that when I had kids my dad was going to be a really fun grandpa. I feel like he was a serious dad and he would have been a really different kind of grandpa. It‘s just really never stopped feeling unfair that that doesn‘t get to happen. And, you know, just like a lot of the sense of who am I as a person: I feel like I know everything about my mom and I know so little about my dad because my dad was not one to tell a lot of stories. So, I just feel so many of these mysteries of who he was I‘m never going to have an answer to. And, I have to think a lot of it too is just how unfair that he worked so hard for his wife and his kids. He was just at retirement age where he was supposed to sit back and relax and really enjoy the fruits of all of that work. Then he doesn‘t get to. I just feel like he worked so much and was always more of the tough love, more of the heavy, bad cop, but I just feel that, as adults, and particularly as we have families, I feel like that would have been maybe his favorite

72 part of his life. I think that he would have just really loved being a grandpa and I bet he would be really good at it. And, it just really bums me out that that‘s not a part of what‘s gonna happen. XIII. I feel like his absence is an entity just as much as his presence was. I guess the story is just how I make reference to it. I wouldn‘t say that it‘s embodied as a story. It‘s kind of just like acknowledging it‘s a space. There are so many words that I could use to describe what it is. It‘s like a space where something should be, but isn‘t.

It‘s like a wound that is in our family and we all feel very acutely.

It‘s like

a closed door and a lost possibility. It‘s also like an open thing that‘s a reminder that there‘s an urgency to do important things for your life, to treat the people in it well, and be proactive in creating your life. In that, I tend to feel like my dad was, in many ways, a call to action for all of us to reconsider everything. I think losing my dad really shattered my bubble. Like, I could no longer really operate as if my own artistic and, I don‘t know, selfish development mattered. I had a really hard time thinking making art mattered. Or, basically anything I had been up to for the last eight years mattered. And, that was not a good feeling. It felt like I was wasting my time. I‘m not a very good person. I‘ve been acting selfishly for years, self-destructively, not contributing, being a leach, just being in a delusion. So much of what was important to me for a really long time just kind of all crumbled. Everything that I thought was important is not important. And it couldn‘t support itself. And, it just seemed stupid to want to do something that was like so self-referential. But, I mean, like it was a lot of shame and self-criticism that went along with that, too, and it was really hard for me to like justify my existence. It was that June [of 2011] that my cousin, Erin, recommended me this workshop she had been involved in. I was kind of at the end of my rope and she was like, ―Hey, do this thing. I did it. I loved it. I think you‘ll get something out of it.‖ Basically, like this workshop that‘s about, you know, looking at like the paradigms that shape your worldview of who you are and who you are in the world, kind of figuring out what matters to you and what are the beliefs that get in the way of getting what you want. So, I checked this thing out and it ended up being really amazing. And, then at the end of the five day workshop I was like, ‗Wow, I think I actually like I am smiling and laughing a real smile and laugh like for the first time in like a year. I can actually like recognize myself.‘ So, that was pretty profound for me, like being able to have a break for the first time in a year and year of the person who had been buried under all of that shit. And, I ended up and going on and doing like the second part of this workshop, which was kind of like you‘ve identified these things that are important to you, you need to identify these things that stop you. This workshop is five days of like concretely breaking through those things. So, through that I really like connected with a passion for life again and like connected with some of my inner resources

74 that I had completely forgotten about. And, again, that was just like I couldn‘t even believe that I was feeling. The way I was feeling again, like I was feeling connected to people, not as much as I could have been, but I definitely like felt strong connections again, felt excited about who I was and felt excited about what I wanted to do. Just reconnected to a sense of self and a sense of power...It was a pretty intense thing and it really like made me come up against a lot of my really self-defeating beliefs and actions, just kind of like the way that I would keep myself very, very small. And, from this it was like a big wake-up call of like, ‗Wow, I have a lot of lost time to make up for.‘ Like it was this real vision of like for many, many years I‘ve been living kind of the wrong way and I have a lot, a lot of work to do to catch up to who I am. So, it was like a really major turning point for me. And, from this there was a three month program, you know, of people that had just gone through the week workshop. This was now like a 90 day program of in your life coming up against all the shit that comes to you and blocks you from doing stuff, like you come up against all of it and you‘ve got 20 people that you‘re on the phone with 24/7 and meeting with several times a week and doing really crazy bananas stuff together, in terms of like taking on your life. Though, I did this and it was a major ass-kicking and it really, I don‘t know, I had a lot of people on my case about the ways that I‘m shitty. It made me like face up to a lot of stuff. It was really a very, very difficult three months, but I had no choice but to be actively engaged in it the whole time. And, people really on me and me on other people about I say that I want to do this that and the other, so why am I not doing it? So, every day I needed to be dealing with short and long-term goals and making things happen. And, it was really like after doing this program that I kind of realized that the things that matter most to me are like ... making art really is, really is important to me. And, but ... not like no longer did the gallery context or being an art

75 star, was not really, that didn‘t resonate anymore. I started to realize that that was not what I wanted to be chasing. I realized what‘s most important for me is… that people can feel safe expressing themselves. That people can trust their own experience and trust their own judgment and not have the overwhelming sense that they‘re missing something. Because, that had really been like the core of my experience in life that keeps me from doing things is fear of judgment, fear that I‘m not understanding, fear that I‘m missing the point of what‘s happening. And, just in general, not trusting my instincts. Not trusting my experience. So, you know, at a certain point, I think it was like October or November, I had just like this light bulb moment where I was like, ‗Oh, there‘s like a whole career that‘s that exactly. Let‘s start there, using art as a tool to connect people with their ability to be functional human beings.‘ And, you know, like the depression did not go away for me. I was still going through some very strong periods of depression and my self-destructive habits did not go away either. But…suddenly there was a fire under my butt to make stuff happen. I was like, ‗Okay, like art therapy, like that is something that I‘m like really excited about that is something I can feel like at the end of my life be like I did something real in the world.‘ Like, you know, I‘ve connected with some very specific things that I want to accomplish through art therapy in the world and they‘re good enough reasons for me ... I feel like they‘re pretty good reasons for being alive. And, it was like the last year was really tough and not a lot of fun. I had two jobs, both teaching art in the morning at a school, then nannying everything day after school. And, to do my prerequisites I had to go back to school at Hunter at night and, you know, like commuting three hours a day all over the city. It felt really different to be doing something that had a really, really, really big goal at the end of the tunnel. And, you know, I was like able to get through depression and boredom and almost like my negative grief associated emotions by having a pretty single-

76 minded goal that I was working towards. Then, when I got into grad school ... I really did feel like I had passed out through the other side of this really horrible period. Like, I have this thing now in my life that would not have happened without all of this horrible pain and depression and like self-doubt and having to re-evaluate, really look really very closely at who I am and what hasn‘t been working and things I‘ve been doing wrong for my whole life. And, actively changing these things about myself, like changing my behaviors and internalizing some really different beliefs. And, then just making some major sacrifices and working really hard. I have this thing now. I have like a real finished product. I‘m sitting in a field [out West] now and it‘s sunny and I have a pile of readings here. In this program, that I‘m completely in love with, I‘m with this group of really amazing intelligent sensitive creative girls that I‘m with and like these amazing instructors. Got this boyfriend that I‘m totally crazy about and know how to communicate with. You know, it‘s like I have stuff now that I‘ve worked really hard for and I would not have had had I remained in Los Angeles working as a baker, making art, kind of living that lifestyle. Like, I‘ve gone through something and I feel like I‘ve processed pretty thoroughly. And, you know, like I‘ve met it and I‘ve dealt with it and I‘ve made decisions and taken concrete

77 actions, like my entire future looks different now. And, that‘s something I‘m really, really happy about and I know my dad would be really so happy about if he was here. I feel more connected with him when I‘m excited about something new. Like, I feel, I guess like maybe almost a sense of like, ‗Oh, I get it now.‘ Like, I get something now about what made my dad make x, y, and z decision. I‘m like, ‗Oh, I get it now. This is what it means when you want to be able to provide for someone. Like, this is what it means to decide that you‘re going to have this impact on people.‘ So, I guess like just identifying with him more as I become more of an adult. I think that I can just have a sense of what he would have liked and would have thought and would have done. Yeah, I can go through and imagine what it would have been like if he was witnessing something and I guess that‘s a way of being connected. Initially with the loss it was completely overwhelming, just like realizing, ‗What on earth am I going to do without him?‘ And, then, you know, as time goes by you realize that … somewhere exist these resources. You carry on without him. A big part of those resources was the rest of my family, just having a much greater appreciation of each other. And, we really treated each other very well during those times and since. As time goes on it‘s easier to think about my dad in terms of the qualities of his that I‘ve grown into and could potentially grow into. I think that I know that for me [the grieving period] did feel very much like a transition between like an extended adolescence and adulthood during that time, absolutely. And, I remember reading somewhere, some book about grieving, that when your parents die then there‘s no one between you and death. It‘s like a layer of insulation that‘s no longer there and you suddenly realize that, you know, you‘re older too. You‘re closer in line, you‘re not protected from that. It‘s funny, when I went back to Los Angeles after, you know, a month or

78 two after he passed away, I remember getting on my bicycle and for the first time ever I felt really weird riding a bike. Like, I didn‘t feel like it was an extension of my body anymore. It felt very dangerous to be riding a bike. I think I just became a lot more careful about a lot of things and I think a lot of that had to do with just kind of feeling like, ‗Okay, we just went through all of this as a family. Like, I‘m not going to be the idiot that gets drunk and falls off my bike and has to be in the hospital. I‘m not going to do that.‘ I felt a lot more responsible for my own personal safety than I had in the past. And, really, like pretty much completely in terms of not wanting to make my loved ones closer to me worse off already. I‘m treating everything with more respect. Like myself, others. Yeah, it‘s ... it is identifying with him I think. It‘s like identifying with what maybe he saw as possible. I think that my siblings have, in a lot of ways, gone through ... they‘ve gone through it in a different path, but I think that the end result for everyone is kind of the same. I think like my brothers have all, in their own way, like synthesized something about my dad. And, they‘ve made some kind of some pretty significant life choices that I think they would not have made otherwise. Yeah and I think that a lot of what they‘re doing is kind of modeled after my dad. It‘s funny for me, too, as a woman to try to synthesize who my dad was by modeling behaviors that are ... My dad was very distinctly like a man. It‘s funny for me. It‘s like me trying to be my dad, but my own version of that. I think especially in the beginning when I was, you know, like taking a job at Barbizon, like yeah, dad this is people‘s office, this is an office ... Like I was making connections that didn‘t necessarily make any sense. This is, I mean, this is very much my own path. But, it‘s with the same larger purposes in mind as what he would have done. The mechanics are different. You know, just this is it, like it‘s my version.

I definitely do feel that everything has been much more purposeful and directed. And, I don‘t know, I just feel, in general, a lot more responsibility and responsibility in a good way. I feel ... I don‘t know, just called towards adulthood. Just called towards, I don‘t know, just filling the gap in the world that was left by him by, you know, being a good person in the same way he was. Like big shoes to fill. In a couple of the dreams there was a sense that it was like someone was dropping in and I wasn‘t ready, like the house was a mess. Like, in that dream when the Animal Collective is playing loudly I was like a bit stressed out and embarrassed in this dream. I‘m like, ‗Why can‘t I make this music turn off? Like, he doesn‘t want this music playing.‘ And, I couldn‘t get the front door unlocked and, you know, I was… having a really hard time dealing with the boundaries of the house. And, like it was a physical wall separating my dad and I and I was really, I couldn‘t negotiate the door. So, yeah, I guess there was a lot of like self-consciousness and embarrassment about things I wasn‘t able to control in the dream, like not being able to make enough room for him. I just have

80 realized that connection right now. It wasn‘t totally a thing in both of those dreams. And, who knows, maybe it has something to do with like me having a regrets that I didn‘t make enough room for him in life and didn‘t really invite him in as much as I would have liked. I think like I‘m making room for, I‘m making space for really a lot of things right now. I think that the last year really has been a major process of making room for new possibilities and definitely editing out a lot of stuff. Like making room is a really involved and difficult process. You don‘t just get more room. You have to get rid of a lot of stuff. Yes, you have to get rid of a lot of stuff and like knock down some walls. I think, in terms of making room for everything I want my future to be ... I feel like is an act of honoring, like it‘s a deliberate act of carrying forward of what I think would have been my dad‘s wish for me.

Liza and her Dad: Analysis Introduction Liza‘s telling of her story begins with the portrait of an artist as a young woman. Like Joyce‘s novel (1916/1994), the initial plot of this chapter of her life featured a young artist seeking to emancipate herself from the mores of an Irish, Catholic upbringing, doggedly determined to realize her artistic ambitions. To do so, Liza moved clear across the country, from New York to Los Angeles, where she created art, showed her work at several galleries, and enjoyed a growing recognition of her talent, while working at an X-rated bakery. Liza, and Joyce‘s artist, Stephen, similarly cull from Greek mythology the travails of Daedalus, whose artwork, a set of waxen wings, comprises the very means of escape from the tower in which he is trapped, as well as his son Icarus, who, by soaring so near the sun, falls to his death. The first movement of the myth, one of Flight, therefore characterizes Liza‘s heroic journey west and landing in the sunny perch of a rooftop pool, high above the ground below; at no other point is Liza loftier in Flight than in this opening scene of her story, one that she described with lingering fondness as ―the funnest time ever.‖ However, the movement of the ensuing grief story is one of Melting, as she leaves her life in California, returns home to help care for and bears witness to her dying father, struggles to once again ―lift off‖ in the wake of his death, and soon discovers a reality that is at once alien, desolate, and directionless. For Liza, the death of her father and her old means of aesthetic connection, constitute a total grounding from Flight, an extended period of grief experienced as Freefall. It is these three narratives, Liza‘s Flight, Melting, and Freefall, that will frame the central discussion of grief and dreams. Last, I shall address how these mythic movements shifted the significance of Liza‘s artwork from aggrandizement of the self to healing for the other. Flight, Melting, the Spell of Silence: Images Show What Words Will Not Say Regarding the arc and central conflict of Liza‘s grief story, the first chapter featured two evocative images, one of her father and the other of their relationship. The first image, Liza‘s father stapling together his badly injured thumb and driving himself to the hospital, epitomized his character and Liza‘s view of him as stoic, self-sufficient, and, through the eyes of a child, ―the strongest man in the world.‖ By virtue of these qualities, and ―because of what he envisioned,‖ he materialized for her an idyllic setting, a ―paradise,‖ in which to grow up. Indeed, the fruits of his strength and determination composed the ―entire framework‖ through which Liza

82 herself envisioned the world. Accordingly, the second image, a woman being ―helicoptered‖ by Liza‘s father, quintessentially conveys their relationship insofar as she is lifted up by his strength. On the one hand, the image bears resemblance to the Icarus myth insofar as he is instrumental in her taking Flight. On the other, however, Liza‘s story diverged from the myth in that the strong grasp of her father, though lifting her up, also kept her in a pattern of Flight both circular and limited to the radius of his reach. With the metaphor of Melting, then, I imagined the process of dying, for Liza and her father, as a loosening of this grasp and a preface to the Freefall of both letting go and grasping at air. Two months before her father died, Liza arrived in New York and was confronted with the dire reality of his illness while eating lunch with him at the kitchen table: ―I asked, ‗Dad, are you okay?‘ And he‘s like, ‗Yeah, fine.‘ And, then I was washing the dishes and then I walked into the other room and then I heard a crash. I ran in and he was on the floor and he was having a seizure. He‘d fallen off his chair and he was having a very, very dramatic seizure.‖ Later, in the hospital room, he is upset by Liza‘s decision to call an ambulance: ―This is really too much of a big deal, we shouldn‘t have to do this.‖ These two passages foretell an emergent tension between the images of dying and the words, spoken and unspoken, through which the experience was represented in Liza‘s family. In relation to the image, ―dad crashing onto the kitchen floor and having a seizure,‖ the words, ―okay, fine,‖ or ―this is really too much of a big deal,‖ do not make sense, or better, they unmake what is sensed, what appears in the image itself. Words betray the image; however, the words, in their denial of the disturbing, unspeakable image, serve to comfort her family and are thus given primacy. None of this is to establish an opposition between words and images, for the power of words themselves derives from the images of which they speak. When her father affirms that he is ―okay, fine,‖ or asserts, ―this is really too much of a big deal,‖ he does more than merely offer phrases of assurance. Indeed, the assurance is in the image invoked by his words: ―the living father,‖ ―the invincible father,‖ ―the strongest man in the world.‖ Similarly, the actions of Liza‘s father—driving aggressively in the motorized cart, stubbornly managing and tracking his medication—belied his condition and perpetuated these images, though in ways that were increasingly confusing and ―crazy.‖ In addition to confusion, the stark contrast between the assorted images of ―the living father‖ and ―the dying father‖ engendered feelings of embarrassment and shame for Liza, and one would surmise for her father as well. She first

83 experienced this conflict when surprising him for his birthday in 2008: ―I remember thinking in my head, ‗He looked very physically different than when I saw him four months earlier,‘ and I remember thinking, ‗Maybe this surprise is not entirely pleasant to him. I remember thinking that he looked like he was self-conscious over having changed physically, so much, so quickly.‘ ‖ In the instant of the surprise, images of the ―living‖ and ―dying‖ father are superimposed and render Liza and her father momentarily speechless. Here, self-consciousness refers to her father‘s primary awareness of the weak, sick, and dying father, as seen through the eyes of his daughter. As physical changes erode the original image, of the living, vital father, so too does his weakened appearance and awareness of it occasion a momentary breakdown in the surprise encounter. The aforementioned exchange between Liza and her father presaged the family‘s silence and denial as the image of the dying father loomed larger in the final months of his life. Although pragmatic questions of how to best accommodate her father were broached, and at times heatedly argued, the grim reality of his dying and potentially imminent death were rarely talked about by the family and never with her father. In addition to feelings of shame, Liza described the ways that silence was sponsored by hope and a wishful fantasy of recovery: ―You‘re supposed to keep on believing that it‘s going to get better…[until] you realize that it‘s not going to get better. It‘s just a matter of how long it‘s going to be.‖ Sadly, Liza and her family did not come to this latter realization until a short time before her father‘s death and yet still, she said, ―We never had that conversation with my dad. It was just lonely, it was just happening.‖ The last part of Liza‘s statement—of passively suffering loneliness—not only underscores the isolative aspects of silence, but also a significant shortcoming of hope: the wishful desire for a projected future can preclude meaningful engagement with present experience, particularly when those circumstances belie the hopeful image. Insofar as words and communication can bear out the ways that the projected future is unfilled, silence acts to preserve the hopeful image and thus keep the fantasy alive. Indeed, Liza plainly articulated this notion in describing what would happen if she gave word to what she was witnessing: ―The end of the sentence was what I couldn‘t say, ‗After my dad dies.‘ If you say…make an acknowledgment, you break the spell or something.‖ Silence, in this way, constitutes an inversion of incantation, a spell created through the suppression of words. Amidst the terror of death and dying, various images of strength, control, hope, and

84 recovery cast spells of invincibility and silence, intending to protect them all from a heretofore unimaginable fate. It is in the context of this psychological climate that I examine the dreams of Liza and her father. Reflecting on the consequences of his precipitous physical and cognitive decline, Liza said that it reached a point where he could not make his own meals and she observed that it was ―hard [for him] to relinquish his right to make a sandwich.‖ So, the dream of the water sandwich occurred at time when his waning health and loss of ability were at odds with his characteristically dogged self-determination. In the dream, Liza‘s father attempts to make a sandwich are continually thwarted: Whenever he holds onto the bread, the insides fall out. He is frustrated by the sandwich (un) making until he realizes that he has been handling a water sandwich. In interpreting the dream, we might say that the image of the water sandwich succinctly encapsulates, in imagistic form, the dilemmas of his physical and existential condition. Despite his best efforts, he cannot take in nourishment. Life is slipping away from him, indeed, running through and down, cascading from his grasp. Thus, the image resonates with a sense of futility and his feeling is primarily one of frustration. At the end of the dream, however, he recognizes the impossibility of the task he has set upon and discovers profound humor in its absurdity, so much so that he uncharacteristically recounts the dream to Liza and her mother. What the dream symbolized or whether or not the content directly articulated his dying process is ultimately unknowable and, I would argue, irrelevant to the value of the dream as he experienced it. Rather, if only for a few minutes, the dream image had the remarkable effect of radically disarming Liza‘s father with respect to his habitual ways of being and relating. Instead of being reserved, composed, and serious, he expressed unbridled laughter and wonderment. Rather than withhold his inner experience, he, for the first time, intimated a dream with the curiosity and zeal of a child. For Liza and her mother, the value of the dream consisted in its capacity to induce such an amazing transformation and fleetingly promote a different kind of dialogue, one that they still recall fondly in his absence. Liza‘s dream, by contrast, would be best characterized as a nightmare given the horrific imagery that it displayed so graphically. As she stated in her brief preface, Liza had the nightmare at a time when she and her mother were highly anxious and hyper vigilant regarding her dad‘s whereabouts in the house. Enfeebled but determined to act without assistance, he would often fall in the bedroom, hallway, or bathroom while attempting to stand up or move around. Moreover, his emotional sensitivity to being cared for dictated that they were close

85 enough to respond quickly if he struggled or had fallen, but far enough away that he did not feel encroached upon. Most importantly, in the context of the interview, Liza elected to tell the dream immediately following her narrative regarding the spell of silence that pervaded the household and insulated the family from the graver implications of her dad‘s illness. The nightmare, in violent fashion, seems to break, or better, shatter this spell by confronting Liza with the unspeakable image—of the dying father—that she neither can talk about nor imagine in the dayworld order of reality. The nightmare dispenses with images of the ―living father‖ by presenting a dream father who is gasping for breath, bleeding from his body and eyes, clawing at himself, compounding his wounds, as his skin rarefies so much so that his condition is abundantly, terrifyingly transparent to Liza. In reflecting on the nightmare and the feeling of helplessness that she felt in it, Liza said, ―All I could do was just watch it happen.‖ In addition, she could not easily remember the details afterwards and, once she did, Liza felt apprehensive to draw the image for fear that it would be seen by someone in her family. Her difficulty in remembering and recording the nightmare speak to the culture of silence in her family as much as to the horror engendered by its images. Perhaps the value of this particular dream, this nightmare, consisted in its very revelation of a catastrophic image—the dying father—that Liza had heretofore shielded from her sight. In this way, the father of her nightmare is more truthful than the father she wishes for, but cannot have, and the value of the nightmare is that seeing what most terrifies us is sometimes better than not seeing at all. Freefall, Beneath the Rubble: Why is it Hard to Talk to Dad, Why is it Hard to Talk? If Liza‘s encounter with her dying father initiated a Melting of her wings while in Flight, then his death marked her descent into Freefall, and eventually, her submergence ―beneath the rubble.‖ Beyond her father‘s literal death, Liza‘s steep descent into grief can be understood in terms of the images that she held of him and their relationship. Returning to one such image, Liza‘s father ―helipcoptering‖ a woman, we can envision the frightening implications of his absence. In the image, he is ―swinging [a] woman in the air‖ while holding her by the wrist and the ankle. According to Liza, the woman is ―on the top of the arc,‖ ―right at that moment of perfect freefall,‖ but ―on the way to being crashed down.‖ Not only is he the central axis around which she turns, he propels her upward toward the sky and holds her safely above the ground as she falls. Significantly, Liza painted this image while her father was in a coma, days before his death, and subsequently, she would not create another piece of art for 18 months. Although she

86 did not explicitly say so, Liza‘s choice to render that moment of perfect Freefall seems to express the embodied experience of a significant turning point, the death of her father, through whose absence she fell out of orbit and finally crashed to the ground. Liza understandably experienced his death as a violent and disorienting descent, insofar as he had an instrumental role in constituting her ―entire framework,‖ one which was so dependent on his strength and invulnerability. Similarly, the story of her father calmly stapling together a gaping wound on his thumb and driving himself to the hospital particularized the image of his strength, ruggedness, and invulnerability. In vivifying the image of his initiative, industry, and competence, she told the story of her father confidently accepting a job for which he has no expertise and learning the necessary knowledge and skills in time for his first day of work. In addition, his death foreclosed images of the future—walking her down the aisle, playing with her children—in which Liza imagined him as less ―serious,‖ enjoying the fruits of his hard work, and importantly, seeing that his daughter had become a woman and made a happy and fulfilling life for herself. It is in the deferred context of these anticipatory imaginings that Liza construes his absence as a ―closed door,‖ a ―lost possibility.‖ Taken together, these particularized images of Liza‘s father comprise different facets of a quintessentially American masculinity—tough, self-reliant, smart, enterprising—that characterized her essential understanding of him. Absent a deeper knowledge of his interior experience that she in part longed for—―Why is it so hard to talk to dad?‖—Liza drew from the aforementioned images in seeking to reconnect with her father‘s presence, and relatedly, construct a life worthy of his admiration: ―I feel like when I do something that is very competent I‘m channeling [my dad]. I feel like that when I set goals and stick to them and work very hard.‖ Though Liza channeled her father by way of these images, her initial efforts to emulate them only resulted in confusion and shame, and were akin to flailing and grasping at air in the midst of her Freefall. In the first 12 months of her grief, Liza recounted several misguided and somewhat desperate attempts to reconnect with her father through vocational pursuits. The first and perhaps most prominent example occurred when Liza moved back to Los Angeles and discovered that her position at the bakery had been filled. Soon thereafter, unemployed and artistically stagnant, she began working for a modeling and acting agency in Los Angeles selling development contracts to the parents of children and teenagers in pursuit of the Hollywood dream: ―I don‘t

87 know how this happened, but suddenly, I was working in intangible sales. I would dress up in an all black power suit and have my hair gelled and heavy make-up on and call teenage girls at home and say, ‗Do you want to be a model?‘ In my view, her radical transformation, from baker and artist to Hollywood agent, and the immediacy with which it manifested reflect the force of the grief experience to overwhelm the ego, particularly when the bereaved are impelled by images of which they lack full awareness. In hindsight, Liza could connect the fatherly image to her enactment of it; however, at the time, her work at the modeling agency constituted a reality that seemed to unfold before her, rather than one she chose purposely. Such is the autonomy of the grief experience, or rather it‘s guiding images, of the dead or otherwise. To the extent that Liza was unaware of the fatherly image or willing to fulfill it by any means necessary, she was caught in an enactment that produces a ―totally preposterous‖ version of herself, of which she later feels ashamed. Thus, I suggest that enacting the dead or seeking to emulate them or literally adhere to their wishes can engender for the bereaved feelings of guilt and shame in relation to the self and the significant dead. Around this time, Liza had a visitation dream of her father that comforted her while presenting him in a vastly different context. In the dream, he is standing outside of their home in New York and ringing the door bell to announce his presence. Knowing that he is no longer living, she is shocked to see him, yet fully enveloped by his rare appearance at her doorstep and desperate, frantic to let him inside before he disappears. Liza is unsure of how it happens, but suddenly he is in the hallway with her. He is laughing hysterically. He appears to have red skin, a large head, and a skinny, rubbery body. Liza holds him up as he falls over and in her arms his body becomes small like a baby‘s body. Cradled in her arms, he says, ―I‘m not going to leave, don‘t worry.‖ Light filters into the house and he assures Liza, again and again, ―No, don‘t worry. I‘m not going anywhere.‖ In hearing this dream, I noted its resemblance to Liza‘s nightmare, her father‘s reaction to his dream of the water sandwich, and to a lesser extent, the desperate manner with which she attempted to usher his presence through her work endeavors. In particular, the dream father has red skin, laughs hysterically, and suddenly appears inside when Liza is at the height of her desperation. Perhaps more remarkable is the peculiar form in which the dream father appears when he offers Liza assurance of his continued presence in her life. In stark contrast with the fatherly images of strength, competence, and independence, she is presented with a dream father

88 with the body of a baby, a quintessential image of vulnerability, whom she cradles in her arms. Thus, the dream presents her father as radically transformed in both form and function. Notwithstanding his bizarre appearance, the words of the baby-father in the dream resonated with Liza: ―It‘s like he‘s telling me that he‘s not left me. It feels very powerful that I still get to see him. When I wake up from having a dream like this I just feel very heart-warmed that I got to see my dad again…I often wish I would get directed by him. Or direct reassurances from within dreams, but I think I‘m just always feel really good to get a visit, you know?‖ Liza‘s reflection on the dream draws a distinction between the dream father that she wished for and the dream father that is presented to her. The former entails the images of her father that governed their living relationship—strength, stability, guidance—whereas the latter corresponds to images of him as an imaginal presence, gaining autonomy from the living wish. In the dream, he is not the provider of Liza‘s home, but rather, a visitor in that home. Likewise, rather than ―the strong man in the world,‖ he appears to her as a baby. Liza is now the one holding up her father, and with him in her arms, she neither ascends in Flight nor descends in Freefall, but stands with her feet on the ground. Liza, in her subsequent grief experiences, seemed to stand on very shaky ground. With her ―framework‖ broken, ―so much of what was important…crumbled,‖ submerging her into a dark, deathly, and dreamlike reality: ―[I] was buried under a lot of rubble, like a building had collapsed and I was someone trapped under the rubble.‖ Importantly, she invoked the image of being trapped under rubble to account for her own process of death and dying that culminated from her Freefall and eventually led to a transformation of her identity. Even prior to her father‘s death and dying, her entry into adulthood and her identity as a professional artist possessed a tenuous quality. For this reason, Liza‘s homecoming was fraught with conflict from the beginning. In the choice whether to remain in Los Angeles or return home, she experienced a dilemma of necessity, on the one hand, to which she felt obliged, and of the independence and freedom, on the other, for which she desired. Although Liza felt compelled to be with her father, her family‘s manner of calling her home only served to tighten the knot of her dilemma and further represented for her the trappings from which she originally took Flight: ―The way I heard that was like, ‗Give up the dream, like grow up, come home, do something real with your life.‖ In the end, however, she chose to return home and, as quickly as she had ―crossed over‖ in Los Angeles, as an emerging adult and a professional, Liza ―crossed back

89 over‖ to her life in New York. Following the death of her father, Liza returned to Los Angeles only to find that her life as she once knew it had fallen apart and with it her nascent identity as a professional artist. While the numbness that marked this period could be characterized as depression, such a designation does not adequately capture Liza‘s stasis and utter disconnection from herself, others, and the world. Her imaginal place, ―beneath the rubble,‖ so dark, dry, dusty, and muted, evoked for me a kind of aesthetic death: ―[I] lost a lot of my facility with words…I really had a hard time accessing emotion and accessing ways to describe things…I stopped listening to music for a long time…I kind of lost my sense of humor…there was a disconnect between my body and myself.‖ Significantly, the noted disconnect between self and body further elaborates her aesthetic death as a desiccation of sensuous experience. Thus, I viewed Liza‘s existence in this imaginal place as affording her a mere husk of self, one that unsurprisingly felt empty and ―unreal,‖ and ushered in a period of creative stagnancy with regard to her art: ―I wasn‘t able to make artwork…I just felt like there was no point…because there was nothing really worth sharing.‖ In accord with the structural metaphor, much of Liza‘s subsequent grief consisted of surveying, clearing ―the rubble,‖ and laying groundwork to support her in her father‘s absence. Above the Rubble: Dad and Me, Dad and Not-Me Though still stricken with grief, Liza‘s emergence from ―the rubble‖ amounted to the mournful and reflexive work of sifting through the pieces of her broken ―framework,‖ ―a call to action…to reconsider everything.‖ In hindsight, Liza reflected, the loss at once revealed and effectively ―shattered‖ her enclosure in ―a bubble,‖ an image according with Flight as the mythic movement through which she had been living her life. Having experienced not only her father‘s death, but also her own aesthetic death, she lamented the egocentric vision she once prized: ―I could no longer really operate as if my own artistic and, I don‘t know, selfish development mattered. I had a really hard time thinking making art mattered. Or, basically anything I had been up to for the last eight years mattered.‖ While her artwork importantly served to differentiate Liza from her family, the telos of the images she produced extended no further than her own self- reference. Against the backdrop of the existential crisis suffered by her family, Liza‘s reckoning of her prior artistic aims aroused shame, but also brought to bear a new understanding of responsibility, one borne out of the very failure of Flight. Indeed, the workshop attended by Liza

90 fostered a process of ―seeing-through‖ (Hillman, 1975) the paradigms that had once invisibly set the boundaries of her ―bubble,‖ and the prevailing myth of a listless and circular quest for self- justification. This process of self-examination allowed Liza to identify the central pathos of her myth, perpetually fearing a judgment to which her particular quest for justification was necessarily bound, and the ways that it would alternately inflate and make her ―very, very small.‖ In recognizing this pattern and her steadfast passion for art, Liza experienced an epiphany of purpose dedicated to helping ―people feel safe expressing themselves,‖ thereby shifting the significance of the artistic image from a justification of the self to healing for the other. Of her ongoing relationship with her father, Liza said, ―I feel more connected with him when I‘m excited about something new… [and] identifying with him more as I become more of an adult. I think that I can just have a sense of what he would have liked and would have thought and would have done. Yeah, I can go through and imagine what it would have been like if he was witnessing something and I guess that‘s a way of being connected.‖ Here, Liza‘s experiences of connecting with her father present an ambivalence of possibility and responsibility, the first marked by the thrill of all that is new and not yet lived, and the second by the wisdom of all that is old and has been lived time and again. Put this way, I imagined Liza‘s experiences as enjoining the archetypal aspects of father and child. In contrast to Liza‘s Freefall, I do not to enjoinment to signify a wholesale engulfment by the image of her father, or in the language of that analysis, an enactment of it that amounted to her grasping for air. Instead, this kind of connection with her father points to a differentiated identification with his image: ―My dad was very distinctly like a man. It‘s funny for me. It‘s like me trying to be my dad, but my own version of that…this is very much my own path.‖ Furthermore, enjoinment constituted for Liza ―a deliberate act‖ of ―honoring‖ her father in conjunction with her identity as an artist, rather than a desperate act of emulating him and forsaking her identity. Last, the act of honoring, as the dream of her father‘s visitation suggested to her, has necessitated that she continue to find ways to ―make space,‖ so that Dad and Me, Dad and Not-Me can co-inhere. Conclusion Across three mythic movements—Flight, Melting, and Freefall—I have imaginatively charted the trajectory of Liza‘s narrative and process of ―falling apart‖ as she enjoyed, however briefly, the fruits of her childhood ambition, returned home to care for her dying father, and, in grief, spiraled downward, while experiencing her own symbolic death. To conclude, I will

91 summarize the latter two narratives. In the Melting narrative, I underscored how deflective language and silence functioned to deny the reality of her father‘s dying, while heightening the loneliness of the experience for the entire family. Additionally, I elaborated the former theme by examining instances in which the images of dying and words spoken to represent it were at odds and the shifting dialectic between images of ―the living father‖ and ―the dying father.‖ In regards to dreams, I explored the ways that Liza‘s nightmare and her father‘s dream of the water sandwich served to break the spell of silence, dispel the illusion of control, and promote or at least potentiate dialogue within the family. In the Freefall narrative, I first broached the subject of Liza‘s grief by imagining it as both a place—―beneath-the-rubble‖—and condition of aesthetic death in her utter disconnection from sensuous experience and selfhood. Her aesthetic death and the related mythic movement of Freefall, taken from her helicopter painting, were amplified in accord with Liza‘s images of her father and their relationship. Liza‘s unconscious enactment of these images in the early period of her grief underscored the pitfalls of emulating the dead and/or literally adhering to their wishes. In addition, the analysis included a brief discussion of Liza‘s visitation dream yielding a substantive distinction between the wishful image and dream image, and elaboration of the latter in terms of the appearance of the dead superseding our habitual ways of construing their form or function. The afterward of Liza‘s harrowing experience of grief, above-the-rubble, traced a shift in the telos of her art—from justification of the self to healing for the other—that paralleled the bursting of her ―bubble‖ and awakening to responsibility. Last, I showed how Liza experienced an ongoing connection with her father through possibility and responsibility, the ambivalence of which suggested an enjoinment of father and child, or a differentiated identification that allowed Liza to simultaneously honor her father and lived out her own distinctive purpose.

Hannah and Ruth: Narrative Collage I. My Mom died on April 22, 2011, one day after her 82nd birthday. She died peacefully at home with hospice care after the rupture of a cerebral aneurysm. The night that she had her stroke, the night the aneurysm ruptured, my sister put her on the phone. I said, ―Let me talk to her for a minute.‖ She said, ―Okay,‖ and her words were getting slurred. It was obvious that she was having some trouble and I said, ―I‘m on my way.‖ She said, ―No, no, no, no.‖ I said, ―I‘m coming. I will be there in about three hours,‖ because that‘s how long it took to drive. I said, ―And, I love you.‖ And she said, ―I kind of like you, too.‖

Those were the last words she ever said to me, ―I kind of like you, too.‖

That’s my mom. When I got there she couldn‘t speak and she was paralyzed on one side of her body. She still had function on the left side. I sat down beside the bed, pulled the chair up there, and I held her hand. I talked to her a little bit, and I said, ―Can you hear me?‖ She squeezed my hand. I said, ―Well, good. Can you blink at me?‖ She blinked her eyes. I asked her if she was in pain, you know, like, ―Squeeze my hand once if you‘re not, squeeze my hand twice if you are.‖ She squeezed my hand once. Then I said I wanted to talk to the nurse out in the hallway, and I said, ―Have you given her any

93 morphine yet?‖ She said, ―We‘re waiting for the neurosurgeon to come in tomorrow because if he has to open her head to repair that we can‘t do it with her being sedated,‖ and I said, ―She has this aneurysm. It‘s large. We knew that this was likely. She‘s seen this guy before. He sent her to Chicago. They said there was nothing that could be done. I want her to have morphine.‖ And, she‘s like, ―We‘ll have to call the doctor.‖ So I called the doctor and we explained and he said all right. So the nurse came in and gave her the morphine and she just quietly went. So then I have these dreams of her not really being dead,

or me trying to tell her that she‘s dead and she‘s not listening to me. II. I knew I was loved. I am the youngest of six or an only child, depending on one‘s perspective. Both parents had been married and widowed before marrying and bringing me into the world. There are 24 years between me and the oldest half-sibling. By the age of four I was the only ―child‖ living at home. I‘ve been told that I was an easy baby and a ―delightful‖ child. I was close to both parents and considered them to also be my best friends. My Dad was quiet, reserved, yet very affectionate. He was always approachable and he was the one I would go to when I was anxious. My happiest memories with him were when I was small and would sit on the arm of his recliner to watch TV at night. He would put his arm around me—Mom said he kept me under his wing. He died in 2003 and I was blessed to be beside him, holding his hand.

My Mom was less emotionally expressive. I would describe her as stable, confident, intelligent, competitive, and hard-working. She gave practical advice, but was quick to tell me the ―right‖ way to do things. She led by example and wasn‘t incredibly patient when trying to teach me things the first time. [My sisters] were 15 and 16 when mom and dad got married, so they were still there even when I was a baby. So, they grew up and went out on their own later. In talking with my sister, she‘d tell me what things were like, how when mom would go out in the garden she would go out there and talk to her. Whenever she would want to have a private conversation with mom, she would go to the garden. I started thinking, you know what, ‗I did that, too.‘ It was about the only place where we had a lot of privacy, that and the bathroom. We used to call the bathroom the Conference Room. So, if I really wanted to get mom cornered to talk to her alone, I would go in while she was taking a bath and I would sit on the toilet and we would talk then. I remember one of my sisters saying one time, ―She‘s not helpful when you talk to her because she‘ll say the same things over and over. A lot of times it‘s a cliché.‖ I think she was listening, but she was more hands-off than that. She wasn‘t going to tell you what to do. She wasn‘t going to solve problems for you. It was more like she‘s going to sympathize and let you talk it through. That‘s what I saw. That‘s not what they saw. My sister was in a job where she ended up working 60-80 hour weeks and because she was a good worker and they kept giving her more work and she was just so frustrated. And, mom would say, ―You know what, they work a good horse to death.‖ She‘s like, ―That didn‘t help me.

What am I supposed to do with that information?‖ At least that‘s what I found talking to mom is what she would do. She would be more reflective and listen. She didn‘t really get too overly emotional about anything. She wasn‘t a big one for hugs or for kisses, but I insisted on hugging her anyway. It was different with my dad. I would give my dad hugs every night before bed. When I was little, I used to sit on the arm of his chair. For mom it was sort of like I had to push my way in there a little bit. Actually, one of my sisters said, ―You know the only reason why she shows affection with Hannah is because Hannah will push her way up on mom‘s lap.‖ It‘s not like mom would pick me up and put me on her lap, she‘s like, ―Hannah would just climb right up there.‖ You know, from the time I was really little. She didn‘t, it wasn‘t like it wasn‘t well received, but it wasn‘t encouraged. It wasn‘t like, ―Come on over here and sit on my lap and talk to me. It was different than that. After dad died, when I would come home, before I had my kids, I would sleep in bed with [my mom] and we would talk until one of us fell asleep. I would always reach over and hold her hand. She never said anything about it, she didn‘t fight, but a lot of times we would fall asleep like that. It‘s just something I felt like I needed to do.

But, that‘s who I am. I‘m that way with my kids, hugs, snuggles, yeah, a lot of that. I can‘t say I felt like I really didn‘t have that with mom, but it was never initiated by mom. When I would tell her I loved her, I‘d say, ‗Mom, I love you,‘ she‘d say, ―I kind of like you, too.‖ It was very rare for me to get an, ―I love you,‖ back. I told my aunt the last words my mom said to me. ―I kind of like you, too.‖ She‘s like, ―That was Ruth.‖ And, I felt like I needed to defend her then, like, you don‘t know, it wasn‘t like she wasn‘t saying she loved me, that was her way of saying she loved me. I never saw her cry, except for one time and it was very brief. It was when her brother died and we were at the funeral home. She went to hide, so I didn‘t really get to see it. I never saw her cry after that. I felt like that was how I should be. So, whenever I would be emotional she would tell me things like, ―Don‘t cry, it‘s not going to make anything better. It‘s just going to make your nose run.‖ I can still hear her in my head every now and then saying, ―Oh Hannah, don‘t say that.‖ Or, you know, ―Don‘t cry.‖ So, it‘s taken me a long time to sort of come to terms with the fact that, ‗You know what, people do cry.‘ If I was frustrated, let‘s say with a friend of mine, I would say, I‘d just be complaining, she‘d say, ―Now, Hannah, you can think anything you want, but you don‘t have to say it. I can‘t believe I‘m hearing those words come out of your mouth.‖ So, there are times when I think I‘m so frustrated, you know, and I just want to say, ‗You‘re mean. You‘re making me mad,‘ and it‘s like, ‗Ah, don‘t say that.‘

Things like that. So, I always felt like I had to keep the stiff upper lip that she had. Nothing seemed to rattle her. She seemed to take everything in stride. I never understood how she could do that, but I learned as I grew up that when she felt emotional she would go out to the garden and work in the yard. My dad had told me times when he had seen her cry. He‘s like, ―She just didn‘t think that you guys needed to see that. You needed to see your parents as strong people.‖ I remember telling him, ―Well, that‘s fine, but it sets up this unrealistic expectation for us how to model that kind of behavior. What do we do with emotion exactly?‖ Obviously, right now, I still don‘t know what to do with emotion. I think I knew [how she felt]. In a lot of ways, I‘m willing to be like her, like, ‗How do I figure out how to not cry with people around?‘ I struggled with that for years. Because, if I felt like I needed to cry, ‗How do you stop it from happening?‘ I remember somebody telling me, ―Hannah, it‘s normal. People cry all the time.‖ [I‘m] like, ‗Do they do it in public? Do they do it in front of other people?‘ They‘re like, ―Have you seen people cry?‖ I‘m like, ‗Yeah. That‘s different though, that‘s them.‘ I never really saw [the emotion]. Although, she did tell me after my dad had died, she said, ―I was cleaning this afternoon and I moved dad‘s chair to vacuum beside it and I found one of his fingernails,‖ and she‘s like, ―I just fell apart.‖ I said,

‗What does it mean when you fall apart?‘ I said, ‗Did you cry?‘ And she said, ―It just tore me up.‖ That was it. I had this image of my mom crying over my dad and I‘m sure she did. Still, I never saw it, not even at his service. She took a Tranxene, I think, that day. She must have [cried]. I guess I felt kind of sorry for her, like she‘s doing this alone. ‗Why can‘t she cry with me?‘ Because I would talk about it when I would cry. She still ... she still held strong. After [dad] died, I got his journals. He used to keep these little books. They have the day, and then they have like ten lines, and then they have the next day. So, they would write down significant events and even those don‘t show emotion from my mom, by the way. But, dad would write, ―Hannah called again tonight, homesick.‖ Like, any sort of significant event I had he wrote it down. [Mom] would write things down. Looking at her journal from the year her first husband died she wrote, ―Bill died today. Period.‖ A couple of days later, ―Went with Betty, killed chickens. Period.‖ Just the facts. Even though dad didn‘t have a lot of emotion in there, it was sort of there. Like, there was one from when I was in Girl Scouts and he wrote in advance, ―Hannah‘s going to Scouts. Today‘s her day to carry the flag.‖ Then he wrote right in there, ―Hannah didn‘t get to carry the flag.‖ So, little things like that. He told me before he died, ―It‘s really hard on your

99 mom when you come home and you cry before you leave.‖ And, I thought, you know she wasn‘t there when I walked out to the car. Dad walked out to the car. She must have been in there crying. I imagine her hiding in the bathroom. I never saw it. I wish I would have. III. She died the day after her birthday—so she had the aneurysm rupture on Sunday night and she died on Thursday. The week after she died, one of the service professionals said she‘d told him, ―I may not be around much longer, but I‘m going to make it until my birthday.‖ When we were in the house, usually through the winter time, she was very competitive. She liked board games, so the family would come over on holidays and we‘d play board games all afternoon into the evening. She loved that. I used to tell her that she was a poor winner, instead of a poor loser, because she would just gloat and loved it. She loved it when she was winning. She said, ―I‘ve never heard of a poor winner before.‖ I said, ‗Well, it‘s no fun to play when you‘re rubbing our noses in it all the time.‘ I think I learned there not to brag, because whenever I bragged I would lose. So, I became kind of sneaky. I knew what I was doing, but I didn‘t want to call attention to myself because I didn‘t want them to block me. Now that I‘m older, I find that I‘ve got her competitive spirit. I see it in my daughter. I‘ll talk a lot of crap, but I know that I‘m going to lose. It‘s sort of like people see it, but I pretend that I don‘t see it. It‘s just kind of a fun mask to wear when we play games.

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Sort of like mocking her confidence or imitating it, I guess. There would be times that we‘d play a game and she‘d say, ―You can‘t go to bed yet, we haven‘t had a play-off.‖ We‘d all be so tired and halfway through the game I‘d say, ‗Play-off? You‘ve won every game we‘ve played,‘ and she‘d just kind of smile. She just wanted that time. That was her way of spending time with us. It was when we got a chance to talk. My sisters would come over and we would all play together. Anytime I came home from college we knew we were going to get the board games out and play. She wanted to be independent, ferociously. She would fend off all of her help, bravely fend off all of her help. Oh, she could be stubborn. She drove me crazy. She had ventricular tachycardia, so her heart would flutter. It took everything I could to get her to go over to the hospital. Every now and then she would say, ―If I lay down for awhile it goes away.‖ If it didn‘t go away after 15 minutes I‘d say, ‗We‘re going over there. They can do something about it.‘ Eventually she had surgery to have that corrected. One day she said, ―Yeah, that was really painful.‖ I said, ‗Did you take the Nitroglycerin tablet the doctor gave you?‘ And, she‘s like, ―Oh no, those are only for emergencies.‖ Like, ‗What do you think this is, mom!‘ She had one of those call buttons for emergencies and my sister was there taking care of her, but she‘d gone outside to mow the lawn, and mom fell in the kitchen and she sat there for two hours. I said, ‗Why didn‘t you push your button?‘ She was like, ―Kelly was out there mowing. I knew she‘d come in eventually.‖ Like, ‗You‘re laying on the kitchen floor for two hours. That‘s what that button is for.‘ She would just ... Ooo. It worried us that she was going to have problems. She would just ... Ooo. I think about it and get myself all worked up again, ‗Why don‘t you listen? Why don‘t you ...?‘ You know, I‘d take her to the doctor, because she‘d be complaining about this that and she‘s like, ―Well, we‘re going to go to the doctor, but we only have time to talk about one thing.‖

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And, I would go ahead and ask some questions while I was there. We got out to the car and she said, ―Don‘t you ever do that again. You know, you don‘t need to be asking questions for me.‖ And, I said, ‗If it‘s a question you have, then talk to him about it. Even if you don‘t think you have enough time, book a double appointment. They‘ll put you back to back in the same appointment then you have more time.‘ And, she‘s like, ―Oh, they won‘t do that.‖ I said, ‗Yes, they will.‘ I didn‘t [understand it] at first. I thought she was just stubborn. People in the family had said that even when she was younger. They used to say, ―Stubborn like Ruth.‖ I think that experience with her first husband and having the four small children and being dependent on other people for help, she didn‘t ever want to be that way again. IV. I look back now. I‘m having a different perspective. I‘ve been kind of reframing things in my mind since she‘s died. I‘ve been going through her things, all of her personal possessions and I start to see a life that I hadn‘t seen before. Before she died, she made me and her sister, the one closest to her in age, the administrators of her estate, of the will. She called me about a year, nine months, before she died, and she said, ―I just wanted to make sure that this is what we have in the will.‖ I said, ‗It is what we have in the will.‘ I said, ‗Are you thinking about dying on me?‘ She‘s like, ―No, I just want to make sure I have everything ready.‖ When I was talking to her that night she was giving me instructions on what to do. She said, ―You know, your dad and I were really concerned about having another baby so late in life. We weren‘t sure if we‘d live to see you raised. We weren‘t sure ... Basically how you would turn out. You might be a difficult child and make later life difficult.‖ She didn‘t really say it in those terms, but that‘s what I got from it. She said, ―But you were a true delight to both me and your dad.‖ That felt really good to hear. And, I told her how I felt. I said, ‗You know, you were the best parents. You were my friends.‘ I said, ‗I‘m not ready for you to go.‘ She said, ―I‘m not ready yet, either.‖

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Then she said, ―We just need to talk. We just need to talk about these things.‖ The year before she died, she really started to draw inward. I knew that was a sign that it was coming because she wasn‘t interested in the news, she wasn‘t interested in current events. She wanted to hear what the family was doing, but she was telling these old stories. She was thinking back. She told me far more in that year before she died than she ever had before. It started to change for me then. That‘s when she started to tell me about her early life. Still, with no emotion. I felt a lot of sympathy. I felt pain for her, you know, I hurt. And, I would say things like that. I would try to bring the emotion in to it, ‗Oh my gosh. That must have just been devastating.‘ I never really got a response about the emotion, but I knew she was basically just looking back over her life, thinking maybe even trying to put it in context. The life review. I think one thing she regretted…I do remember her talking about this, it‘s one of the reasons why she pushed me to college. It was WWII when she graduated [high school], right after the war, in ‗46. She graduated top of her class, Valedictorian, very smart, very athletic and she wanted to go to college. And, pretty much everyone told her she was college material. Then it turned out there wasn‘t enough money to send her. She was one of seven kids, her dad was an oil field worker, and the scholarships weren‘t really there at that time either. So, she was working two jobs at the time when she met her first husband and he had just come back from the war. She never said too much about him, but from what I heard from people that lived in the community, he was a real mean jerk. She had so much potential and she ended up with this dreg from society. But she thought a lot of him because of the war and she said that

103 she also thought that once men married they settled down. She expected all men to be like her father and they weren‘t. Late in ‘47, she was pregnant and got married that Christmas and my brother was born in June of the following year. I always thought she got married young because that‘s what they did in the 40‘s, but it was a big shame. It was a huge mistake because [her husband] was a drinker, an alcoholic, he liked to brawl. He sometimes wouldn‘t come home for days. He was mean to her. He threatened her. I knew some of those things from what she had told me before. They had four kids and then he got into a bar fight and was actually killed. He was shot through the chest and then the guy who shot him backed over him with a car. So, in 1960, in a small town, it was a huge deal. So, she was left a widow at 30 with four kids. All this I knew, but I hadn‘t really thought a whole lot about it. Ten years later she marries my dad. Two years after that I come along, so there‘s like 24 years between me and my oldest brother, 15 years between me and the next youngest. My dad had one son from his first marriage and his first wife died of cancer. So, they were both widows fairly young. I always felt like there was this weirdness between me and the others [my half-brothers and sisters]. [I thought], ‗Okay, it‘s just because we‘re different ages,‘ but over time it became more realistic that they were not necessarily angry with me, but angry at the fact that I had more than they had growing up and that I seemed to get anything that I wanted. So, ―I was spoiled, I had more of mom‘s attention, I had more of her affection, I had two parents.‖ Mom used to say of my two brothers that she thought they were staying away because they were drinking and they knew that she didn‘t approve of it. It wasn‘t until after she died that one of my brothers said, ―It felt like she got married and abandoned us. She left.‖ My dad was in the service, so as soon as they got married she went to Italy for two years and then they came back. And, [my brother‘s] like, ―She just left us. Here, we grew up without having anything. Our dad died. We lived on his social security income. We wore hand me down clothes or clothes that she had mended. We didn‘t have the nice things that you had.‖ Anytime they talk about her I feel like I have to defend her. I said something to one of my

104 sisters, ‗The way you‘re describing her it sounds like we had two different mothers.‘ I said, ‗That doesn‘t sound like her at all.‘ And, she‘s like, ―We did have two different mothers. She changed when she remarried. She was happy. That was the first time we‘d ever really seen her happy. It was like she had a new life and we didn‘t really feel like we fit anymore.‖ I want to ask her more about the early life. Some of the questions I want to ask probably aren‘t appropriate, like, ‗Do you really think this was a huge mistake? Is that why you were so cautious about letting me date, why you didn‘t want me to date?‘ We talked about her early childhood memories. I know a lot of those stories. I really want to know how she felt. V. ‗What does it mean when you fall apart?‘ In the spring [mom] would go mushroom hunting. I didn‘t understand, at that point, that her first husband died in April and whenever she was mourning him she wanted to go to the woods. She spent every spring—particularly the month of April—in the woods hunting mushrooms. This began as a formal tradition when her first husband died. She said at one point that it was how she processed her grief over his death. Ironically, they both died in April. She just wanted to be by herself. That‘s the time that the mushrooms come up, so that became one of her passions. We knew when April rolled around she would be in the woods. That‘s just where she went. I went mushroom hunting with her a couple times, but I really didn‘t like it. I like the woods, but I don‘t like being out there in the wet. So, it wasn‘t a pleasant experience. It was

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tromping through mud and rain looking for mushrooms. I was much more interested in playing with sticks, trying to find a spot where I could play house or something. You had to be on the move constantly until you found a patch of mushrooms. Pick them and move on. She was happy out there though. She loved the dirt, I guess. She just really liked the outdoors— growing things, finding things. She said that would give her time to think and pray, is what she said. She wasn‘t a very religious person. We didn‘t talk about prayer. That was the only time she ever mentioned it. My dad wanted to be cremated. That was awful for her. She couldn‘t imagine being cremated. She wanted to be buried. I remember saying, ‗You shouldn‘t be outside in the garden with that aneurysm. If it busts you‘re going to die out there in the garden and we‘re going to find you

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laying there in the dirt.‘ She said, ―You‘d know that I‘d die happy. That‘s what I like.‖ So, even burying her, I mean, it was the wettest spring we‘d ever had. And, I was feeling so bad. She said, ―Don‘t buy the best vault.‖ She said, ―A vault is a vault. You just get the cheapest one they have.‖ So, the cheapest one they have has two holes drilled in the bottom of it. Okay, well, here we are putting her in the ground, the wettest spring of the year. I know water‘s coming up through there. And, so I‘m imagining her underground bobbing up and down in muddy water. That was intensely distressing to me. Oh gosh, it was horrible. Absolutely horrible. I did say something to my sister about it. She‘s like, ―Hannah, she loved dirt. She loved to be outside. I don‘t think that bothers her.‖ Before the funeral, I felt like I‘d done everything just the way she wanted. But, after the funeral, because we were having all of that wet stuff, I was like, ‗Oh my gosh, is this gonna make decomposition happen faster? Is she sopping wet? Is she uncomfortable? Did I do the right thing by buying the cheapest vault? If I put her in the vault that was just solid concrete would that make the difference?‘ My sister kept saying, ―No, this is what she said she wanted.‖ And, I said, ‗But, do you think she knew what she wanted?‘ She said, ―Hannah, mom

107 has buried enough people. She knows what she wants. And, she liked the dirt. So, if she‘s down there and she‘s muddy, she‘s happy.‖ I can‘t, you know what, there‘s like a thought block that happens there. I have to put it there because I love her so much and the thought of her body decomposing is just completely distressing to me. I envision that and I can see her hands, the way they were placed when she was buried. I can hardly stand it. That bothers me. [When] I think about my dad, he was cremated, I don‘t have that same worry about him. I just don‘t. Why I‘m at peace with that but not with the burial I have no idea. We go out there. The last time I was out there I noticed that one corner of the grave had started to sink in a little bit, which I know is normal. I know its normal and I think that‘s falling in on her. It‘s all settling down. There‘s a lot of pressure there. If it was anybody else in the world I wouldn‘t care. This is my mom. I know my sister‘s right. She‘d be happy with that. I think back to what she said, if she died in the garden she would have died happy, I mean, what she wanted, being in the dirt.

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VI. The dreams I‘ve had of her since her passing have been mostly fraught with anxiety and self- doubt. Three of them have had a similar theme of me trying to convince her she was really dead and needed to lie down and be quiet. I‘ll start with the most recent dream, the first week of December 2012. [I dreamed] I had a call from some unknown person that my mom was not being compliant and they needed my help. When I arrived, she was sitting upright in a chair with her arms firmly strapped down. I released her hands and told her that we needed to talk about her situation. She was visibly agitated and her skin had a green hue to it. I convinced her to lie down while I asked her why she wasn‘t aware of her state. She was angry to be dead and

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said she wasn‘t ready to be buried. I told her that I wasn‘t ready either, but that it was time and everything would be fine. I realized I was standing beside her casket and helped her lie her hands across her torso taking care to squeeze them so she would know I was there. I told her people would be there soon and she didn‘t seem to want that but said she was confused. [The dream ends] I awoke feeling distress and lamenting that her skin had turned green and she was still not accepting her death. Within the first two months of her death, I dreamed that I was trying to manage keeping up with work, my kids, and my mom‘s arrangements. I was at the end of the road near our house at a small gas station. I got out to check the tires of the hearse I was driving. My mom‘s body was in the back and had been in there

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for some time. I recall asking someone how bad the smell would be when I opened the door to drive her back to Indiana. The hearse didn‘t smell bad at all which was a relief, but as I started to drive out, I began sobbing because I didn‘t have time to take her to Indiana because of work issues and trying to keep up with my kids. I remember saying to the box in the back of the car that I was so sorry I‘d neglected to get her home sooner. [The dream ends] The third dream I had was intensely distressing. I had taken care of arrangements for the funeral and went into to the viewing room to look at and talk to her before people arrived. The casket was reverse of the way most caskets open/face. I found that to be frustrating at first, but was relieved to see her looking relaxed. I told her how much I missed her already and that I loved her. She looked at me and said she didn‘t know what I was talking about. I assured her that she was dead and that guests would be arriving. She wanted to sit up but

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I told her to lie down. We did this a few times and she kept insisting that she was fine. I heard someone outside the door and told her to cooperate because the visitation was about to begin. She layed down but did so grudgingly. I then whispered to her how I loved and missed her and closed the casket lid. [The dream ends] I awoke crying. I am [left to imagine what she felt] and I think for me, more than anything, it‘s about that process of dying. As she was dying I wanted to tell her, orient her to where she was and what was happening, and I didn‘t. I don‘t know if I should have, if I shouldn‘t have, if it even would have mattered. But I told her everything. We talked about things in detail. She knew it was coming. We talked about what it would be like. She talked to her daughters about it. It did cause her some anxiety, but it wasn‘t a surprise. It almost feels like being dishonest with her by not telling her, ―That‘s where you‘re in the hospital, the aneurysm has ruptured, you‘re under good care, we‘re going to make sure that you‘re not in pain.‖ There was one way we could talk when everyone was there and then there were the quiet times when it was just the two of us, like when I would come into the bathroom when she was taking a bath or hunt her down in the garden to talk.

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But, we would, we would talk about some emotional things. She told me what she wanted to do. I sat down and worked out the living will with her. I helped her with the will, all of that. So, all the end of life stuff she talked to me about. None of the others, none of the others knew any of that. So, I think those dreams are coming from the fact that, had I been alone in the room with her, I would have said, ‗The aneurysm has ruptured. You need to relax. We‘re going to give you morphine to keep you comfortable.‘ That kind of thing and I didn‘t because my sisters were there. Like, ‗What would they say if I told her the aneurysm had ruptured?‘ I‘m sure she knew. I‘m sure she knew. But I never did that. When I think about it, I can still evoke the emotions that I felt when I woke up from those dreams, which was anxiety and frustration. It took some time and I realized that it was more about what I didn‘t do, than what she didn‘t have. Then, when I think about it, cognitively process it, I didn‘t do anything wrong. I did just what she wanted. She knew this was likely to happen. I know she was comfortable, so I think the unfinished business would have been with me. Not like she needed the closure to know she was dying, but the fact that I didn‘t feel like [I did] what would have been natural for me and to tell her. I think I go between guilt and regret and sort of a sense of peace, like I know I did what she wanted me to do. But I wish I‘d been able to act as my own agent, do what I felt was natural at the time without being stifled. VII. Now, I will say I had one other dream. One dream that was not like all the others. It was more like a real contact. I was struggling over how to handle some of the stuff with the estate. She had this huge coin collection, you know, ‗How do we deal with that?‘ Half of the siblings wanted

113 some [of the coins], the other half didn‘t want them. The lawyer said either everybody has to come and look through them or nobody, because you can‘t, it‘s not really fair. And, if everybody gets to see them there‘s no way to get them all in the same room at the same time. But two of them said, ―I don‘t even want to see them.‖ So, we got the majority. One sister was really upset. We knew she was going to be a problem, but I just remember thinking that night, ‗Mom where are you? What do you want me to do? I knew what you wanted me to do with your casket, with your burial plot, with your vault, with your possessions.‘ I knew all of that, but I didn‘t know how she wanted the coin collection to be handled or the sale of the house. I remember falling asleep and I heard [mom] call my name and I said, ‗There you are! I‘ve been waiting for you for the longest time! I thought you would never get here.‘ She said something to me and I said, ‗I had to make these decisions and I don‘t know what decision you would make.‘ What she said to me was so funny, it was, ―I can never trust you to make the same decisions I would make. You just have to keep making decisions and moving forward.‖ And, I thought, I remember saying, ‗Okay. I can do that. There‘s so many things I want to tell you, you know, I want to ...‘ I just kept talking and she was gone. I felt like, ‗How could you leave so fast? Don‘t you want to know what‘s going on?‘ I remember feeling a little frustrated by that. But I didn‘t take it as I don‘t trust you to make my decisions. I thought that‘s just the way mom would say it, too. The brevity was definitely a frustration. First, I kind of had my feelings hurt by that, ―I can never trust you to make the same decisions I would make.‖ Then I thought, ‗Well, I think she knows we don‘t think alike.‘ So, that‘s pretty much what it meant: ―I trust you to do what has to be done. I have no stake in it now.‖ I did expect more, because I‘d had a couple dreams like that about my dad.

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In this [one] dream, my dad was there in my house and my husband was asleep. And, I said, ‗I‘m so glad you‘re here. I didn‘t think I would see you again.‘ And, I asked him, ‗Can I get you something to drink?‘ And, he said, ―No, I don‘t need that.‖ But, he said, ―Let me give you something.‖ And, he handed me this cup. It was like a iridescent cup and it was pink and it was blue and when you moved it around it looked kinda purple. And, he told me that he liked [my husband]. He knew that [he] loved me. And, that we would be parents. And, I said, ‗Really, are you sure?‘ And, wasn‘t too long after that, I can‘t remember what happened at the end, but I was just so shocked to have this cup and have him tell me I‘d have a child. Sure enough. About a year or so later my daughter arrived. But, you know, my dreams with him are so totally different than the ones I‘ve had with mom. The only time I felt like it was really my mom was that one night, that one sentence. I didn‘t see her, I only heard her voice and it was over. I still wanted more, but that was all I was going to get and I could be okay with that, but there were all these things I was trying to tell her and she was already gone, you know, it was just fast. And, I didn‘t see her. I only heard her. I‘m disappointed that [the dreams of mom] haven‘t been positive. I‘m disappointed in not seeing her in the way I had seen her before. Even the one where I felt like she was there and she was talking to me, I wasn‘t able to get anything more from her than that. The dreams about dad, you know, he showed me he was healthy and happy and back to when he was a younger man. I felt joy. I felt peace. That was great. Mom was just like, ―Keep going, just keep going.‖ That was basically what I got from her. On the move constantly until you found a patch of mushrooms. Pick them and move on. VIII. Well, I will tell you when she first died it was sad,

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but then I became numb, I think to take care of most of the rest of the business that had to be taken care of immediately after she had died. When I came back here, when I got home, I felt guilty again, a lot of guilt here, because I was grieving more for my dad again. It brought up all those feelings of loss for when my dad died. I will say that I felt like I was closer to him, more like him in personality and everything else. But I remember just talking about when dad died and how hard that was and what I felt and tried to talk to mom about it and just feeling that whole pain all over again. I told somebody, ‗I should be grieving for mom, why am I having all these feelings about dad?‘ I had anticipatory grief with my dad. We watched him going downhill pretty quickly. There was one point where he said, ―I‘m so miserable I wish I were dead.‖ That actually hit my mom pretty hard. She said, ―What have I done? Have I done something to make you feel that way? Is there anything I can do to help?‖ And, he said, ―No. I can‘t do what I want. I don‘t feel well. This is torturous.‖ So, there was grief over him, not necessarily him wanting to die, but grief over him experiencing all of that. There were a couple nights, I remember, I sat up by his bed through the night. But he was far more open to talking about what he felt, what he thought, what the experience was like. So, I had a better sense of peace about that. We never knew when mom was going to go. Never knew how she really felt about it. All I knew was she didn‘t really want to talk about it. [The grief over dad] wasn‘t as extreme as what I felt with mom. Maybe that‘s because I did feel close to him and he was more mine, like I had to share mom with all these half brothers and sisters. My dad did have a son and he would pop in like once every four years. So, it was like he was so distant that he was never really in the picture. I was with him when he died, my dad. It was peaceful. We did just what he wanted. It felt right. But there would be times when I think, I want to tell him something. Then I‘d have a similar reaction, but not nearly like I‘d been

116 punched. It was more like a sinking feeling, so it was different. But with mom it just completely knocked the breath out of me, ‗She‘s gone, I‘m by myself.‘ She died in April. We had [an] auction in June. That was still very much about dad for me. We were pulling a lot of things that she had saved of his out at the same time, so it kind of brought him back to the present, I guess you would say. Five, six months [had passed until I started grieving her], I think. A lot longer than I thought it would be. I was going back and forth from Kentucky to Indiana during that time. Each one of those trips, we were sorting through more of her things. So, I stayed there through a better part of May trying to get the household stuff ready for auction, going through her jewelry boxes. She had little diaries. My sister and I sat down and we looked through all of those. We looked through some letters she had from her friends and some of the ones that she had written. I think I mentioned before I was all over her for writing down her life stories for old friends instead of for us, so she started photocopying some of those for us, which I was thankful for. Then, every other trip back was to deal with the more intimate things, the paperwork, the more sentimental items that she and dad had both kept, including boxes of pictures, boxes of pictures that came from my dad‘s side of the family, pictures from siblings on my mom‘s side of the family. I scanned like 1500 pictures over that time period. So, when I did that I was completely immersed in the family history. Seeing what she was like. I think seeing some of the pictures from her childhood and my grandparents and my cousins made it seem that much more real. We were losing connections there. There was nobody. There was no kin-keeper to pull us back for reunions. Kind of like a boat that‘s lost its moorings. Here we are floating further and further away from what was. At one point a pretty close-knit family. But then it came around. I was able to let [those feelings for dad] go, and it would hit me that she was gone and it would be just like a punch in

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in the stomach, really strong reaction, like, ‗I can‘t believe she‘s gone. She‘s really gone. This is it. I won‘t be able to talk to her again. I won‘t be able to see her again. How am I going do this? How am I going be able to live without her?‘ I look at her things. After she died, we took her clothes to Goodwill and gave them away. She had these sweaters she used to wear. She had the same thing in the pocket of every sweater she wore regularly. It was a wad of Kleenex, rubber bands, a paper clip, and a little box of Tic Tacs. Every last one of them. One of the sweaters that I had given to her—that we really wanted to bury her in but we couldn‘t find at the time—I brought that home with me. It‘s still exactly as it was when she died. I left the wad of Kleenex in there, the rubber band, the paper clip and the Tic Tacs. It‘s hanging in my closet. So, sometimes when I want to talk to her I‘ll go in there and kind of look at the sweater. I don‘t take it out. I just leave it on the hanger. I usually turn it so I can see the front of it. It has a big cardinal on one side. And, I usually just put my hand in the pocket, you know, just to feel her things. Every now and then, I think I want to put it on but I think I can‘t. I can‘t. But it‘s there. And, just last week I went through and packed up all of the pictures and all of the mementoes. It was too painful to have them out, like I could hardly stand to look at them. So, I put them in a box and put those up in the top of the closet. I figure I‘d get them out again, but I just couldn‘t stand to have them out anymore.

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I used to call [mom] every day when I left work and I would go pick up my kids and it was just like an automatic habit. So, I can‘t tell you how many days that I‘ve grabbed my phone as I‘ve walked to the car and tried to call her. I started calling my sister Kelly instead. I said, ‗You know, mom‘s not here, so you‘re going to get her daily phone call from me, whether you want it or not.‘ She said, ―Go ahead and call me anytime.‖ And, we would talk. One day I called her and I said, ―I just tried to call mom.‖ She‘s like, ―How‘d that work?‖ I said, ‗Not very well.‘ It‘s just hard to believe. We‘ve been doing a lot of the processing about her life together and trying to make sense of it and trying to make sense of some of the other family dynamics. But when we talk on the phone, one or the other of us will say, ―I wish she was here.‖ Kelly was really more interested in the gardening and outdoors stuff than I was. So, she plants her garden, she said, ―I used to ask mom, ‗How do I do ... this‘ or ‗I read the book and it says to do it this way,‘ and mom would say, ‗No, you need to do it this way.‘ ‖ So, Kelly would test her and do half of the planting her way and half of it the way mom told her too and mom‘s way worked much better all of the time. So, last summer she was planting and she was having some problems and she said, ―I just wish I could ask her how to handle this.‖ And, I said, ‗You know, I wish she were around because I want to know about ... this other thing.‘ Whatever it was. We‘d talk about how mom always had to have things done her way. We‘d talk about playing board games and how she instilled this competitiveness in us. I do miss her. There‘s so many days that I just want to call and talk to her. The other thing I‘ve been doing though, in reframing her life and her death, I think about where I am in life, comparing that to hers. So, she told me about her first husband when I was pretty young. It seemed like a lifetime. It was like twelve years from the time he died to the time I came along. That‘s not that much time. And, her life with my dad would have just been taking off. They got married when she was 40, which is where I am now. Maybe it‘s just because I‘m at mid-life. I think, ‗Okay, I have to live the next half of my life without my parents.‘ I‘m at the same age she was when she married my dad and started a whole new married life and a new family, in essence. That had to be pretty frightening. Was it as scary as me thinking about

119 the next 40 years of my life without my parents? Maybe, I don‘t know. Those are the kinds of things that are going on my head, things I‘d like to ask her: ‗What was that experience like for you?‘ I know a lot of those stories. I really want to know how she felt. Then I think, if I live to be the same age that she lived to be I‘ll live half of my life without my parents. I can‘t fathom that. It‘s a huge hole. It‘s a big gap. So, who do I go to for advice on things like that? I just can‘t imagine the second half of my life without my parents. I feel like an orphan. I feel like I don‘t really have a family of origin anymore. I really wonder if I was ever part of that anyway, you know. I used to tell people I‘m either an only child or the youngest of six, depending on how you looked at it. The more time passes I really think I was an only child. And, then I look at the family I‘ve created, my husband, my two kids. It feels good, but it‘s also frightening, because there‘s like no support there. I mean, we have his parents and I love them and I‘m thankful my kids are going to have some grandparents. But they‘re not mine, though. There‘s a fear that I‘ll forget them, that I‘ll forget what they sounded like when they talked. I can‘t stand the thought of that even. How do I move forward without them?

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How do I honor their memory? How do I make sure that my kids know about them and make them feel like they knew them in a way? IX. Mom and I had identical feet, right down to the wrinkle in the middle of our foot. We were always just kind of amazed that our feet look just alike. She used to have me wear her new shoes to get them ready. I kept saying, ‗You‘re buying these a half size too small.‘ She‘d say, ―No, I‘m not.‖ I‘d say, ‗I wouldn‘t have to be breaking these in for you if they fit in the first place.‘ She‘d say, ―You buy your shoes the wrong size.‖ And I‘d be like, ‗You buy your shoes the wrong size.‘ This went on all the way up until the day she died. ―I can never trust you to make the same decisions I would make. You just have to keep making decisions and moving forward.‖ My daughter got her hair tangled up in her earring one day and it was really painful, so I helped her get it untangled. She‘s like,

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―It hurts. It hurts,‖ and I stopped and I said, ‗I know.‘ And, I told her the story of when I got my ears pierced and I got in a pool and my hair got wet and it got tangled up in the front and the back of the earring and ended up cutting my ear. There‘s a scar there. So, I showed her the scar and I said, ‗I know that hurts, but let me fix this so that it doesn‘t become a problem.‘ Gosh, it wasn‘t too long ago when she brought that up, ―Do you remember when you had that hair caught in your earring?‖ So, she hears what I‘m saying in some of these stories, like, ‗Oh yeah, I did that and this is what it was like for me,‘ and she‘ll remember it, she‘ll relate it.

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Hannah and Ruth: Analysis Introduction Toward imagining the archetypal significance of Hannah‘s grief experience, I based the nine chapters of her story on the myriad images, fantasies, and dreams that precisely characterized the mother-daughter relationship in life and death. The complexities of motherhood in general and the nature of mother-daughter intimacy in particular comprise its main themes, yet they ultimately open up to the larger predicament of sustaining transgenerational connections in the past, present, and future. Thus, in the former sense, the story is as much about the character of Hannah‘s mother Ruth as it is about Hannah‘s imaginings of her amidst her death and dying. The first chapter briefly alludes to a longstanding conflict concerning Hannah‘s wish for an affiliative intimacy with her mother, and a series of thematically linked nightmares that have haunted Hannah in her grief. By the end, her distress over Ruth‘s darkly animated presence shifts to a dawning uncertainty over how she will remember and honor her dearly departed parents. Here, Hannah‘s dilemma evokes the question of responsibility and the great weight shouldered by the living in retaining, enriching, and perpetuating ties with the dead in a transgenerational context. In the following section, I will take up the themes of Hannah‘s longstanding conflict, grief, and dreams with respect to her mother, mother-daughter intimacy, abandonment, and ancestry, while drawing out resonances between the images attendant to these themes and the mythic backgrounds in which I imagined them. Remembering Ruth: Artemis, Arrows, April The opening chapter of Hannah‘s story takes place on the night of Ruth‘s aneurysm, four days before her death, and features a telephone conversation that brings into sharp relief the dynamics of their relationship as well as Ruth‘s character. Her emphatic response to Hannah‘s intent to join her—―No, no, no, no‖—and restrained display of sentiment—―I kind of like you, too‖—are concrete exemplars of the fierce independence and muted emotional expressivity that, among other traits, so essentially defined her. Ruth‘s words, ―I kind of like you, too,‖ were her last, yet familiar to Hannah as she heard them again and again over the course of their living relationship. As Hannah emphasized so pointedly, ―That’s my mom.‖ Though she asserted knowledge of Ruth‘s manner and love for her, Hannah acknowledged her ignorance of the particulars of her mother‘s emotional experience as much in those final days as in the lifetime of their relationship. With this as my point of

123 departure, I will delineate aspects of the mythic figure Artemis, whose correspondence to Ruth will aid in elucidating and deepening our understanding of her. In addition, the mythic characterization of Ruth will serve as a foil for the mother that appears in Hannah‘s grief and so vividly in her fantasies and dreams. In the table below, I compare Bonnard‘s poetic characterizations of Artemis with those offered by Hannah:

―Her faithful and the poets call her ―She just really liked the outdoors—growing the Savage or things, finding things. She said that would the Queen of the Wild Beasts. give her time to think and pray, is what she said.‖ Her pleasure is to travel to the woods ―We knew when April rolled around she and the high crags battered by the winds would be in the woods. That‘s just where she She loves those animals went.‖ which have not been subjugated by man. The games of childhood and When we were in the house, usually through the chaste thoughts of the winter time, she was very competitive. adolescents belong to her. She liked board games, so the family would come over on holidays and we‘d play board games all afternoon into the evening. She loved that…She loved it when she was winning. She is the Invincible Virgin, ―She wanted to be independent, ferociously. fierce and beautiful. She would fend off all of her help, bravely fend off all of her help.‖ She is pure and cold, ―Nothing seemed to rattle her. She seemed to like the light of the moon take everything in stride. I never understood that guides the hunter through the forest. how she could do that… Her arrow is cruel, ―My sister was in a job where she ended up sure, working 60-80 hour weeks and because she and swift. was a good worker and they kept giving her more work and she was just so frustrated. And, mom would say, ‗You know what, they work a good horse to death.‘ ‖ She is the Goddess of untouched Nature, (Ruth as remembered by Hannah) of intact bodies, of hearts free from passion‖ (as cited in Paris, 1986).

The preceding table—with poetic stanzas on the left and Hannah‘s reminiscences of her mother on the right—bring forth the archetypal qualities and concordances of Artemis and Ruth, each identified with nature and earth, the thrill of the hunt and game, aloofness and solitude, strength and independence, and arrows of combativeness. The daughter of Leto and Zeus, twin

124 of Apollo, Artemis is recognized as goddess of the wilderness and its flora and fauna, of the hunt, and of fertility. As goddess of the wilderness, Artemis ―comes to sanctify solitude, natural and primitive living to which we may all return whenever we find it necessary to belong only to ourselves‖ (Paris, 1986, p. 110). Thus, in contrast to the kind of femininity distinguished and valued for its relation to the other, Artemisian femininity is non-affiliative, insofar as solitude affords a distinctive and invaluable ―presence to oneself‖ (Paris, 1986, 115). However, considering that the wilderness constitutes Artemis‘ mythological realm, we might more precisely say that she is predominately absent in human affairs and affiliations and vitally present in the life of the natural world and its non-human inhabitants. Indeed, it is in relation to the Wild Places that Artemis herself appears as an archetypal presence and obtains her significance. Her sensuous and instinctual participation with non-human life and embodiment of animality endow her with the distinction of skilled huntress and protector of wild things. Additionally, in possessing extraordinary strength and independence, Artemis of the Amazon embodies feminine separation and autonomy that she will defend fiercely, at any cost. Throughout Hannah‘s recollections of her mother, we can see striking resonances with these core aspects of Artemis. Overwhelmingly, solitude, as a mood and a psychological process, pervaded Hannah‘s descriptions of Ruth, down to the ways that she related to her children, used and delimited her space, and gave word to her lived experience. More specifically, she sparingly expressed, reciprocated, and initiated emotion or physical affection with her daughters, valued privacy and time for herself in the bathroom, and storied her life in terse and dry terms—―Bill died today. Period.‖ Whereas these characterizations largely reflect the quality of Ruth‘s presence in a domestic context, the images of her solitude in nature are entirely different and suggestive of an affinity with the non-human. Indeed, the outdoors signified for Ruth a contemplative and sacred space in which she could potently experience that ―presence to oneself.‖ Despite being a non-religious woman, she once said to Hannah that working in the garden and wandering through the woods afforded her time and space to ―think and pray.‖ Furthermore, her ritual treks into the wet and dank woods each April suggest that her solitude in nature, however tranquil and meditative, were also tinged with sadness and mourning. Though, as her elder daughter emphasized again and again, ―She loved being in the dirt.‖ Last, Ruth‘s proclivity for baths and open windows and doors in her home may have constituted intentional

125 means of bringing the outdoors inside, and thus imbuing her domestic space with elements of the wild. In addition to solitude and a strong affinity to nature, Ruth personified the interrelated Artismesian qualities of competitiveness, independence, and combativeness. In playing board games with her daughters, Hannah said, Ruth‘s highly competitive nature revealed itself. Akin to Artemis‘ thrill of the hunt, board games animated and invigorated Ruth, who relished in winning and engaged her daughters in play for hours and hours, sometimes late into the night, particularly during the holidays and winter months. Her competitive spirit would also emerge when she and her daughters debated the ―right‖ or ―best‖ way to do things as illustrated by Kelly‘s anecdote about the most effective technique for growing plants in her garden. Additionally, independence and self-determination were essential aspects of Ruth‘s character that she fiercely guarded even if it meant jeopardizing her health and physical well being. With her steely exterior, Hannah asserted, ‗Nothing seemed to rattle her. She seemed to take everything in stride.‘ More than any other, the image of her lying on the kitchen floor for hours after she had fallen, rather than calling for help exemplifies her obstinate fidelity to autonomy. Relatedly, her combativeness, like the arrows of Artemis, in part aimed to preserve her independence and protect it from infringement. She shot one such arrow—―Don‘t you ever do that again. You know, you don‘t need to be asking questions for me‖—after Hannah asked questions on her behalf while accompanying her to a doctor‘s appointment. To be sure, at times Ruth‘s arrows could be piercing and hurtful, as illustrated by her response to her overworked, overwhelmed, and frustrated daughter: ―You know what, they work a good horse to death.‖ Solitude, an affiliation with nature, competitiveness, independence, and steely combativeness, taken together, comprise the central mythic correspondences between Artemis and Ruth as well as the imaginal background of Hannah‘s grief, a subject to which I now turn. What Does It Mean When You Fall Apart? Five days after our first interview, Hannah emailed me a link to a blog post entitled, ―Do Mama‘s Ever Cry?‖ (Kane, 2010). In the form of a dialogue with her child and introspective, first-person reflections, the author, a mother of three children, two living, one dead, writes about crying and the expression of pain and sadness in the mother-child relationship. Beginning with the titular question posed by her child, while seated in the backseat of the car, the piece vividly depicts the joys and agonies of motherhood as well as the intricacies of delimiting expressiveness

126 in the mother-child relationship. After presenting a variety of experiences that had led her to cry, Kane (2010), the mother and author, articulates the crux of her predicament: But it‘s hard to determine what to share and what to hide. And sometimes I‘m not hiding the tears, just the scattered me who can‘t function for a few minutes and needs to hide beneath blankets and pillows with the lights off to search for air. Because tears aren‘t as straightforward and easy to soothe when you‘re ―all grown up.‖ They‘re scary and overwhelming and sometimes require explanations that wouldn‘t make sense without more words than you can handle. But it‘s sad to think that I‘m so stoic around you that the idea of me crying seems foreign. The last line, in particular, underscores a central theme in Hannah‘s narrative—that motherhood and guilt are inseparable. Referring to her mother‘s own stoicism, Hannah recalled telling her mother a few times, ‗I‘ve never seen you cry.‘ However, she said she never received the response for which she had hoped. Again, the particulars of Ruth‘s emotional life, namely her experience of vulnerability, or put differently, Hannah‘s question, ‗What does it mean when you fall apart,‘ loomed large in her imagination before and after Ruth‘s death. Much like Hannah‘s story, ―Do Mama‘s Ever Cry‖ has as its foreground motherhood, from the point of view of a mother. In the background, however, lingers the inquisitive perspective of a child, whose curiosity about the ―interior mother‖ instigates the crisis in the car and pulls Kane down into the archetypal depths of the mother-child relation. Likewise, I imagined Hannah in the back of a car driven by an enigmatic Ruth. In the image, she can only see the back of her mother‘s head, only hear her voice, and wonder about the expressions streaking her face. More than innocent curiosity, the mystery of Ruth invoked in Hannah a deep longing, though not for knowledge as much as a kind of affiliative intimacy, a direct experience of her interiority. Extending Hannah‘s maxim further, we might say that guilt is to the mother as longing is to the child, inseparable. Thus longing, the mythic styles of consciousness in which it obtains, and the contribution of Ruth‘s Artemisian qualities all bear exploration with respect to Hannah‘s fantasies and dreams following the death of her mother. In addition to a prevailing tone of longing, the motifs of origins, vulnerability, abandonment, and orphanhood point to the puer aeternus as an archetypal background to Hannah‘s narrative (Hillman, 1975b). In accordance with a mythic perspective, I do not approach Hannah‘s storied experiences literally, as actual child or childhood, or pejoratively, as ―childish,‖

127 but in terms of the archetypal fantasies that constellate this particular style of consciousness. First, open and enigmatic questions concerning her mother, grief, and nightmares often transported Hannah into the distant past, where she traced them to imagined origins in hopes of understanding better or establishing a satisfactory explanation. Likewise, prior to the initial interview Hannah‘s response to the writing prompt, entitled ―Context,‖ spanned her entire life, beginning with her childhood and ending with her mother‘s death. With respect to Ruth‘s independent, stubborn, and solitary character, Hannah talked about delving into her mother‘s origins and how the traumas of Ruth‘s first marriage may have contributed to her strong aversion to dependence. Second, the motif of Hannah‘s vulnerability and her mother‘s seeming invulnerability pervaded Hannah‘s stories, fantasies, and nightmares of Ruth in ways that were both expectable and surprising. Third, Hannah‘s recollections of Ruth‘s characteristic aloofness, the transition from her ―first life‖ into her second, and Hannah‘s anticipation of the future without her constellated the motif of abandonment and the plight of the orphan. Having imagined separately the archetypal dominants—Artemis and the puer—that characterize Ruth and Hannah in her storying of their relationship, I now will examine the pertinence of these motifs to the bereavement images that populated Hannah‘s fantasies and nightmares of Ruth. The first bereavement image, Ruth buoyed in a porous, watery vault, is unique in kind insofar as it marks the sole waking fantasy in Hannah‘s narrative. In particular, Hannah imagines Ruth underground, inside of her vault, bobbing up and down in muddy water that has seeped up from the holes beneath her. According to Hannah, the image and its corollary, physical decomposition accelerated by exposure to the natural elements, evoked such intense dread that she walled it off from her awareness. Among the questions spurred by her imagining of Ruth, Hannah last asked, ‗Is she uncomfortable?‘ Significantly, the present tense and sensuous adjective that structure Hannah‘s question indicate how Ruth remained an animated presence in her imagination. The nature of Hannah‘s confrontation with the image reveals imagination as a medium through which the paradox of the dead—simultaneously absent and present—is precisely given, sometimes in extremely unsettling forms. In what mythic context might we situate this image in connection with the horror that it evoked in Hannah? The image itself, exclusive of Hannah‘s corollaries and questions, depicts Ruth underground, alone in a vault filled with water. From the perspective of Artemis, Ruth‘s solitary immersion in soil and water signifies a sacred place of rest. While her physical body

128 would most certainly decompose under such material conditions, from an imaginal perspective, Ruth‘s envelopment by these archetypal elements makes her ―subtle body‖ intact. Indeed, in response to Hannah‘s plea about gardening with an aneurysm and dying in the dirt, Ruth said, ―You‘d know that I‘d die happy. That‘s what I like.‖ Likewise, Hannah‘s sister, who often talked with Ruth in the garden and gardened herself, attempted to assuage her sister‘s anxiety by acknowledging, ―Hannah, she loved dirt. She loved to be outside. I don‘t think that bothers her.‖ Thus, the image, in its presentation and implications for Hannah, is full of ambivalence. Although the image of Ruth-in-the-Dirt resonates aesthetically with Ruth‘s Artemisian qualities, Hannah apprehends it in terms of the mythical motif of vulnerability and defenselessness, as if the natural elements are corrosive to Ruth rather than cohesive in an archetypal sense. Significantly then, Hannah‘s horror with regard to this bereavement image bears out a kind of mythic discordance. Whereas the abode of the puer is with the mother, Artemis‘ is rooted in the Wild Places—a watery grave and abandonment for one is the sacred home and solitude for the other. Therefore, the image at once thwarts Hannah‘s wish for preservation, while honoring a dying wish, said offhandedly by Ruth: ―You‘d know that I‘d die happy…dying in the dirt.‖ Keeping with the theme of Ruth as an animated presence, Hannah intimated having a series of nightmares and one dream of her mother ―not really being dead.‖ Of the three nightmares she had in the 21 months following Ruth‘ death, Hannah said that two involved her ―trying to tell [Ruth] that she‘s dead and she‘s not listening,‖ whereas in the third, Ruth‘s ―not really being dead‖ is less explicit and instead suggested by the subtleties of the image. All of the nightmares, Hannah remembered, were fraught with anxiety, self-doubt, and frustration and left her disoriented and wanting. Notwithstanding the emotional weight of her nightmares, Hannah expressed that they did not signify ―real contact‖ with her mother. In the following paragraph, I will recapitulate Hannah‘s three nightmares in the sequence that she dreamed them. Hannah had the first nightmare two months after Ruth‘s death, at a time when she felt numb and disconnected from her grief. In an interesting reversal of the image of Ruth and Hannah in the car, Hannah dreamed that she was driving a hearse with Ruth in the back. She has the sense that her mother has been in the hearse for quite some time, yet notably, the hearse does not smell of death and decay. In continually prioritizing work and her children, Hannah feels as if she has ―neglected‖ her duty to bring her mother ―home.‖ Within a few months of this nightmare, Hannah dreamed of Ruth laying in a casket, reversed in its orientation, in a funeral

129 home. Upon telling Ruth that she misses and loves her, she looks up at Hannah and says she does not understand. Ruth insists she is fine and means to sit up. Hannah pleads with her to be quiet and still before the guests arrive for her visitation. Ruth does so, but grudgingly, and Hannah closes the lid to the casket while repeating that she misses and loves her mother. In the third and most recent nightmare, Hannah dreamed that she discovers Ruth, agitated and with green skin, strapped to a chair in which she is seated. When Hannah releases her, Ruth expresses that she is angry to be dead and not ready to be buried. Hannah acknowledges that she is not ready either, but that it is time. Ruth appears in her casket and Hannah lays Ruth‘s arms across her torso while squeezing her hand to provide reassurance. In the moments before the guests arrive, Ruth is in position for the viewing, but still alive and confused. When Hannah first approached me to volunteer for the study, she relayed briefly that her mother had died almost two years ago, yet continued to live on in her dreams in ways that were disturbing and mysterious to her. However, in the two months that passed between that conversation and our interviews, Hannah had formulated a meta-interpretation of her nightmares that drew substantially from experiences of Ruth‘s dying process, particularly the final moments of her life before the doctor injected her with morphine. Against her instincts and better judgment, Hannah chose not to communicate to Ruth the circumstances and fate that likely awaited her. What she did not do—act as soothsayer and guide to Ruth as she approached and crossed the threshold between life and death—haunted Hannah after her mother passed and evoked anxiety and frustration, a mood that echoed that which she felt upon waking from her nightmares. Hannah affirmed that the nightmares represented a kind of confrontation with the images of her silence at Ruth‘s deathbed. In this way, the nightmares signaled to Hannah the presence of unfinished business, an interpretive view that led her out of the dreams and into a highly circumscribed context of her lived experience with Ruth. Through the method of reversion (Hillman, 1979a), Hannah‘s nightmares can be framed mythically. Here, I return to the idiosyncratic fantasies and motifs belonging to the mythic figures of Artemis and the puer aeternus as imagined in Hannah‘s narrative. First, the latter two nightmares betray Artemisian qualities insofar as Ruth persists in asserting her autonomy from Hades, the god of death and the underworld, and refusing to acknowledge that she has died. Second, Ruth‘s perpetual resurrection in the dream can be imagined in terms of the puer, who, as Moore (1979) argues ―resurrects because resurrection in the psyche is puer‖ and, quoting Jung, is

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―never anything but an anticipation of something desired or hoped for‖ (p. 200). These archetypal aspects of the puer can also be phrased in terms of the image itself: Whenever Hannah expresses her love for Ruth, Ruth comes to life; or, Ruth comes to life only when Hannah expresses her love for her. Third, we can imagine Hannah‘s nightmares as scenes depicting the relation of Artemis to the puer aeternus. Of the Artemis and puer relationship, Dietel muses, ―Is it possible for that cold one to pull me so that I am mad with wanting? I run toward her as to one on intimate terms with my own soul‖ (cited in Hillman, 1979b, p. 169). In turn, this mythic union, and the deep longing emerging by it, has strong resonance with Hannah‘s narrative of the mother-daughter relationship. Reflecting on the death bed scene, Hannah oscillated back and forth between her experience and the one she imagined for her mother, until finally, she offered the possibility that ‗the unfinished business would have been with me.‘ Significantly, this scene accorded with a lifelong pattern in which Hannah had to imagine the particulars of her mother‘s emotional experience. In this way, Hannah‘s nightmares of Ruth, rather than an encounter with images of her own silence in those final moments, can be viewed as an encounter with images of wanting that characterized Hannah‘s experience of an emotionally silent relationship, particularly in death: ―I run toward her as to one on intimate terms with my own soul‖ (cited in Moore, 1979, p. 169). Whenever Hannah expresses her love for Ruth, Ruth comes to life; or, Ruth comes to life only when Hannah expresses her love for her. In Hannah‘s nightmare, Ruth‘s resurrection coincides with Hannah‘s yearning for her, and yet, for Ruth to be alive in a casket begets her anger with death, which, taken together, echo the very ―mad with wanting‖ constellated by the Artemis-puer relation. Indeed, in Hannah‘s third nightmare, she says plainly to Ruth, and Ruth to her, that she is not ready for her to be buried. Thus, I discerned in this series of bereavement images an anguished ambivalence for Hannah about burying her mother—―I convinced her to lie down‖; ―I told her I wasn‘t ready either‖—such that ―mad with wanting‖ characterized the mood of her dwelling on a series of bridges, imaginal spaces between life and death, mother and daughter, intactness and falling apart. Filled with uncertainty about how to handle Ruth‘s coin collection, Hannah again encountered her in a dream; however, the experience of the dream and its significance were different than Hannah‘s nightmares. In this singular instance of what Hannah referred to as ―real contact,‖ she dreamed of having a brief conversation with Ruth, in which she only hears her

131 voice. When Ruth announces her presence by calling Hannah‘s name, Hannah greets her and presents her dilemma. Ruth says, ―I can never trust you to make the same decisions I would make. You just have to keep making decisions and moving forward,‖ and disappears before Hannah can fully respond to her. Upon waking from the dream, Hannah remembered feeling frustrated by its brevity, hurt by Ruth‘s words, and wanting for more: ―Mom was just like, ‗Keep going, just keep going‘,‖ and then, ―I still wanted more, but that was all I was going to get.‖ In the dream, Ruth, true to her archetypal form, draws her bow, takes aim, and releases an arrow: ―I can never trust you to make the same decisions I would make. You just have to keep making decisions and moving forward.‖ Although her words missed the mark for Hannah, it appeared that Ruth hit her intended target. While the dream is not the loving encounter that Hannah wanted, it is the dream with which she is presented, one that had an unanticipated significance. In an interesting reversal of Hannah‘s nightmares, I imagined that here the manner of Ruth‘s presence is laying Hannah to rest, and doing so in the only way she knows how. While not what she wished for, I suggest that Ruth‘s presence in the dream offered a meaningful legacy for Hannah, insofar as Ruth challenges her to trust her own judgment, rather than imagining what Ruth would want. Grief, Pothos, and Nostalgia of the Orphan In the wake of her mother‘s death, Hannah did not grieve Ruth, except perhaps in those nighttime encounters in the hearse and funeral parlors of her dreams. Rather, Hannah grieved for her father all over again. Although saddened by the memory of her deceased father, Hannah‘s grief for him seemed to be accompanied by a modicum of peace and comfort, or rather, possess an invisible structure that allowed her to experience its pain and melancholy in meaningful terms. In particular, Hannah‘s interactions with him during the dying process may have afforded this structure insofar as they talked openly about what the experience was like for him. In stark contrast, the timeline for Ruth‘s death was much less clear, but, more importantly, Hannah and Ruth did not have conversations about her experience and what it meant to fall apart. So, as Hannah put it, she was left to imagine what Ruth felt as she laid comatose on her deathbed. Whereas Hannah described grief for her father as ―a sinking feeling,‖ her grief for Ruth felt like ―a punch in the stomach‖ that ―completely knocked the breath‖ out of her. Ironically, Hannah associated the greater intensity of her grief for Ruth with the fact that they did not have as intimate and exclusive a relationship: ―[The grief over dad] wasn‘t as

132 extreme as what I felt with mom. Maybe that‘s because I did feel close to him and he was more mine, like I had to share mom with all these half brothers and sisters.‖ In particular, the scene of Hannah and her sisters seated beside Ruth at her deathbed so well encapsulates the complexities of their relationship. Ruth cannot talk with Hannah because she is comatose and non-responsive. Hannah does not talk with Ruth because her sisters are in the room. Overwhelming and tragic, the scene is at once a condensation and intensification of the lifelong dilemmas that Hannah experienced in her relationship with Ruth. Little wonder, then, that Hannah associated this image with her nightmares and the guilt and longing that manifested so prominently in her grief. Hannah‘s embodiment of her grief—―like I‘d been punched‖ and ―it knocked the breath out of me‖—is striking in its violent and laming quality. Her embodied reaction, however, arises more particularly from the realization or image that Ruth has gone away forever leaving Hannah all alone. On the heels of this realization, Hannah recalled, she began to experience her life world in terms of her mother‘s absence: Daily phone calls to Ruth that were never answered or returned; Ruth‘s favorite sweater hanging in the closet; Old photographs, Ruth‘s life in images, strewn across the floor. Out of an expansive ―gap‖ that characterized her grief, Hannah experienced a deep longing for her mother that repeatedly impelled her to pick up the phone, reach into sweater pockets, and look at old photographs. Hannah‘s realization and consequent pull to objects signifying Ruth or their relationship once again brings to bear the now familiar, interrelated motifs of vulnerability, abandonment, and longing. In the previous section, I discussed the archetypal phenomenology of this pattern in terms of the peculiar relation between Artemis and the puer. Here, however, I wish to examine an aspect of puer consciousness that accords with a different pattern emerging from Hannah‘s narrative, namely the predicament of orphanhood and ancestral connectedness that occasioned the death of her parents. Reflecting on the challenges and ambiguities of motherhood, Hannah mourned the absence of Ruth, longing for her guidance. ―I think about where I am in life, comparing that to hers,‖ Hannah said, and observed that Ruth was roughly the same age as Hannah is now when she started her second life with Hannah‘s father. Her foray into the origins of Ruth and of her family put into sharp relief the loss of her parents and further led her to identify as an orphan: ―Then I think, if I live to be the same age that she lived to be I‘ll live half of my life without my parents. I can‘t fathom that. It‘s a huge hole. It‘s a big gap.‖

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As she sifted through old photographs and family artifacts, Hannah recalled, the scope of her mourning expanded further once she recognized the disintegration of transgenerational connectedness: ―I think seeing some of the pictures from her childhood and my grandparents and my cousins made it seem that much more real. We were losing connections there. There was nobody. There was no kin-keeper to pull us back for reunions.‖ As the ancestral dead mount in number and significance, Hannah imagined, the living relations become akin to ―a boat that‘s lost its moorings. Here we are floating further and further away from what was.‖ Hannah‘s image of a boat floating away poetically expresses her mournful wandering and marks the culmination of an enlarging pattern of longing, whose objects include Ruth, Hannah‘s parents, and her ancestry and whose movement is from the personal to the archetypal. Returning to the method of reversion, we can imagine Hannah‘s expansive pattern of longing, the oceanic nostalgia of the orphan, in terms of pothos, a Greek word that signifies a yearning for the unattainable or, from Plato (Cratylus 420a), desire for that which is absent. In Greek mythology, Ulysses‘ pothos, the perpetual horizon in his travails and wanderings is ―not for mother, but for his home and native land‖ (Hillman, 1975, p. 52). So too does the pattern of longing in Hannah‘s story of grief point home. Yet, like a boat that has lost its moorings, she is an orphan without a home, though still, it is the place for which she pines and struggles to remember in her grief: ―There‘s a fear that I‘ll forget them, that I‘ll forget what they sounded like when they talked. I can‘t stand the thought of that even. How do I move forward without them? How do I honor their memory? How do I make sure that my kids know about them and feel like they knew them in a way?‖ Hannah‘s orphanhood, in this context, is an experience of suffering the memory of the origins from which she has irrevocably drifted and the responsibility of reimagining the significance of home for herself and her children. The responsibility of reimagining, however, is a monumental one for the bereaved in a culture that has lost its ―ancestral dimension of the soul‖ (Mogenson, p. 131). Where Hannah seems to begin is by honoring the Artemisian qualities of Ruth that she and her children continue to embody, while respecting the essential, unbridgeable differences between her and Ruth. Though she cannot emulate Ruth‘s steely strength or fierce autonomy, Hannah‘s willingness to caringly bear her scars and relate to her daughter human vulnerability demonstrates an altogether different kind of courage.

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Conclusion For Hannah‘s story, I focused on the theme of mother-daughter intimacy and its role in bereavement dreams as well as the broader imaginal process of grief and mourning. Across three sections—―Remembering Ruth,‖ ―What Does it Mean When You Fall Apart,‖ ―Grief, Pothos, and Nostalgia of the Orphan‖—I developed Hannah‘s grief concerning maternal and transgenerational loss, while drawing out resonances between narrative images and the mythic backgrounds in which I imagined them. In the first section, ―Remembering Ruth,‖ I provided a detailed characterization of Hannah‘s mother for the purpose of showing how the significant dead can influence the grieving process for the bereaved. Furthermore, by the method of reversion, I elaborated connections between Ruth, Artemis, and non-affiliative femininity to establish an archetypal background against which Hannah experienced her mother‘s essentially independent, solitary, and non- expressive presence. In the second section, ―What Does it Mean When You Fall Apart,‖ I underlined mother- daughter intimacy as a main conflictual theme in Hannah‘s narrative. Again employing the method of reversion, I situated Hannah‘s relation to her mother in the archetypal context of the puer, and examined her longings for her in terms of the Artemis-puer union. In addition, I elaborated Hannah‘s bereavement images in terms of these archetypal phenomenologies, and argued that her tendency to view them exclusively from a puer perspective at times had the effect of constraining her mourning process. Relatedly, I interpreted Hannah‘s nightmares of Ruth as resonant with ―the mad wanting‖ that can characterize the Artemis-puer union, and suggested how a third dream of Ruth potentially endowed Hannah with a meaningful legacy with which she might begin to ―move forward‖ and mourn the loss of her mother as well as the wish to know her on more intimate terms. In the final section, ―Grief, Pothos, and Nostalgia of the Orphan,‖ I showed how Hannah‘s grief for her mother gave rise to a broader sense of transgenerational loss and orphanhood as she struggled to imagine living the second half of her life without her parents. Drawing from the Greek notion of pothos, a longing for the unattainable, I connected Hannah‘s personal and transgenerational grief with the plight of the Orphan and an archetypal nostalgia for home. Finally, while acknowledging the daunting and open-ended nature of this question in her grief, I alluded to small but significant acts in which Hannah has begun to reach across the divide

135 in her relationship with her own daughter.

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Marion, Rachel, and Tommy: Narrative Collage Prefatory Note: I constructed the following narrative collage from a series of interviews with two related participants, Rachel, and her maternal grandmother Marion, whom Rachel recruited for the study after we completed our interviews. The deceased, Tommy, was Marion‘s husband of almost 40 years and Rachel‘s maternal grandfather. Finally, I wish to clarify that Rachel is adopted and that Marion and Tommy are her biological, maternal grandparents. I. Marion: I actually had a dream before [Tommy] died that he was gonna die. That was probably about three weeks—I keep trying to go back in my head and figure out—but probably about three weeks before he died. And, in the dream I heard, ―Tommy ‘56,‖ and I knew that that‘s what it meant— that he was gonna die when he was 56. I don‘t remember seeing anything, either. I just remember hearing it. Like, it was real stark. It was real, you know, just kind of very blunt. And, I think that‘s part of what hit me about it too. It was like very serious. And so, a couple weeks after that he was running around. He was always really busy doing all kinds of stuff for people. In all arenas, like at church, in the neighborhood, at school. He did all these extra things for people. And, so I was telling him, ‗You have to slow down. That the whole a-fib thing the year before was a call to you to, you know, bring some peace to your life and calm down.‘ And, he said, ―These things I‘m doing are important.‖ And, I said, ‗But, I think you need to give some of them up.‘ And, he said ―No, I‘m not willing to do that.‖ And, then I told him, I said, ‗I had a dream that you were going to die at 56.‘ And, he said, ―Well, it could still happen.‖ And, when I think back on that I think I wonder if he had that dream, too? Because, it was a real tart remark to me, which wasn‘t like he would normally do. That [he] was just, ―Well, it could still happen.‖ So that started the connections, my connection with God and talking about that. So then, when he was in the hospital I kept hearing in my head this song that said, ‗It‘s a tiny offering

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compared to Calvary, but nevertheless we‘ll lay it at your feet.‘ And, I just kept hearing it, over and over and over again. And, I knew God was asking me to let go of him, to lay him down. And, so the whole time, you know, through this, I knew God was there. I knew it was his plan. I knew that he was walking me through it. That this is what had to happen. And, I think my kids knew that too. You know another weird thing about Tommy ‗56? At the funeral all of these kids kept coming up to us, ―You know, he always said that he couldn‘t remember seven times eight.‖ Yeah. We‘re like, ―Excuse me?‖ And, it would be like kid after kid and how he would talk about that, how that was a hard one for him—that he always had trouble remembering that one and ... I was so troubled by that. Rachel: As I said before, I‘m adopted, so [Tommy] is my birth grandpa so, [he‘s] my birth mom‘s father and we have an open adoption, so I see my birth family four times a year almost. Growing up we have always been really close. So, a couple summers ago I was asking, ‗Okay, well, you know, well how did this come about? How did you come to your decision about putting me up for adoption?‘ and, stuff like that. So, [my birth mom] went and told me the story of how she was always so adamant about having the baby. And, she said that both my grandpa and my uncle didn‘t want her to have the baby because she had a lot of things in the future—like, she wanted to go to med school and she actually had a scholarship to play basketball. So, they thought it would be easier for her to just abort the baby, which would have been me. She was pregnant, let‘s see, I was born in 1993, so [she] was 18 years old. She had been very strong in her faith and she said, ―It goes against my moral beliefs.‖ Like, ―It‘s unfair to the baby. I need to carry this out.‖ But then my grandfather was like, ―Well, you know, it wouldn‘t be the best thing for you to do. You need to think about yourself in the future and stuff like that.‖ And, so she challenged him, she said, ―You can do your information and come back to me and tell me.‖ So he did research, like how the procedure was done and the

138 effects and the aftermath of it, the stress and all that stuff. And, he came back to her and he was bawling his eyes out and he said, ―I‘m sorry. I can‘t believe that I ever tried to do that to you.‖ Also, that is what brought him to Christ. So, my mother always told me, ―You were the one that brought your grandpa to be very, very strong in his faith.‖ Because ever since I knew him he was always a man of his faith, like went to church and all this different stuff. So, it‘s really cool to know that I played like big role in that. I was shocked. It was like I almost couldn‘t talk. It was just one of those really powerful things. Because I found out all of that after he had passed away. Because, we were talking, my family, we constantly talk about it like how we‘re coping with it and different things because it was a shock to all of us. So, we constantly talk about just different things or what would it be like if he was here or all the different things. So, it was awesome to hear how much of a role that I played in his life even before I was even born. II. Marion: [Tommy and I], we met each other in high school. And, he went to a different high school than I did. And, I was in this music group and it was a group that was, it was kind of connected with Up With People—I don‘t know if you know anything about that movement—but it was, you know, to try to bring positive messages to people and uplift people. And, so Bill, at my school, started it and then he decided to open it up to teens in the city. So, when he did that, my husband‘s brother, Frank, joined. And so, he and I were good friends, along with my sister, a whole bunch of us. We all packed around together. And, Tommy, my husband, was not musical at all. And, so one time we were having a paper drive. And, so he came to help, because he was a ―do it,‖ ―busy worker‖ kind of person. And, so then he kind of got into the group and was like a worker. He would run the sound equipment and help move stuff on stage, that kind of stuff. And, so in doing that then, first he went out with my sister, because my sister‘s best friend was dating his brother, dating Frank, his brother. And, then that didn‘t work out so good and so he was talking to me about that, you know, about my sister. And, so we just became good friends. And, then when it was time for Homecoming in my senior year I was like, ‗Ugh, I just want to go to Homecoming. I just want to

139 have a date.‘ So, I told Frank to ask his brother if he would go with me. And, Frank said [Tommy] punched him because he thought he was messing with him, that I didn‘t really say that. And, so from that first date on we just connected, you know, we could talk, we were friends, we shared things. One of the first things he said to me was, ―Everybody talks to you. Who do you talk to?‖ And, that was just, it got me. That was a good line for me. He was just so comfortable for me to talk to and I was comfortable for him to talk to, because he was a pretty quiet person. And, we just could do that. You know, we just could talk about things. We could share things we [were] worried about or concerned about. It kind of was at a point in our life where we both were kind of insecure, and so we helped cheer each other up. So being so young, we ended up getting married at 19. We were married in ‗71. It was ‗71. So, young and, you know, I think for us that worked in our favor. We grew together. You know, we both gained confidence and just grew. And, having kids right away was a good thing for us too because both of us really liked children, family. And, we made those connections and I think that helped us establish ourselves as adults and feel confident and know that we were doing something right. And, my son was born in ‗72. And, my daughter was born in‘75. It wasn‘t all smooth, as growth rarely is. Because when he worked as the heavy equipment operator, I think because he went to that so young and when he was in high school he never drank or ran around with buddies or did any of that kind of stuff, so he started doing some of that stuff with construction. And, so—and construction workers are a little more crazy about it than even high school kids—that became a problem and we struggled through that until finally that was sort of what pushed into changing careers was the struggle and the difficulties that was placing on our marriage. And, I think our kids too, you know, he was missing so much because he would work like 90 hours a week. I have pictures of him sleeping while he‘s eating. And, he would just, he would be exhausted and he would just come home and go to sleep. So, not only was he gone all the time, he was gone when he was home. You know, so that was a big problem then, so—I‘m trying to think how long he did that—I think he did that for 12, 13 years maybe, and then went back to school.

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When my daughter was born, when she was like three, I went back to school and got my teaching license. And, then he decided he wanted to go back to school and get his teaching license. So, then I went to work and then he went full time back to school and got his teaching license [in the 80‘s]. So, we both ended teaching for about 19 years. So, that was a big change that really helped us pull together was when he decided to go to school. And, it helped him with the kids because he was going to school full time. Then he was with them more than I was. I think that was a good time for all of us and another one of those growing together life experiences. Other parts to our story—my brother [Paul] has Down‘s syndrome, and when my mom died, he came to live with us [in 1981]. And, that was when I was 29 and he lived with us for 27 years. And, then my father came. That must have been, I‘d say ‗97, and he was with us for five years. My brother was still there. And, then my father died in 2002. And so, our relationship built. It helped a lot when we both were teaching because we could talk about that, we had that in common, and we also had that understanding of what kind of schedule that creates. That really spread both of us out to know a whole lot of people, you know. We both taught at different schools, so kind of different arenas for that, but ... I look back and just think how neat it was to see us grow. And, you know, gain confidence and make changes and adapt to problems. Do that together, always together. Rachel: I would go to see [my birth grandparents] in Ohio, where I was born. And so I would always go back during the summer and during the winter they‘d come up and see me. Since I was the oldest grandchild, I always felt like [Tommy] would, like he wasn‘t hard on me, but he definitely challenged me. And, he was a teacher and I‘m going into education. I went into his classroom one time and he always challenged the kids around him and challenged almost anybody. Because, he, as well as I do, we see

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the full potential in people. And, so we constantly want them to strive to be the best they can be. And so he would always have a huge importance on, ―Okay, it‘s not like you have to be perfect at this, it‘s just the constant transformation, the constant pushing,‖ because he would always see the full potential and that‘s how I am as well. And, in sports we are both huge basketball fans. I played basketball from third grade up, until I tore my ACL. And, so like it was just like he was always pushing me there. He was always pushing me in my grades. Always pushing me to just be the best person I can be. Learn the most information and just keep on trying to succeed in life because he always wanted the best. It wasn‘t a negative way at all. It was mostly to encourage me, but also he had the stern kind of habits. You knew what he thought. You knew all the different things, but he did it in a way that felt warm and you just wanted to please him and you wanted to do your best just because, you know, it would make him happy and you knew that he knew it would be good for you as well. Whenever I went to go see them…my mom was really big in basketball, I was really big in basketball. So, whenever we would go and I would be, you know, practicing, because I would practice all the time, they had a hoop outside, you know, I would go. And, some of the other kids would play with me too. But any time we‘d like play with the littler kids he would always pick me to guard. And, he would always push me in that sense. And, it was just the challenge of even in that specific moment of each possession, you had in the game or something like that, he would challenge you to learn something new—to go right instead of left, since I‘m left-handed. So, to push those things and I think as a whole it made me improve my game better, but also gave me a different perspective that, ―Okay, you can push people. You can challenge them, but you also have to be on the same level as them.‖ Because, if you, let‘s say, are trying to push a five year old, you‘re not going to succeed as well or you‘re going to seem more overpowering, then if you did, say, when I was playing it could have been anywhere from 14 to 16. So, through his challenging,

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through him challenging me he also gave me perspective, as I reflect on it now, about also how to handle a certain situation and to challenge people enough, but not push them overboard. III. Rachel: So, basketball went through the fall and that winter [of 2009 and] my whole family was supposed to come to one of my games. My birth grandpa, my birth grandma, my [birth] mom and her husband and then my two siblings, were all supposed to come down and watch me play basketball my freshman year. And then there was this really, really bad snowstorm, so the game got cancelled. And, so they decided they can‘t come down, you know, like, ―It‘s too bad, the weather, it‘s too bad, but we‘ll see you sometime, like we‘ll schedule another time.‖ And, so the weather was still bad and they ended up not being able to come up to see me play basketball, which was fine, because I was like, ‗Okay, like no big deal. I play in the summer and I play, you know, in the fall. And, we‘ll definitely see you guys, you know, see you.‘ And then, that April the first, well, it was a couple days before, I get a call from my grandma and she says, ―Okay, your grandpa he just had a brain aneurysm.‖ Because, they were out visiting my birth mom in New York, that‘s where she lives, and they were out visiting her. And, like all of a sudden he was playing with the kids and all of a sudden he started having a headache, so he had to sit down and then he just passed out. And, so I get this call saying, ―Okay, we rushed him to the hospital. We don‘t really know the situation.‖ And, then so I was kind of, I just had that weird feeling in the pit of my stomach like something‘s wrong, like I know, I mean, he‘s obviously in the hospital so its severe, but I just knew in the back of my head that it probably wasn‘t going to get any better. Then they told me about the brain aneurysm, about how it probably wasn‘t going to be

143 very long and then the next day they called and said, ―Yeah, we took him off life support. He passed away, like we, you know ...‖ And, so I think the hardest part for me was definitely not seeing him. Like, I didn‘t get to say goodbye, like even in the sense that ... like even, I always got really, really emotional when I would leave them, seeing any of my birth family because it was always that leaving again that always hurt. And, so for me it was really, really hard I didn‘t get that final goodbye. I felt almost like I was being punished, because I didn‘t get to see them in the winter…I never got to see them. Marion: It was spring break. And, we were going to New York, to see my daughter and her family. And, Paul, [my brother], was supposed to go with us, but…we left him with my sisters. And, so it was just Tommy and I and it was the greatest drive to New York we had ever had. The weather was perfect. We talked about things. Traffic was good, you know. We got there and we were both in such a good mood. And, I remember telling my daughter, ‗That was just the best time I ever had.‘ And, [we] talked about the future and what we were going to do. That was on a Friday. And, so Friday night we went out for pizza and we came home and everybody was watching TV, watching TV downstairs. And, it was time to go to bed and he said, ―I‘m not going to come up to bed, I‘m just going to stay down here.‖ We never ever did that. And, I said, ‗No, no, come up with me.‘ So, he came up and went to bed. And, then the next morning, the grandkids kind of got in to snuggle. He was kind of short

144 with them, which never ever happened either. And, so then he got out of bed. He started helping my daughter. They were hanging insulation in her laundry room. And, he did that for a couple hours and was complaining about his head hurting. And, so at one point my daughter came and got me, because I was entertaining grandkids, and she said, ―Dad‘s not feeling well.‖ So by this point he had stopped working. He went outside. He was sitting on a chair and he was throwing up. And, every time we went on vacation the first day or two days he would always get sick. I really think it was a stress thing because it was always a school break, so he had to do all these things at school to get still, so then when he relaxed, you know, that would kind of be a shock to the body. So, we kind of all just thought he had the flu or something. And, I said, ‗Come on, why don‘t you go in and lay down. Take a warm bath and then take a nap.‘ So, he tried, he walked to the front of the house and stopped at the door, puked over the railing before he could even go into the house, and then took a bath. And, then I was with the grandkids again outside and pretty soon my son walked in and got me and said, ―You need to go in there, he‘s freaking out.‖ And, so, I went in and, you know, got him to lay down and take a nap. Again, it still seemed like the flu, what he was talking about. So, he laid down and pretty soon he fell out of bed and my daughter went in and he was on the floor, totally unconscious. She and I were lifting him back up onto the bed and he was so heavy. We could barely lift him. This is a man that weighs like 150, like 5‘7‖ weighed 150, so a real small person, but her and I together could barely, we like rolled him up on to the bed. We couldn‘t lift him. So, she went and called the ambulance. And, he, a year before, had had atrial fibrillation, where his heart was out of rhythm, and so I laid my head on his chest to see if that‘s what was happening.

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And, he put his arms around me and held me ... even though he was unconscious. And, so then the paramedics came and took him. And, when they came he barely squeezed their hand, but nothing else. And, so, he went to the hospital and right away at the hospital they took me, totally not to the emergency room, somebody walked me to this totally different entrance, took me into this little room where no one was. And, my daughter drove behind the ambulance, so when she came they took her there too. And, pretty soon, the Chaplain comes in. Then the ER doctor came in and talked about the surgery that they did and he said, ―I just want you to know that people who have strokes don‘t usually leave here with more than what they came in with.‖ Yeah, I mean, we all knew. We all knew. We knew. It wasn‘t going to be good, he wasn‘t going to live. We knew that‘s why they put us in that little room. We all knew that. And, so then my son-in-law came and then later that day my son flew in from Ohio. And, we waited ten hours before we got to see him. And, when we he did he was on a respirator and just never, you know, never regained consciousness, never was even responsive or anything. I mean, he laid there for four days. But, it was interesting in those four days, because you could see, I could see things that he prayed for happening. And, one of those was his brother was never very religious, never believed in God, very frustrated with religion. And, his brother [Frank] flew in and started talking to me about God and how was I getting through this. And, how was I being able to do this. And, I kept telling him,

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‗You know, it‘s God. It‘s God who‘s holding me together. It‘s God who‘s holding all of us together.‘ And, so I just knew that was something Tommy had prayed about, prayed about. Another thing was my son and daughter didn‘t really talk a whole lot. They just were very different people and had very different lives. And, so that just brought them together. They were the ones in charge of the situation. They were taking care of me, taking care of Frank, taking care of grandma, grandpa. Just, they, you know, were taking care of everybody together. [Tommy‘s dad], I know he always worried about, his dad and step-mother came and, again, he witnessed how strong our faith was and the strength that we got from that. I think Tommy wanted that for his dad. And, then we decided to donate his organs and we knew that was the thing—I‘m sure that that‘s something he would have wanted to do. And, at one point they said, ―He‘s so bad I‘m not sure he‘s going to make it long enough to do that.‖ And, I just thought, ‗He will. He will, because it‘s something that he wants to do.‘ And he did. My kids and I were really solid about [end of life decisions]. And, there wasn‘t any kind of hesitation or anything. And, so we made that decision before his dad and step-mother and his brother came. Because, I knew his brother was going to be really emotional and I didn‘t want them to be a part of making that decision. I wanted it to be made. So, nobody questioned it. So, I think that everybody was okay with that. The weird part of it was because it was a brain injury and not a heart injury. They said if [it‘s] a heart death

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you know when the body stops, but with a brain injury you don‘t always know that. Like, the brain can stop before the body stops. So, they had to, at one point, they had to pull him off the respirator and see how he responded, because they said he had to die within an hour to make his organs viable. So they gave him that test to see if he would die within an hour. And, they must have figured it wasn‘t long enough, because we waited, that was in the afternoon, and we waited all the way to like two o‘clock in the morning before they took him and pulled him off of it. And, they took him out of the room. They took him to surgery and they wouldn‘t let us go. [The process was] strengthening in some ways. You know, I think we all just united. It was in the course of the four days, you know, everybody cried and talked about it. And, at one point my son and I said we knew that in Springtown they were praying for him. And, he said, ―You know, we already got our miracle.‖ And, then we both looked at each other and said, ―Our miracle was him.‖ It was just having him. And, you know, we knew, we just knew he wasn‘t gonna come back. And, so when it got to the final hours it was just like I‘d called everybody around the bed and said, ‗Let‘s all tell one of your really good memories about him.‘ And, we did that and then we said a prayer and then they took him. IV. Rachel: We would go to an ice cream shop that was called Scoops. And, we would go as a huge family…We always brought probably about 15 people into this ice cream place and it was really, really small. But everybody would get their [own] ice cream, like different flavors and stuff. But, my grandpa and I would always get a Starbucks coffee ice cream because we both loved coffee.

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So, we would always get it. So, …the scariest part for me, it wasn‘t scary it was just kind of breathtaking, was after he had passed away, it was like the next week, I went to, I didn‘t go to that ice cream parlor, but I went to a different one with my adoptive mom. And, we‘re like deciding, ―Okay, what flavor do you want?‖ And, I was trying to decide between two and it was like ... instantaneous, just hit me like I have to get this coffee flavored ice cream. It was just so weird because I had been trying to cope with the shock of losing him and it was just kind of a calming moment for me: Like, ‗Okay, that wasn‘t a coincidence, that had to have been something.‘ And, so for me, I definitely thought that moment was like a time where he definitely was like, ―Yeah, pick the coffee one.‖ And so, in one perspective, I‘m very logical— because I‘m going into math, math education and math and statistics—so on the one hand for me it‘s like almost like, ‗Okay, that couldn‘t have happened, like this is the logical thing. Like, my body was just telling me that I want coffee.‘ But, on the other hand like, it was like, ‗Okay, I know this was him.‘ So, I mean, for me it‘s always a conflict of and questioning myself of did I think that or was it definitely, like you know, some spiritual thing. Like, ‗Did he say that?‘ Marion: So, after he died, two days after he died, I woke up…well, I had a dream. And, in that dream… I saw his face. And, again, real authoritatively he just looked at me and he said, ―You have to take a break from missing me.‖ And, I thought that was kind of unbelievable: ‗Oh, really? Two days after you died and we‘re still in New York.‘ My son had gone back to make arrangements in Ohio. And, so that day was

149 the day we were going to leave and go to Columbus. So, after I had that dream I got in the car to go and do some things for my daughter before we left. And, the first song that came on, it was on the CD, was that song that I kept hearing in the hospital. The one about, ―It‘s a tiny offering.‖ And, I didn‘t realize that the other part of that song was, ―Emmanuel, God is with us.‖ And, I was like, ‗Okay?‘ And, then the next song that came on said, ―Let your old life crumble, let it fade.‖ And, then the next song that came on said that, ―If you feel like you‘re in a dark tunnel, that God is the light at the end of that and that you‘ll be okay.‖ And, later when I went back and looked at that CD those songs are not in that order. So, after hearing those three songs I knew that God was speaking to me and I just felt like He was saying to me, ―You can go back to grieving or you can come with me.‖ And, so I said, ‗Okay, I‘m gonna come with you.‘ And, I just had this feeling that I was being sucked through a portal. It was, you know, just like ―a vacuum thing.‖ This was awake. I was awake. It wasn‘t a dream. So, I came back, told my daughter about that and everything. And, I just knew that that was the support that I was asking for to get through all this. V. Rachel: After he passed away, they flew him back or drove back and had the funeral back in Ohio. So, I went out to the funeral. I was there for the viewing hours, the visitation, so I skipped two days of school to go out and be with my family. Seeing him, there was an open casket, so that was another really scary thing for me. I looked at him and I just was waiting

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for it to be a scary movie kind of thing, where he just opens his eyes… They had him in his work boots and a cool hat. They didn‘t dress him up, which I think was good for me and I think it almost made it a little more real—I was expecting to hear his laugh again or I was expecting, like you know, just see all these things, because I never got that full closure. I think it was really hard for me, too, because it was so lifeless and he always had such a bubbling personality and stuff like that. And, I mean, for me there was something about it that just didn‘t look like him. And, I feel like it was because there wasn‘t a smile on his face, because he was always smiling. I mean, I didn‘t hear that laugh. I didn‘t, you know, hear him joking around with you and stuff like that. And, so for me just to see him laying there just still, was just, I mean, it was upsetting, because I couldn‘t imagine, it was really hard for me because I couldn‘t imagine him so lifeless. But, also it was a kind of a soothing fact that, ‗Okay, I get to see his face one more time.‘ And, the one really, really cool part was they asked all the grandchildren to write letters. So, we wrote them and they were on display during the visitation, like you know, during the viewing hours and the showing…But, then I found out that night that I was going to have to read my own letter in front of everybody. And, so, I mean, on the one hand I was very, very glad that I got to convey my emotions and stuff like that. But, another thing it was like shock for me, because it was like in front of all these different people. I practiced it and I worked with some people. Some of my mom‘s friends through teaching that also knew Marion, which is my grandma, and knew them, so they like took me aside before the service even started so I could practice and read it again. Although I don‘t remember who was sitting where, I could tell you my parents were sitting to the left of me and my birth family was sitting right in front of me. And, then there was like a lot of different people just mixed throughout. And, the way the church was set up, I was on the left side, like if I was looking out, I would have been on the left, so you would have seen me

151 on the right, and it was like just this big podium. So, I definitely felt somewhat isolated in the sense that I was the only one up there and, you know, I‘m like looking out at this sea of people. But, also on the other hand because I could make eye contact with them it felt like I was closer with them. And, then in the original copy of [the letter], it‘s on this beige paper and there‘s a picture of me and he‘s holding me. I was two months premature, so everybody‘s all wearing these huge smocks and stuff, and they had to go through like this crazy washing process and stuff like that before they could hold me or anything. And, so it‘s this picture and he looks like he‘s about to perform surgery pretty much because he‘s all in this blue. But, you know, he‘s just looking down at me and I‘m looking up at him, and it‘s a really cute picture so that‘s on [one] side. And, then there was a picture of me in my freshman year on [the other] side. ‗Dear Tommy, Although many called you ―Papaw,‖ our relationship as granddaughter and grandfather was different. When I was put up for adoption I know it wasn‘t because your family didn‘t want me, but out of love so that I would have a better life. Because, my adoption was open you and I shared many great memories together. You and I shared many similarities and great memories together. One of my favorites was our love for coffee and coffee ice cream. I remember every time we went to Scoops together we would always get the same ice cream. It was strange, because when you were in the hospital I went to go get ice cream and I almost got a different kind, but something persuaded me to get the coffee ice cream. And, I know it was you.

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You and I always had many laughs together. I remember your laugh quite well and that laugh will always be in my heart. We would play basketball in the pool with my cousins and you would always guard me, because I was the oldest and you wanted it to be a challenge for me. Being your oldest grandchild I envisioned you at some of the most memorable events in my life—my graduation, my wedding, maybe even when I had children of my own. When I heard about your condition all the special times spent with you flashed before my eyes. I didn‘t focus on the future, but on the past. Although I didn‘t spend every day with you or even every month, every time I did spend with my birth grandpa was special, meaningful, and important to me. And, when these important events occur in my life, I know you will be there watching over me, my family, and all the ones you love. I love you, Tommy, and I miss you. I will always remember the great times that we had together.‘ It was definitely very, very hard for me to get up there in front of everybody and show them the true pain and the true heartache that I was experiencing, because I always tried to put on a front or a mask in a sense, where I don‘t like people to know when I‘m hurting. I don‘t like the attention, and I think it‘s just always been my philosophy to always put others first and always care about them, you know, and not try to take the attention of others because, I always think about, ‗Well, there‘s people that are worse off than me.‘ And, so definitely during that experience I didn‘t want to show a lot of my pain because I knew how much pain my birth grandma was in or my birth mom was in. And, I knew that they were hurting probably even more than I was. So for me, I was trying to be that strong person that somebody could go to, but I knew at the end of the day that we were all grieving. So, I think it was a good point for me to kind of say, ‗Okay, this is a time where I can be emotional, I can show my emotions,

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I don‘t have to keep the mask on. Because, if people see my emotions then maybe that will also let them know that they can have those emotions, too.‘ Marion: I think the part [of the dream] about ―taking a break from grieving‖ was because he was teaching fifth grade at the time. So, at the funeral were all these fifth grade kids, and sixth grade kids and seventh grade kids— all those kids coming through the line, plus grandkids. And, I think I realize now ... I think if I had cried it would have been a mess. It would have been just so hard on them, knowing that it was important for those kids that all of us stay real strong and we did. You know, we all did. My kids were just wonderful, you know, talking to these kids. They‘d come through the line and everybody would ... And, it was funny because we didn‘t talk about it, but each one of us would say to them, ―You know what he would tell you to do. He would tell you to work hard and do your best and to help people.‖ You know, we, all of us were saying that in our own way to each one of these kids that came through the line. So, I think that was the important part of not, you know, breaking down and being a total mess kind of thing. Rachel: It was a really powerful experience for the service, because you saw, since he was a teacher, there was past students that he had, there were parents of students, there were just everybody. I mean,

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the room was filled. And, you know, it was so overpowering for me, just a great experience to see, ‗Okay, this is how much an impact my grandpa had on everybody.‘ And, so there was that. We went through the service and then at the end of the service, since he was a teacher, we all, instead of following him and following the hearse to go to the cemetery, instead of following him in different cars, all the family got on a school bus. Marion: It was really neat. There were 2000 people that came to the funeral home, 2000 showing on one day. Two-thousand people came. And, it was so amazing, because person after person after person would come up and tell you a story. Like, this old lady comes up and goes, ―You don‘t know me, but I am so-and-so‘s mom who your Tommy taught. She is in Nigeria as a Peace Corp volunteer because of your husband. She called me and told me I had to come here and tell you that.‖ Another one was this boy who Tommy had the year before, who, he was really out of control, he had a lot of problems. And, in fact, we joked that that was the reason that Tommy went into the hospital [the previous year]. That boy walked up to me and gave me his framed honor roll certificate. So it was just a stream of things like that, you know, the lives he had touched and the things he had done. And, I think the thing that was so powerful to me about that and I kept saying it, like they had a memorial service just for kids, was…like his whole life he always felt like he was just small and normal and not really ... you know, he‘d always look at other people who were doing grandiose things and he said, ―But, I just ... I don‘t really have those kind of talents. I‘m just sort

155 of a jack of all trades.‖ And, I said, ‗You know, I think that might be the most powerful message of this.‘ He didn‘t go lead any crusades, you know, or create products, or build new companies or ... he was just nice to…the people around him. And, what an impact one person can make. VI. Marion: Along with losing him was the fact that my brother [Paul] was in this dementia. And, you know, waking up at night and then he started having seizures and so…sometimes I slept next to him. Sometimes I slept in the room next to him, but you know, he would fall out of bed, he would fall in the bathroom. So I was just like on guard, that‘s what I did. I took care of him for four months. And, so in the daytime I would have to make sure I knew what he was doing all the time. So, a lot of times I would drive with him or take him to the store, you know. So, a lot of my initial grieving I was busy. But, also just really torn. I mean, how it seems to me, how I describe it, you know, they say that if you do your marriage right, the two are supposed to become one. And, so to me it seemed like I was half. And, it felt like somebody ripped off my arm and my leg. And, though I was just trying to live through that and suffer through it. I mean, it‘s very painful and sad and very, very lonely for me. I do very much act as caregiver and had done a lot of care giving for a lot of people and I really thought people would come and care for me. And, it didn‘t happen how I pictured it. So, that was another really hard thing for me. So, I ended up alone a lot and that was very different for me. In my whole life I had never been alone. I grew up in a family of seven, took care of my younger sister and my brother Paul. And, it was such a hard thing for me. I think from the beginning that I just I knew that I had a right to suffer. You know, I lost a lot. Like, it‘s never going to be the same. It wasn‘t just that I lost Tommy. I lost my life. I lost who I am. I lost my church, my friends, my job.

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You know, it‘s like I lost a lot of things and so I had to do a lot suffering and a lot of grieving for that. And, so, you know, I guess my thing always was, as long as you can have those suffering periods but then you can get up and go do something or, you know, step away from them. That it was an okay thing. That, you know, if I got into that and just went down and couldn‘t get back up then I wouldn‘t think it was right. And in retrospect, you know, looking back, I really think that you have to do that, because you have to grieve for each and every thing that you lost. And, you don‘t know that all at once. You know you lost a person and then that starts it, but then you start to see all the things that he touches— ‗Oh, there‘s a lot of things that I have to grieve.‘ Like, going on vacation with my husband or, you know, sitting and reading the paper with somebody at night. So many little things that I now had to grieve for that were a part of my life…that…weren‘t going to be there anymore. Rachel: I felt punished and I also couldn‘t help but to think it was somehow my fault. And, I didn‘t know, like I didn‘t really understand, ‗Why, why it had to happen like that?‘ And, after that happened it also kind of led to a bad time, a low point in my faith as well, because I was like,

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‗Okay, God, why? Why did this happen? Why did an innocent man—he was like in his late 50‘s, early 60‘s—you know, why would you let him [die]? He didn‘t do anything wrong.‘ He died mid-school year so the kids had to have a different teacher come in and everybody would always request, ―Can I please have Tommy Lautner as my…kid‘s teacher. He‘s a great guy.‖ And, things like that. So…there was so much pain and suffering…not just with me, but I was also taking the perspective like, ‗Okay, like all of these people were influenced by this [man], why did it have to happen?‘ It‘s definitely a personal pain, because I never got to say goodbye. I never got to have that closure. I definitely think that I lost sight of a lot of things after he died and after I started just going through that downward spiral. But, definitely I think it was almost the sense [that] you dive into this huge, muddy pit of things. It was dark. It like held you. It held you back and… I sometimes thought, ‗Okay, I‘m getting better.‘ Like, ‗Okay, I‘m doing all this stuff, like you know, it‘s not this bad, like it doesn‘t seem as bad, but something even miniscule would happen and, bam, I was back down there again.‘ It was definitely a hard road …There was definitely times…that I was better and times when I was worse. Marion: Another hard part of grieving to me was that nobody wants to hear your experiences, because it‘s too much. Initially, when I was just in

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so much pain and grief, I think it‘s so hard for people to listen to that. They have to take that in. And, they don‘t want to. So, it‘s nice to be able to share that and have somebody who wants to hear it. I had a friend who, really good friend, and she said, ―I think you need to go to a grief group.‖ And, I said, ‗Well, the only problem with that is that if I go to the grief group I‘ll wind up helping other people.‘ That is what I do. And, I know that‘s what would happen. And, she said ―Okay.‖ And, so I said, ‗What I was doing instead is reading.‘ Like, I had read probably 12, 15 books about grieving. And, she said, ―Alright, well I‘ll read one with you.‖ So, the one she was reading with me was, ―From One Widow to Another.‖ She calls me back and goes ―Oh my gosh! This is so sad. It was really hard for me to read.‖ I‘m thinking, ‗Read? How about live it?‘ What I noticed in people trying to come to me is that they could only come in little bits. Like, they could send a card or they could call once in a while. Or, they could talk to me a little bit, but nobody could go to the depth of it with me, which is what I so wanted. And, what I started noticing is that, you know, when people would try to do that. Like, occasionally somebody would say, ―Okay, tell me how you really feel.‖ And, then, I would try to do that, I would notice that I did not feel any better after I did that, after I talked to them. And, so, I started recognizing that what I thought I wanted isn‘t really what was

159 appealing to me ... It wasn‘t going to work. That wasn‘t going to be the answer. Rachel: I wore a mask, figuratively, because I don‘t like people always checking on me. And, like, for me, I always want to be that person for them, their caretaker, that person they can go to. And, if they see me as weak and if they saw me as emotional like they would focus on me more than I could on them. So I would just throw myself into other people‘s problems. Not necessarily in an offensive way, but just like, ‗Okay, let me help you.‘ Like, maybe I also thought that with helping them I would help myself. But, I mean, in some ways it did. In some ways, I was like, ‗Okay, can I apply this to myself?‘ Or, ‗Look how well I‘m doing,‘ when really it was, ‗Yes, in one sense you are helping people and that‘s a good thing, but you need to focus on yourself as well.‘ So, reflecting on that now I see that, yes, helping other people is a good thing, but you also have to focus on yourself. And, you can‘t fully help people unless you‘re fully helping yourself as well. It‘s hard for a lot of people to understand why I‘m so close with my birth family. So I tried to explain it, and they‘re like, ―Oh, so it‘s your grandpa.‖ And, I was like, ‗Okay, it‘s my birth mom‘s dad.‘ They tried to be supportive, but they didn‘t understand how much of a really deep relationship [we] had. I mean, my close friends understood and my boyfriend at the time, he understood, but I feel like all the other people they couldn‘t be as, like they could be sympathetic, but they didn‘t really have empathy or they couldn‘t be like that full on support for me. Even with my parents, like my adoptive parents, I knew that they cared and I knew that they wanted the best for me, that they wanted me to grieve in the proper sense, but also like overcome it, but I feel like even with them they wanted to understand the connection that me and my grandpa had, but I don‘t think they fully could either. Marion: And so…in the beginning I was, you know, doing devotionals at night and in the morning, reading a lot, and spending a lot of time with God in those quiet times. And, just, there‘s one scripture where it talks about how man is not going to be your answer, that, you know, that it‘s got to be God. And, so I just kind of tried to make that shift, since people weren‘t really coming around anyway. So, you know, I just tried to just be still. You know, I kept reading that over and over again, ‗Be still, be still,‘ and kept thinking, ‗Well, what does that mean already?‘ I mean, ‗I‘m already not talking to people and I‘m not working and I‘m not, you know, doing a whole lot of things.‘ It‘s like, ‗How much stiller

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can I get?‘ Because, I‘m so used to being a mover and a doer and an accomplish things kind of person… but I‘m not doing anything. Like, I just felt like I didn‘t have a lot of work or value because I wasn‘t accomplishing anything. VII. Rachel: I think that the most, the biggest helping process and healing process that I‘ve definitely gone through is talking to my birth mom about [Tommy‘s death] and also talking to my grandma about it, because they both had that connection, the essence, that ―part of him is in me‖ kind of thing. My [adoptive] family has always been very, very supportive. And, it was interesting, because when I was adopted my [adoptive] mom [was] best friends with my grandma. They taught together and they just had teaching experience and all, so they knew each other before I was even born. And, that wasn‘t the reason why Dana, my birth mom, why she chose my [adoptive] parents, but it‘s an interesting concept because they were always close. So, my [adoptive] mom knew my grandpa really well and they would always go with me to visit. They are also included with my birth family. Like, my birth family considers my [adoptive] parents part of their family as well. So, I think it‘s such a unique experience because a lot of people they don‘t realize how inclusive everybody is of everybody. So, like my parents, like my adoptive parents, they‘re included in my birth family, but then again my birth parents are also included in my family. They have a really close-knit relationship, which I think is like really special for me. The first dream [happened when] I was really lonely and struggling with coping. This dream happened right after he died. I just remember vividly that

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I was crying and he told me, ―Everything would be okay‖ and that ―I was never alone.‖ I felt him give me a hug and just hold me. In that dream it was just his arms… like a huge embrace, and I felt warmth and I felt happy again. [The dream ends] And, it was just, I mean, it was an overpowering experience. I woke up crying. I told my [adoptive] mom, ‗Okay, I just had this dream.‘ I told [her], because I woke up and I pretty much ran into her room and I was like, ‗Okay, I just had this dream. Like, am I crazy? Like, what is going on?‘ And, so she was like, ―I had a rough time in high school‖ and all this stuff, and ―One time I also had a dream where I kind of experienced a thing.‖ She said she felt like God picked her up and rocked her like a baby to sleep. So, she kind of talked me through the whole situation like, ―what were you feeling‖ and things like that. So, she‘s also been very open with having me talk to her about different situations as well. So after I talked through the initial one, I told my [adoptive] mom and she goes, ―You should call Marion,‖ who‘s my grandma. She was like, ―I bet you she‘ll have some insight as well.‖ And so I called my Mamaw and she was like, ―You have dreams, too?‖ And, then she

162 proceeded to tell me about hers. That‘s also one thing that we‘ve always kind of shared, in the sense that since I‘m older I can help her through the grieving as well because I can give insight and she sees me more as an adult now. I mean, her next oldest grandkid, my cousin, he‘s in 8th grade, I think. I mean, he‘s older, but he‘s still not, I feel like he doesn‘t have the emotional support that she would need. And, so we would talk about different things. And, we‘d stay up, and almost always when we would talk it was always late at night. [We would] start talking at 10 and like stay up ‗til 1 in the morning. Like, we‘d look over at the clock and [say], ―Oh, we should probably go to sleep.‖ But, it was always at night that we‘d always open up or maybe it was driving. My brother‘s in the 6th grade now and my sister is in 3rd grade. And, so they were younger at the time when we had these conversations. So during the day all the kids were around, the cousins sometimes came and played. Like, we always had plans. And, you know, we were doing things. And, I feel like we were always on the go and then at night we just had time to relax, time to like breathe almost. Marion: For me it‘s been a very interesting thing, because my two kids I don‘t feel are very receptive about talking to me about that. And, I don‘t know if that‘s a part of their grieving process, that they‘re just not ready to go through there. I know they‘ve been really concerned about me, and how I was feeling and if I was okay. I don‘t know if they see that as dwelling on it, you know, when I talk about it. But, I would talk about those experiences while I talked to my niece. And, I have another niece that I talk to about it openly, you know, that I could talk about it, share about it. Tends to be younger people, doesn‘t it? Rachel: One time I went out there and I stayed with my parents, both my birth mom and my

163 birth grandma, and my parents. Like, we all went out as a family, but then my [adoptive] parents came back and my birth mom was going to take me back home when she went home. So, I had like three days, so it was just me and birth family. My adoptive parents weren‘t there. And, that also made me feel more comfortable and a sense of like this is, you know, my family and a sense that, ‗Okay, they understand.‘ So, one night we were up really late just talking and sometimes it would be talking just about stories that we had or different memories that we had, but also the one time I told my grandma, ‗Yeah, I had a dream about grandpa the other day, like about Papaw. Like, he was there and it was crazy because I was grieving and I was really, really sad.‘ You know, I was just totally at one of my low points and all of a sudden I just hear him say, ―It‘s gonna be okay.‖ And, ‗Then I just felt him hug me. Like, I physically felt it and it was just like such a powerful experience.‘ And, she goes, ―Really? You have dreams, too?‖ And, so she would tell me about, she was like, ―Sometimes I just hear him talking.‖ And, you know, he‘ll have conversations with her and stuff like that. So, it was always long periods of time that we spent together that it would just somehow come up in conversation and then we would constantly, you know, just keep on talking about the situation. And, then we would kind of drift off path and talk about, like she got me different books that she‘s read that helped her overcome the grieving process and things like that. And, so we would talk about the different processes and also just her life, how she‘s trying to cope with things. And, she also went to see a counselor as well, so we also have that similarity where we would talk about like, ―Well, my counselor told me this about the situation and she gave me this picture.‖ And, she would say, ―Okay, well, my counselor said this.‖ So, it was, I think, that through this process that I‘ve gotten closer with my Mamaw, because we‘ve both shared the dreams with each other and just the more emotional side of it. I always was surprised by how strong she seemed, like before we started talking, but then when we talked about it I could tell just how much it really affected her. Like, I knew it affected her because they were high school sweethearts, they grew up together, they were always so, so close. And, to see her being able to cope with losing the love of her life kind of thing and also just to see, ‗Okay, you‘re struggling just as much as I am, if not more.‘ And, for me, I think that was also comforting because when you go through a traumatic experience

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you‘re like, ‗No one understands me,‘ so I feel like for me there was comfort in, ‗Okay, she does get it. She actually understands. She‘s actually had some of the same, like you know, she‘s dreamt about him too, like seeing him here, like the other parts of your life has completely changed because of this experience.‘ So talking with her, definitely it was a soothing thing for me. I definitely think that me and my grandma…it‘s much more relaxed and it just kind of comes up. It‘s not like we have to sit down and [be] like, ―This is what we‘re going to talk about.‖ We just start talking about how I am and how I‘m doing and stuff like that and then it just kind of turns into this conversation of, you know, it‘s morphed though. It‘s when we‘re relaxed and it just kind of comes up. Like, when I was talking about this dream experience [or] different conversations that we had had and the different types of questions that were being asked. And, I was like, ‗Would you feel comfortable like sharing yours?‘ And, she said, ―Yes, absolutely.‖ And, she just talked about how for her it was helped her through her healing processes as well. And, so I just really like seeing that comparison between me and her. And, that is how we have kind of learned to cope and how we‘ve healed and…not necessarily moved on, but…advanced from that situation. VII. Marion: One of the first things he said to me was, ―Everybody talks to you. Who do you talk to?‖ And, that was just, it got me. That was a good line for me.

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He was just so comfortable for me to talk to and I was comfortable for him to talk to, because he was a pretty quiet person. And, we just could do that. You know, we just could talk about things. When he was gone it was like I went back to that again, you know, back to that same point where it‘s me caring for all these people and I can‘t do it. So, a lot of the dreams after that… he would just come and be in bed with me, just lay beside me or hold on to me. I had dreams before from people who had died. When my Mom died she came and said, ―What do you want?‖ and I said, ‗I just want to hug you.‘ So we hugged. I have had many dreams where Tommy comes and hugs me, usually when things have been very hard or emotional for me. Rachel: [My dream of the embrace] was soothing in the fact that, ‗Okay, he is here,‘ and comforting in the fact that, ‗Okay, I‘m not alone in this situation. He understands what I‘ve been going through. He understands how much I miss him.‘ And, that it definitely was for me a point of starting to build up, because I was so low and I was so just upset about the situation. And, that knowing that he was there ... Because, a lot of times also I‘d be afraid that I‘m going to forget his laugh or I‘m going to forget like certain experiences or certain things that we shared together. So, being able to just experience that again. And, one, it gave me relief that I can still hear it, I can still have that in my head, but also, ‗Wow,

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he‘s here, he can speak when I‘m sleeping… I can still have a relationship with him even if he‘s physically not here.‘ Marion: Very early on, I‘d say the first year or two, those dreams really felt like I spent time with him. And, they really helped me through my grief, because it was like I‘m getting to see him. You know, that‘s what I‘m grieving the most is not getting to see him and I was getting to see him. Sometimes getting, like in the dreams, to kiss him or hug him or, you know, things that you would want to do in the physical world. But, I would at least have those pictures of that. Rachel: So, I was like ‗Okay, this [dream] is awesome.‘ But, then when I started reflecting on it and analyzing it, like my logical analytical part of my brain started kicking in like, ‗You must be crazy.‘ Like, ‗It was just your brain telling you that.‘ Like, ‗You needed to hear it, so it just kind of happened‘ and all those things. And, so I just started doubting myself and like doubting, ‗Okay, was this real or was it a sense of, you know, imagination or different things like that?‘ So, for me it was this conflict with being so happy and feeling supported to a sense of doubt, so that was always conflicting. I think the reason why…the experience overweighed the doubt was after talking to people and hearing that I wasn‘t the only one this has happened to, kind of for me was…like evidence. Like, the initial experiment was kind of for me was, ‗Okay, I had this dream.‘ And, then like the evidence to support it…in the sense that…this occurred to multiple different people at multiple different occasions. And, so for me that kind of validated my dream. That it was in

167 fact, you know, him speaking to me and it wasn‘t just my mind playing tricks on me kind of thing. I‘ve always kind of remembered [the dream], but sometimes I have to physically like try to remember details or try to do things. But definitely the situation, I mean, I can remember. Like, I could remember exactly when I had it, but I knew it was when I was trying to heal. It was right after he had passed away. And, I mean, for me it‘s just such a vivid thing that happened to me. Like, such an emotional experience that I definitely think it‘s something that I can remember. And, also the fact that I‘ve talked to other people about it, so that they can also remember as well. Marion: The first grief counselor I went to I gave him my journal where I had written all those dreams in. And, when I came back the next time he said, ―I‘m really glad your dreams give you comfort.‖ And, I thought, okay, I can‘t give you anymore. What I heard in that statement is that your dreams are kind of like helping you create it. You know, soothe yourself, to make yourself feel better. And, I know they are much more than that. They are connection of souls… it is soul talk and I think that would be the response of people that range from, ―Okay, good, you had a dream, I‘m sure that made you feel better to see him, kind of thing,‖… to other people that are like, ―Wow, he said that to you? He gave you that message?‖ Yup, he did. My one friend, who I told you about, whose husband died, you know, she and I could talk about those. And, she would have them, dreams of her husband. Not as many as I did, but she would ... At one point she‘s like, ―Well, I‘m just going to go to bed tonight and pray that I have a dream about John.‖ So we knew that that‘s what it meant that they were communicating with us.

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Rachel: Like, it depends for me, like I feel kind of self-conscious [talking] about it if I don‘t know [the person] as well, because I‘m like, ‗They‘ll think I‘m crazy, like you know, that this experience is going to happen.‘ But, when like I‘ve told, like you know, like family members or something like that about it I feel like if they knew how, like if they know my background, and if they also share some of the same qualities, like if they‘re really close with a family member, they‘ve experienced death like some type of death in the family, or also if they‘re just a really spiritual person, I feel like they understand me and get me more, so they will be more supportive of that or…more conscious of my experiences. But, then I also feel like if I would tell someone who‘s either not as spiritual or…haven‘t really dealt with that I feel like it would be, they would try to understand, but they would also in the back of their mind have doubt. So, I think almost it was like when I first had the dream and I woke up I had doubt, you know, this can‘t be happening, like it didn‘t happen. So I feel like they would be in the state where, ―That couldn‘t have happened to you. Here are the reasons why.‖ So, I think it just for me it‘s a perspective kind of thing, if I feel like I‘m always open about different things. Like, I‘m a very straight-forward person. You know, as me about anything and I mean, I‘ll pretty much tell you straight forward, I mean, here‘s how it is or here‘s the experiences I went through. So, I think for that sense, I mean, I would tell them about a situation, but maybe the extent that I told would be a different thing. Marion: After four months, I sold my house and Paul went to the nursing home and then I moved to the villa. And, then I had a dream one night that he came and he was laying next to me on top of my nightstand. And, it looked like the villa, you know, looked like that bedroom. And, he was laying there and he said, ―I‘m almost home.‖ And, that was when ... it was really close to the one year anniversary. It must have been a day or two after that, because I kept thinking in my head that the dreams wouldn‘t continue. That they

169 were to support and that for a year I‘d probably have them and after a year I probably wouldn‘t. And, so he said ―I‘m almost home.‖ And, I said, ‗You need to go. You know, to go home. Go be where you‘re supposed to be.‘ [The dream ends] But, they continued so that‘s been very, very comfortable. Like, I said, almost always there, but just more his presence. And, a lot of times it would be dreams about like just normal things. Like, in one dream he and I were in the truck and we were going to the store. That was the kind of thing we did a lot. The [dream]…about him turning into the blonde woman. That was a very significant one to me because it came true. The following fall [after his death], when Tommy should have been going back to his 5th grade classroom, on the night before his…birthday, I had a dream where I was walking down the hall Of Springtown Elementary School passing the teacher's lounge and I heard Tommy laughing. I looked in the door and he held up a finger to tell me not to say anything. He got up to walk towards the door and he changed into a small, petite, young blonde woman. [The dream ends] I knew that meant that his teaching spirit had been passed on to someone else. A couple months later I found out that the woman who took his place

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was a small, petite, young blonde woman! You know, I met the lady maybe like three months later. I met the lady and found out that she was the lady that took his place. She was this small petite blonde woman and I told her about the dream. I said, ‗I think his spirit‘s living on in you‘ and, she just looked at me. Some of the dreams were just, like I said, just seeing. Like, I‘d just get to see him again. In fact, some of them were even like I would see him like laying inert, in front of restaurant or something. Like, I wouldn‘t even get to interact with him, talk to him or anything. Just to remind me, I think, that he‘s there and watching me. One of the things that I would notice always in the dreams was that he always looked young and real happy and real fit. But, sometimes in a dream where it would just be a message, but then he might look older or how he did when he left. Rachel: I was in theology class and we were doing this reflection and different things. So, my mind started to wander and then all of a sudden… I was having a bad day at school and, you know, I was very reserved during that time, so I was just like I closed my eyes and I was just calmly ... because, we were supposed to be reflecting on a certain thing, but I never, I couldn‘t pay attention at all just because of all the emotion I had been dealing with. So, I just started reflecting on, you know, the experience at the funeral and different things like that. And, so I just closed my eyes and was thinking. And, his face pops into my head. And, it was such a relief… to see him smiling.

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And, then I heard his laugh. And, I mean, like he was always laughing and always joking around and stuff like that. So, I think to hear that and to see him happy also gave me like hope and gave me like strength to say like, ‗Okay, like you know, he‘s still with me where ever I go and stuff like that.‘ Marion: Almost all the dreams, I think there might have been one or two this did not happen, but in almost all the dreams I knew he was dead. I knew that I was so excited to see him again. To have that opportunity to see him again. And, many times when I would wake up I would just feel ... [I‘m] trying to think of the word ... like an energy running through my body— almost like a shaking. Yeah, like a shaking from the inside kind of thing— almost like you do when you shiver. But, it was like I wasn‘t controlling it. You know, it just kind of felt like his spirit going through me and like reinforcing that I really did see him, that I really did spend that time with him. Every once in a while now I will have that feeling. Sometimes I just have that feeling, like when I‘m just waking up or something I‘ll just have that same feeling, even though I didn‘t have a dream

172 that went with it. I call it love vibrations. Rachel: I feel like sometimes I even get the chills when I think about that embrace and how I felt during, when I felt him hug me, I mean, I get chills sometimes just like trying to remember that feeling and remembering how content I was after that. I definitely think it‘s because I needed that physical touch. Like, for me it‘s a sign of love. Like whenever I see somebody I almost always hug them or like give them a high five. It‘s something about that tangible display of affection that I feel like that‘s part of who I am. And, also, I mean, I just, I think I physically needed something like, ‗I am here. Like, this is me.‘ And, then so I think that that was just so strong for me that whenever I need that…I can remember the physical aspects of it. Marion: The dreams continued regularly, especially on days when my grief was overwhelming. One of those days he came to me and as he was standing next to me, he said, ―Do not let go!‖ [The dream ends] Some dreams were connected to special events. When my niece, whom I am very close to,

173 graduated from high school two months after Tommy died he came in the dream wearing the same shirt that Emma's Dad had on at the graduation. He was walking around the side of the house, smiling. [The dream ends] He wanted me to know that he was at that ceremony. [I had] several ones like that of where there was a connection in the dream to something that had happened that day. Sometimes I would just have dreams where I felt like I was lifted up. And, could look down and see what people were doing down below me. Sometimes he would be there and sometimes I would feel like it was God doing it. [The stamp of approval dream] was right before I left [for New York]. In the midst of the preparation I had a dream where Tommy was standing next to me and he said, ―You are lucky to have the stamp of approval to achieve and to go on.‖ And, it was just a real comforting because, you know, it made me feel like this was what I was supposed to do. You know, I was supposed to go forward and ... live another life. And then when I got out here I had a dream where I was sitting on his lap and he said, ―God is triumphant in people‘s lives.‖ And then, he got underneath me and lifted me, lifted me up and towards, just seemed like the light of God that he was lifting me up

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towards. And then I heard people saying, ―Lord, how my God is.‖ And then after he said, ―Let God take you there,‖ then I was standing next to a pile of unwrapped presents that were on the floor and maybe they were stacked up like four feet high. [The dream ends] Well, [I felt] that vibration kind of thing, but like very, very strong and very, very loved, you know, and close to God and just feeling like that‘s where I‘m going someday. Rachel: It‘s never been that strong again. Like, the first time that I had it, it was like I felt like I was being hugged. And, now I feel like when I get a physical type of re-affirmation it‘s just mostly like chills, the physical kind of reflection of it. Like, when I woke up I got chills. I was like, ‗Wow, like this actually happened.‘ And, so, I mean, I feel like I get those chills again so it makes me reflect on that physical experience. Marion: In the last, I would say, in the last year, they have decreased intensity in some ways, just when they happen they don‘t seem ... for awhile they had a lot of meaning and then, you know, now it‘s just kind of just more getting to see him, I guess. But, every once in a while, you know, there is one. Like, I had one once where he took me to Heaven. And, I was looking around trying to like process it all, you know, gather all this information—about what‘s going on and what I‘m supposed to learn from this. And, then, you know, [he] brought me back. I couldn‘t remember very much of it, but I remember that I was walking through places that seemed like a building, you know, it didn‘t seem like an animated building, it just seemed like a building, but things were happening. In one part of it there was kind of a channel of water that kind of went through the building and you got on the channel and rode to different parts of the building. And, we would move from place to place quickly. Like, I would be in one kind of room and then all of a sudden we would be in a different room and seeing different things. And, I remember part of it seemed like a factory or a business where people were doing things, working on things.

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Another one I did not tell you about, when Paul was in the hospital. He was in the nursing home for two years before he died and he went to the hospital three, four times maybe. And, he would be in intensive care with pneumonia. And, the one time the doctor had came in and told me we needed to decide about putting the feeding tube in. I have like five other brothers and sisters. I am in the middle, age-wise, and yet none of them could organize their thoughts about how to care for him. So, it was ... so all that fell on me, which seemed like a heavy burden to me along with grieving. So, on that day the doctor said, ―Okay, by morning you need to make your decision about what you‘re going to do here.‖ So, I was sleeping in a family room, you know, lounge thing in the hospital and, I was praying about it, asking for help. And, I had a dream that I was sleeping in the family room and I woke up and that Tommy was there and Paul was there walking his dog. And, I just knew that it was going to be okay. That everything was going to be okay. And, so when I went back that morning to meet the doctor he said, ―I‘ve just decided this is what we‘re going to do,‖ which is what I wanted them to decide. So, things like that, you know, were just helping me through that experience with Paul, too, where I would just have these dreams that were supportive and helpful. One of the days I was in the hospital with Paul and, you know, he‘s very sick, and I‘m thinking like, ‗Tommy, you have to help me. Mom and Dad, you have to help me. You have to help me know how to take care of Paul.‘ And, all of a sudden, Paul, who has been mostly asleep…he just sat up in the bed and said, ―Tommy Lautner, Mom and Dad.‖ And, then he laid back down. I just felt like they were there. They were there. [The dreams] don‘t make me feel so alone.

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I feel like he is with me in spirit. And, in my soul, he is still connected and watching, so I‘m not totally alone. I know that my soul mate is helping me each day. I do not get to have a dream every time I want one, but I am lucky to have a dream when I most need it. VIII. Marion: It hit me one day when I‘m sitting in my villa all alone and started crying and stuff— my villa had cathedral ceilings— and, I was like, ‗Oh, I‘m in the cathedral. I‘m in the sanctuary. You know, that‘s where I am, instead of being in a lonely box, you know. You are here essentially, you know, purposefully.‘ And, now

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I can‘t wait to sell it. And, I think that it‘s part of my healing. It‘s like it‘s time now to go out, you know, and figure out how to integrate who I was and who I am. I, in all that quiet time, would evaluate who I was and what things in my life did I like and what things did I not like. And, ―who I was‖ was a problem solver and a caregiver and very much a people person, a social person. And, all of those things were no longer part of my life. You know, like the biggest things that defined me. That that‗s been an interesting thing for me in my grief. Initially, what I wanted to do was fill it back up with people, you know, fill my life back up with people. Because, that‘s how my life had always been. And, I‘ve spent three and half years spending a lot more time alone than I ever have in my whole life. And, realizing that this next part‘s different. That solitude and stillness are going to be important and that they strengthen me. And, keep me connected to hearing God‘s voice and hearing where I‘m supposed to go, what I‘m supposed to do. In the stillness, I spent an awful lot of time alone just because I had to. And, started thinking about why: ‗Why is this my life? Why is this what God wants me to do?‘ And, one day I was sitting in my villa and I looked up…and it just struck me: ‗this is a healing time when you just are supposed to be alone, being in quiet,

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being in stillness and just heal from the pain and suffering.‘ So, once I started sort of embracing it instead of fighting it, then I got better about just sitting, sitting and reading or just sitting or taking naps, I just stopped worrying about what I was accomplishing. You know, this is what you‘re supposed to accomplish in this quiet stillness. And, the more I did that the more I started ... I started feeling better. You know, I could feel a new spirit. You know, I could feel just a peace. And, so, that was a big transition from my, ‗I hate being alone. Why am I sitting here by myself? Why do I have to do this?‘ So, learning to shift into embracing that quiet and peace. And, I feel like now it is important to me. And, now I would always make time for that quiet, peace, stillness. Rachel: [My Mamaw] was going through this grieving process and stuff like that, but also she heavily relies on God. She was like, ―Okay, well, you know, Your Will be done. Like, you‘ve got to lead me now because I‘m lost.‖ So, she kind of stepped back and tried not to control herself and that‘s why she went to New York before. Like, before she decided to move out to New York she went out there for month and lived out there in an apartment to see how life would be. It was like a couple months. And, then she also did that in Detroit, which is where my uncle lives. And, so I feel like she leads a great example of saying, ―Okay, like go with the flow, kind of lay back and then just see what life throws at you.‖ This year, since I graduated and stuff like that, I was the first of his grandkids to graduate, and so I always pictured him there. And, it was really a nice, because my birth grandma, my birth mom, my two siblings…my grandma‘s sister and great aunt, my uncle, they all came to my graduation. So, they were there sitting also with my adoptive parents and it was so comforting to see all of them there, but also at the same time heartbreaking that he wasn‘t there. So, I mean, in a sense I was like, ―I know he‘s gonna be here today, but, like you know, with me in spirit kind of thing.‖ But, it was also just like when I go through those big steps and, like you know, big occasions in my life and that he‘s not there it‘s also just, it kind of comes up again. But, it was also, in the letter I wrote about him, like you know, it was like in my last paragraph I talked about… I expected and I always

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saw you… seeing me graduate, and seeing me getting married, eventually and, all this. Because, like we had such a young family, like I never really thought about, ‗Okay, like he‘s not going to be here.‘ And, so for me it was like heartbreaking to know that, …‘You‘re not going to be here to experience all of these things, like me having my own kids eventually and stuff like that‘…And, so it was one of those things where I can be really, really happy in a situation, but I can also have that in the background, kind of like a solemn or even like sad kind of feeling about something that should be really exciting. Marion: To let go of, and I think all of that is part of that healing process, too. You know, to get to that point where you don‘t have to worry about where you‘re going or what‘s going to happen next or what am I going to do when this happens or that happens. You know, I think there‘s an awful lot of fear that is a part of grieving, at least, there is for me. And, I think that as you get to that point where you just kind of embrace where

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you are then I‘ll embrace tomorrow too. I‘ve spent three and half years spending a lot more time alone than I ever have in my whole life…and realizing, that this next part‘s different. That solitude and stillness are going to be important and that they strengthen me. And, keep me connected to hearing God‘s voice and hearing where I‘m supposed to go, what I‘m supposed to do…it‘s like it‘s not about what you do, it‘s about what you are being. And, what you are. I‘m finding myself coming to this place of realizing that really my main job here is to honor God, and spend time with him, recognize him. Rachel: And, so that‘s also what I‘ve been kind of doing, even with the college experience. Like, there have definitely been things that have been thrown my way that I haven‘t had to handle before. And, so, I mean, taking that step back, but also finding comfort in family, finding comfort with close friends that I‘ve made. And, also I find comfort through basketball…it‘s also one of the things I shared with Papaw was always our love for basketball. And, so I think I hold onto that and I think that‘s why I definitely wanted to work with the women‘s basketball team here is because, like I said before, once I get on the court everything else goes away. And, it‘s this calming factor and I can just focus on one of the games that I love and I can process and analyze that and not worry about what else is going around me. So, I definitely think that that process and that kind of thing has helped me cope and it also gives me confidence that I think [Mamaw] will do that as well. Marion: So, I think that, you know, now when I, before when I just looked at my life it was like ‗Oh my gosh, it‘s so sad, it‘s so lonely. I‘m not doing anything.‘ You know, many of the things I did before I just couldn‘t do. It was just so sad. And, so I just spent all this time at home doing nothing. And, now I have come to a place of realizing how valuable it is to do that. And, you know, because of switching how I felt about that I think it‘s given me strength and now, as I go out and be with people, I think I‘m a stronger person. And, so, you know, you make those connections better. You can be with people better. And, then the solitude feels better, too, because it‘s more in balance with people. Rachel: I don‘t think it was until probably either last summer or even senior year that I definitely came to terms with everything and finally, I guess, would consider myself fully healed…kind of

181 crossing the finish line was definitely a huge accomplishment for me, because I could look back at the figurative race that I had run, or, you know, the process that I had overcome and see, ‗Okay, wow, this is exactly where I‘ve been. Here‘s where I am now.‘ I‘m achieving my goals that I want to, like I was accepted to [this university and] I‘ve received a scholarship for my education. Like I received, you know, all these different things. And, it was constant reminders of, ‗Okay, if I set goals I can achieve them‘ and looking into my future saying, ‗Okay, Tommy wanted me to have a good education. He wanted me to have good goals for myself. He wanted me to do this.‘ And, all of these constant things that ... I had discussed with him…He had pushed me to be the best person and I was achieving those things. So, [I] was very, very warm and happy to be feeling that I could actually do something again. That I was confident in the sense that, ‗Okay this is gonna work. That we‘re going to be okay. That this process is heading upward.‘ I felt like I was coming to terms with the situation... instead of just feeling like I was drowning, like there was no future, there was nothing there. I could start to see a future… And, definitely I think the most healing part for me was coming out to [school] the summer after and saying, ‗Okay, I‘m on my own now. I don‘t have my parents around. I don‘t have the stressors of being perfect. I‘m going to depend on myself.‘ And, it was a really healing time for me, because I proved to myself that I can be dependent on myself, like I don‘t need to have that one person there to support me. Like I don‘t need that. I can walk on my own two feet and stuff

182 like that. So, being by myself, being away from all my friends, all the past, I felt like for me I was leaving that situation. And, so it was a good experience for me, because I got away. And, so I think that that getting away was symbolic in the sense that I wasn‘t running away from my problems, but it was more like a moving on. Marion: The other night I was watching the tail-end of this movie. I think it was ―Bagger Vance,‖ or something, it had Will Smith in it. And, they were talking about, he was saying to the golfer about how everybody has one amazing swing within a moment in time that you were chosen for and that you already have inside you everything you need to be in that moment, and ... I just felt like he was saying that to me. [Tommy] liked golfing. And, it said how golf is a game that can‘t be won, it can only be played. And it‘s like, that‘s life, you know, that‘s how this is. You can play it in different ways, but it‘s within you already. What you have to do in this life is already within you. Yes, yes, I had the love vibrations. Every time I don‘t, but that time I did. Sometimes I just like feel like he would smile if he was in that situation. You know, if he saw that he would smile about that or he is smiling about that. Another thing that he loved was to watch hawks and watch them soar. And, so, just the other day I was watching this hawk. And, how he‘s not moving, he‘s just going on the winds. And, you know, I‘ve kind of had that connection a lot of times

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where I feel him. That‘s him there. That‘s what he‘s trying to tell me is just ride the winds. Just don‘t try to fight what‘s happening. Rachel: Angel wings are another thing because my boyfriend, when we were dating, said, ―He‘s your guardian angel. He‘ll always look over you.‖ So, I have a lot of different angel wing things now, because symbolically for me he‘s always there. And, so I was telling my Mamaw, ‗Oh, I want to get a tattoo of angel wings on my back, so it‘s like he‘s always hugging me, he‘s always there…‘ So, I was talking about it, telling her that when I get enough money I‘m gonna try to do this. Like I still haven‘t gotten it yet, because I‘m a college student so I‘m broke. But, [I have] goals about doing that and just like having something physically there for me. And, also it‘s a sense of when I get the tattoo I‘ll feel pain ... It‘s almost like a reflection process for me, like I‘m going through all of that pain. Going through all of the different things, it will be symbolically like the past four years… the pain of having the tattoo done would be like the pain that I experienced, but then the end result would be like he‘s always there, like a reflective thing. And, also [it‘s] a constant reminder for me that I‘m never alone…

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Marion, Rachel, and Tommy: Analysis Introduction Marion and Rachel‘s bereavement narrative portrays the intergenerational mourning of a grandmother and her granddaughter. The dialogues I imagined between them, to borrow a phrase from Marion, comprised for me a form of ―soul talk,‖ insofar as they give voice to experiences of Tommy presenting himself as a real, autonomous presence in the reveries and dreams that manifested in their grief. Such a mode of imaginal intercourse—the reciprocal articulation of post-death encounters among experients in a ritual, relational space—evoked for me a Dionysian style of mourning, whose mythic aspects I shall develop in the interpretive exposition of Marion and Rachel‘s shared process following Tommy‘s death. In general, the dialogical narrative that I have assembled is reflective of a spiritual, relational, and imaginative process of myth-making both mourning Tommy‘s absence and opening up possibilities for his presence in the lives of Rachel and Marion. Dionysos and Apollo In the following analysis, I aim to weave several narrative threads into mythology, a move that is reflective of my method and consistent with the process of myth-making accompanying Rachel and Marion‘s narrations of grief. Prior to doing so, however, I wish to delineate several motifs of Dionysian mode of interpretation, so that its characteristics and constellations may be more immediately grasped upon first reading the texts selected for analysis. Moreover, much as the style of grieving here can be characterized as Dionysian, its primacy does not exclude the incarnation and interpenetration of different mythical motifs, such as the principles of reason and harmony embodied by Apollo. After rendering an overview of each, I shall turn my attention to mythic aspects of the narrative and highlight their significance for healing amidst grief and loss. The son of Zeus and his mortal wife Semele, and brother of Apollo, Dionysos is a complex God, who has been variously associated with madness, ecstasy, and vitality, communality and participation, initiation and revelation, and masks and theatricality (Downing, 1994; Paris, 1990a). Here, I shall summarize this body of Dionysian themes in necessarily truncated fashion, and I shall later expound on their constellations amid Rachel and Marion‘s experiences. First and foremost, Dionysian consciousness is distinguished by embodiment as a mode of imagining. More specifically, Dionysos inheres in the relation of body to soul and spirit,

186 and in embodied images. The sensuous manner of this relation is amplified by the related motif of participation, which bespeaks an intimate and imaginative mode of relating. In participation, then, we allow ourselves to be taken in by the image of the other. Regarding yet another motif, the Dionysian and Eleusinian Mysteries consisted of ritual initiations, often for the marginalized, into the underworld, where the secrets of life, love, death, and renewal were revealed to its initiates (Paris, 1990a). In addition, Dionysos is associated with dismemberment or the painful, rending, and psychological process of division, particularly of bodily experience (Hillman, 1972). And last, through Dionysos, the God of masks, we glimpse the dramatic structure of imagination, through which we play a variety of roles, all of us actors on ―the stage of psyche‖ (Hillman, 1983b, p. 38). Although starkly contrasting Dionysos from his brother Apollo belies the more subtle nuances of the mythology, I shall do so here for the sake of establishing a rudimentary point of departure, later to be taken up in a dialectic that I discerned in Rachel and Marion‘s narratives. Whereas Dionysos occupies a dark, emotional, and experiential realm associated with the related processes of loosening, decentering, and participating, Apollonic consciousness, manifesting as it does through light and reason, upholds principles of unity, order, and clarity. Of this contrast, Nietzsche‘s (1872/1967) study of the Apollonian and Dionysian duality portrays the former as a defense against suffering, the latter as the source for our redemption, and their intersection as the locus of tragedy. By contrast, Paris (2007), in the language of depth psychology, has said that the ―irrationality of the psyche is to the ego what Dionysus is to Apollo; not an opposition between a devil and a god, but one between two gods, two essential principles whose opposition is part of a necessary equilibrium‖ (p. 70). If the images of Dionysos should turn diffuse and disorienting, Apollo may offer a frame in which they gain perspective. Conversely, should the images of Apollo become chilly and calculating, Dionysos may deliver a jolt through which they take on an enticing ambiguity. In my analysis of the narratives, I shall consider both the strong and moderate views articulated herein. Beginnings, Fate, Participation The first chapter of Marion and Rachel‘s story features a dialogue of beginnings, a prophetic dream for one and a life-altering event for the other, that frame the invisible, mythic dimensions of their respective relationships with Tommy after his death. Moreover, the ominous dream image and creation story each intersect with Tommy‘s fate in a manner that exemplifies

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―the connection of souls‖ described by Marion in her elaboration of ―soul talk.‖ Here, I shall discuss the ways in which these two experiences underscore for Rachel and Marion ―a soul connection‖ with Tommy. In response to the first writing prompt—―Tell me about the loved one whom you have lost and a time when you were vividly aware of what he or she means to you‖—Rachel called her relationship with Tommy ―a special bond‖ and said that, according to her birth mother Dana, the matter of her conception ultimately had ―brought him to Christ.‖ As the story goes, Tommy, on first learning of her pregnancy, insisted that Dana have an abortion, lest she jeopardize her education and career, but he later recanted in dramatic fashion after discovering the risks associated with the procedure. Amidst and because of this series of events, Tommy experienced an awakening of religious faith through which he committed his life to Christ. Thus, I read the creation story as telling of a double birth, one life conceived, and through it, the spiritual life of another. Rachel did not know this story before Tommy‘s death. It was not until two years after he died, when Rachel asked her birth mother to clarify the circumstances of her adoption, that she discovered that her life had ever been put into question and that it so profoundly affected the fate of her grandfather, whom she had known as a religious man and never differently. Therefore, for Rachel, the story served to deepen the strong bond she had always felt with Tommy. In this context, it evoked for Rachel awe, in her recognition that she, just emerging into life, could so drastically alter the life of another. One of the main themes of Rachel‘s creation story, challenge as the impetus for growth, typified her relationship with Tommy, particularly as she played basketball under her grandfather‘s tutelage. These memories exemplify the ways that he challenged her to continually expand upon her skills of play, so that she might develop into the kind of player of which he knew she was capable. Again and again, she accepted and met each challenge that he posed, and loved him for it, because the process signified his understanding of her full potential, whose incremental fulfillment facilitated growth and esteem in Rachel and reverence for Tommy. Because of the significance of this relationship, Rachel adopted the metaphor of human potential, at the base of this dialectic of challenge and actualization, as a way of relating to other people—―Because, he, as well as I do, we see the full potential in people.‖ Though they had this metaphor in common, it was always Tommy who challenged Rachel. In the creation story,

188 however, the roles were reversed as Rachel challenged Tommy. Her existence, coupled with her mother‘s will, challenged and ultimately transformed Tommy. Thus, all these years later and in the wake of Tommy‘s death, her awareness of this astounding reversal transformed her feelings from reverence to awe. Although the transmission of Rachel‘s creation story, from mother to daughter, had not occurred until much later chronologically, it served as the ―beginning‖ of her narrative, insofar as she told the story to illustrate the meaning of her relationship with Tommy, and later, her grief for his loss. Moreover, that particular story bespeaks a Dionysian style of mourning for its thematic synthesis of life, death, and transformation as well as the unique kind of participation it portrays in relation to Tommy‘s fate. Whereas Rachel‘s creation story takes place ―in the beginning‖ of her life and of her relationship with Tommy, Marion‘s prophetic dream marks ―the beginning of the end‖ for the man to whom she had been married for nearly 40 years and known for even longer. Marion had her dream three weeks before Tommy‘s death. In the dream, she heard simply, ―Tommy, 56,‖ his age at that time, and described the tone of the dream voice as ―stark,‖ ―blunt,‖ and ―serious.‖ For Marion, the meaning of the dream resonated in the register of the tone, grave and authoritative, issued by the dream voice, as if making a grim pronouncement of his fate. Marion conveyed the dream to Tommy to avail him of its message, with the hope that he would temper his then kinetic efforts to serve his school, church, and community. In contrast to Marion‘s concern and anxiety, Tommy, when confronted with the dream replied ―tartly,‖ ―Well, it could still happen,‖ leaving her to wonder whether he had the same dream or prescience of his death. To be sure, Marion had been so strongly persuaded by the dream that she believed it to be true. However, her narrative of the days prior to his aneurysm suggests a temporary suspension of this belief as they ―talked about the future and what [they] were going to do‖ on the drive to their daughter‘s home, which Marion characterized, tragically, in light of the events that followed, as ―the best time I ever had.‖ After Tommy‘s brain aneurysm, Marion‘s dream had been on the verge of being fulfilled as both a prophetic message and the original image in her mythology of his death and afterlife. The second narrative image, Tommy‘s embrace of Marion while unconscious, signified and foreshadowed for me their continuing relationship and the way that he would be experienced by her as an intentional and sensuous presence in spite of his physical absence. In yet another image, the song of Cavalry playing in her head at the hospital, God is presented as a significant

189 figure to whom Marion will address questions regarding her loss, and from whose signs she will make connections regarding her fate in its divergence from Tommy‘s. I viewed these three images as anticipatory of the two main plots of Marion‘s grief narrative, remembering Tommy through ―soul talk‖ and a spiritual transformation, whence she begins to re-imagine her life without him. Goodbye, Hello Rachel and Marion, in the days before and after Tommy‘s death, each had a vivid encounter with him that shaped the beginning of their grieving process in markedly different ways. For Rachel, Tommy had been experienced through an instantaneous predilection for coffee ice cream, while at a dessert parlor with her adoptive family. Though she readily associated the experience with memories of eating coffee ice cream with her ―Papaw,‖ it was as if, Rachel said, Tommy had chosen the flavor for her. Rather than an act of personal deliberation, Rachel experienced the choice as issuing spontaneously, and intensely, from her body—―it just hit me…my body was just telling me‖—which itself seemed to speak for her. For Rachel, the emotional power of the experience, ―kind of breathtaking,‖ as well as the identification of the choice with Tommy, rendered the choice a necessity—―like I have to get this…ice cream.‖ According to Rachel, this uncanny, embodied experience stood in stark contrast to her logical disposition and typical orientation to reality. Indeed, from the perspective of logic, Rachel doubted the act as a manifestation of her Papaw‘s presence and sought to recast it as a food craving or some other automatism of the body. Now faced with a different choice, real or not, Rachel ultimately settled on the first, though an ambivalence regarding the ―truth‖ of this post- death encounter recurred in her narrative. By contrast, Marion experienced Tommy‘s presence in a dream, the first following his death, while in the immediate throes of grief. In the dream, Marion saw his face, which appeared as it did before he died, and she heard him say authoritatively, ―You have to take a break from missing me.‖ Unlike Rachel, Marion did not doubt whether it was Tommy who had addressed her, though she had been stunned by the message because she received it so soon after his death. Later that day, still bewildered by the dream, Marion heard a series of three Christian songs, which she remembered playing out of order, depicting God as imminent and luminous among worldly decay and darkness. This unusual and synchronous event extended beyond the dream by revealing a choice—―You can go back to grieving or you can come with me [God].‖ Marion,

190 after having chosen the latter, had a strange bodily experience that she described as ―a vacuum thing,‖ in which she had the sense of being ―sucked through a portal‖ towards the support that she so desired. This choice between grief and God highlighted for me a central dialectic by which she alternated among different modes of grieving, though later in her narrative she would find healing in its reconciliation. I interpreted Rachel and Marion‘s imaginal experiences—one signifying connection with Tommy and the other temporary disconnection—as influencing their respective expressions of grief at his funeral. Rather than reveal the depth of her suffering, Marion, now aided by her spiritual support, resolved to take a strong and stoic role. Expressing her grief, which Marion construed as ―messy,‖ would have meant ―crying‖ and ―breaking down‖ in front of attendees, many of whom were children and Tommy‘s students. For Marion, then, Tommy‘s cryptic dream message and her spiritual epiphany had manifested to contain her grief so that she could convey to Tommy‘s students, for one last time, the principles he espoused as a teacher—―He would tell you to work hard and do your best and to help people.‖ Thus, I viewed Marion‘s projection of spiritual strength as both an act of protection and preservation. As an act of protection, she sought to shield the vulnerable, including perhaps herself, from the excruciatingly painful dimensions of death. In its place, she heralded Tommy‘s core values so that they might be carried forth and preserved in the spirit of continuity. Here, insofar as this role was in service of the other and the communication of a message, Marion acted primarily as a representative subject rather than one expressive of her own personal loss. Anticipating the funeral, Rachel also wrestled with the dilemma of whether to express her ―true pain‖ and ―true heartache‖ or act as a ―strong person‖ for the sake of those she presumed to be ―hurting more,‖ like Marion and her birth mother. However, whereas Marion resolved to temporarily ―take a break from missing‖ Tommy, Rachel, as suggested by the words of her letter and the images that adorned it, elected to show in large measure what the loss meant to her. Indeed, the images of the letter, which spanned her life and extended into the future, vividly illustrated for me the evocative theme of presence and absence that she experienced soon after his death: Tommy holding baby Rachel; Rachel, then a freshman in high school, standing alone; the encounter at the ice cream parlor; Tommy fading from the ―big‖ scenes of her future. Based on these descriptions, I interpreted Rachel‘s letter not only as an mournful address to what had past and never will be, but also, as a salutation, a greeting of Tommy ―in [her] heart,‖ where he

191 now is and always will be. Through these words and images, then, I imagined Rachel at once saying goodbye, while beginning to locate her Papaw in a place where he might dwell as an imaginal presence. Though Rachel‘s letter signified for me both a closure and an opening, as an address to loss, I noted that her reminiscences and reveries were mostly pervaded by an intensely mournful mood. In this view, her letter may have constituted an acknowledgement of Tommy‘s absence, to herself and the persons who attended his funeral, by way of concrete images that not only evoked his values and ideals, but also the lived experiences in which they were inscribed. Remembering the relationship in this way allowed Rachel to reveal her ―true heartache‖ and, she hoped, permitted others to do the same, after having witnessed her unfettered expression of grief—―if people see my emotions then maybe that will let them know that they can those emotions, too.‖ Although the open expression of intense sorrow painfully acknowledges the discontinuity brought by death, that it does so in the context of a communal space, creates the potential to contest the narrative that grief is suffered individually. Grief as Dismemberment While first speaking with Marion, I wondered about the absence of the ―messier‖ elements—pain, suffering, and conflict—in her telling. When she described the family‘s ―unity‖ in the hospital as ―strengthening,‖ I considered, in view of the immediacy of Tommy‘s aneurysm and death, what was not being said, namely the experiences against which the unity had been strengthening. Putting this to her, Marion acknowledged that it had been a shock given Tommy‘s lack of medical problems, adding that she dreamed ―he was gonna die.‖ Even prior to his death, Marion said, the dream spurred on a process of making ―connections with God and talking about that,‖ out of which she proposed a spiritual agreement in advance of her grief and loss: ―if this is what has to happen, then you have to get me through this.‖ I imagined Marion‘s experience of being ―sucked through a portal‖ as sealing the agreement, manifesting as it did with songs signifying God‘s immanence and light amid darkness and decay. Although this portion of Marion‘s narrative recapitulates her process prior to the funeral, here, I examine how it unfolds in accord motif of dismemberment amidst grief. As she had done for much of her life, Marion dedicated the first four months of her grief to caring for her brother and remaining ―busy.‖ At the same time, however, she described feeling ―torn‖ from Tommy, insofar as they had become one, having ―grown together‖ for almost 40

192 years of marriage. In his absence, Marion said she felt halved, ―like somebody ripped off my arm and my leg.‖ A frank expression of her suffering, this graphic image depicts her grief and loss as an experience of being violently pulled apart—wounded and dismembered. More than an embodied and psychological aspect of grief, I associated the theme of dismemberment with the comprehensive disruption of Marion‘s habitual way of being-in-the-world—―It wasn‘t just that I lost Tommy. I lost my life. I lost who I am. I lost my church, my friends, my job.‖ For these multiple losses, Marion said that she had ―the right to suffer,‖ [emphasis added] which begs the question: from what viewpoint does her suffering require justification? Marion‘s way of being-in-the-world, which she and Tommy shared, co-constituted, and lived in their relationship, consisted of service to God and community, ―bringing people together,‖ and fostering harmony through the doing of good works. In this way, I imagined Marion‘s experience of grief, loss, and Dionysian dismemberment manifesting against an Apollonian background. Relatively speaking, an Apollonian order inheres in all life before death. More than not, life flows along in its routines and regularities. Yet life after loss, as Marion points out, is ―never going to be the same,‖ ―you know you lost a person and then that starts it, but then you start to see all the things that he touches.‖ From this perspective, our lives are ordered in and with the presence of significant others. Co-presence, you and I, as a condition of living-with and beholding life, extends into the life spaces that compose our days—us at the grocery store, us on the road home, us at the kitchen table. With loss, then, a sense of disorder flows from absence and brings to bear specters of the dead that haunt those crumbling features of our life world. I venture that this kind of dismemberment and recognition of disorder in the wake of loss can signify a Dionysian initiation. In another sense, however, I saw Marion‘s initiatory suffering following from the gradual realization that her old way of being-in-the-world, predominately Apollonian in style, by itself could not adequately contain her grief: ―Because, I‘m so used to being a mover and a doer and an accomplish things kind of person…but I‘m not doing anything. Like, I just felt like I didn‘t have a lot of work or value because I wasn‘t accomplishing anything‖ [emphasis added]. So marked a difficult transition from doing to being, in which Marion began to grieve the dying of ―the little things‖ as well as her characteristic way of being-in-the-world. From the outset, Rachel presented a dark and visceral telling of her grief. Though she identified as ―a strong person in [her] faith,‖ Tommy‘s death initiated a tumultuous crisis,

193 wherein she felt ―punished‖ and had great difficulty reconciling the loss with her view of God, and her Papaw, as essentially benevolent—―Okay, God, why? Why did this happen?‖ For Rachel, the deep depression that marked her grief seemed to emerge from compounded loss and, similar to Marion, her way of relating to others. Additionally, Rachel lamented that she did not have an opportunity to ―say goodbye‖ to her Papaw, and that, following his death, she found that those meaning to support her could not do so given their limited understanding of the depth of their bond. The loss coincided with a period of significant transition for Rachel, as she transferred to a new school, largely because of the values Tommy instilled in her, in order to receive the highest quality of education. More importantly, basketball, academic excellence, and the will to continuously improve upon herself were core to Rachel‘s identity and inextricably linked to her relationship with her Papaw. Thus, his death threw her into ―downward spiral‖ of chronic sadness and self-doubt. Rachel imagined her grief as a headfirst descent into darkness, ―a dive into this huge, muddy pit of things. It was dark. It like held you. It held you back.‖ In the context of this image, Rachel described the movement of her grief as a process of alternately climbing out and falling back into that dark pit: ―I sometimes thought, ‗Okay, I‘m getting better.‘ Like, ‗Okay, I‘m doing all this stuff…it doesn‘t seem as bad, but something even miniscule would happen and, bam, I was back down there again.‘ Whereas Marion imagined dismemberment as a rending of the body, Rachel imagined it as a rending from light and movement, and engulfment in darkness. I also associated dismemberment with the related themes of masks, personae, and the performance of grief in a social context. The contrasting roles adopted by Marion and Rachel at Tommy‘s funeral, which I termed representative and expressive modes of grieving, were not by any means fixed. For instance, Rachel, who first extolled the connective value of openly expressing her grief, talked about gradually withdrawing: I wore a mask, figuratively, because I don‘t like people always checking on me. And, like, for me, I always want to be that person for them, their caretaker, that person they can go to. And, if they see me as weak and if they saw me as emotional like they would focus on me more than I could on them. So I would just throw myself into other people‘s problems. Here, Rachel articulated a tension between her characteristic social persona, caring for others,

194 and an aspirational grief persona, others caring for her, that she had difficulty reconciling after Tommy‘s funeral. Whereas Marion construed her social experience in terms of the same duality, she possessed more of a readiness to express her grief than Rachel; however, when people did not ―come around,‖ Marion felt forlorn and somewhat embittered. Moreover, once she found people who were willing to engage her grief in depth, the encounters were not as healing as she presupposed. By contrast, Rachel did benefit from expressing her grief, though significantly, only after she had begun exploring her self-image while in counseling, and with the important caveat that others often did not fully appreciate the meaning Rachel ascribed to her relationship with her Papaw, much less her post-death encounters with him. Much as caring for others impeded a communal mourning process, the members of Rachel and Marion‘s community exhibited a hesitancy to engage with their grief, and when they did so, that social engagement had its limitations. Once she reached out to others, Marion said, she discovered that ―nobody wants to hear your experiences, because it‘s too much. Initially, when I was just in so much pain and grief, I think it‘s so hard for people to listen to that. They have to take that in. And, they don‘t want to.‖ According to Rachel, her friends, and even her adoptive family, ―tried to be supportive, but they didn‘t understand how much of a really deep relationship [we] had…they could be sympathetic, but they didn‘t really have empathy or they couldn‘t be like that full on support for me.‖ For Marion and Rachel, the disjunction between their grief and social personae, and marginalization from their respective communities, in itself constituted another kind of dismemberment. In particular, the reversal and ultimate breakdown of role structures illuminated and loosened fixed identifications that, in turn, freed them to connect with their grief and seek alternative pathways to healing. Dionysian Mourning Very soon after Tommy died, Rachel dreamed that he embraced her while she was crying, assuring her that ―everything would be okay,‖ and that she ―was never alone.‖ As he hugged and held her in the dream, Rachel expressed feeling ―warmth‖ and ―happy again.‖ Like her experience at the ice cream parlor, Rachel characterized the dream as ―overpowering,‖ and in her waking disorientation she questioned her grasp on reality. Still crying, she brought the dream to her adoptive mother, who, upon hearing it, normalized the experience for her by telling a similar dream she had in high school, in which ―God‖ held her and ―rocked her like a baby to sleep.‖ Interestingly, rather than ask about the meaning of the dream, she helped Rachel identify

195 what feelings it had evoked for her. Afterward, she suggested that Rachel speak with Marion, whom she had known to have a vivid dream life. When Rachel called her, Marion said, ―You have dreams, too?‖ So began this highly unique relationship, and, from my perspective, Rachel‘s initiation into Dionysian mourning, which she described as the ―biggest…healing process‖ amidst her grief, where healing did not mean she had ―necessarily moved on but… advanced from [her] situation.‖ I viewed the intensity of Rachel‘s experience, coupled with her fear that she could be ―crazy,‖ as partly emblematic of Dionysos, the God who brings madness. Thus, as Paris (1990a) points out, such encounters require ―a ritual that holds in check and formalizes, a community that gives it meaning,‖ for ―without an experienced guide and without any kind of ritual, the initiation…can only be traumatic‖ (p. 12). Rachel‘s adoptive mother, in directing her to Marion, ―an experienced guide‖ in dreaming, seemed to recognize the value of this kind of relationship in light of Rachel‘s experience. After first speaking with Marion over the telephone, Rachel said that she stayed with her birth family for three days, and when her adoptive parents left her to visit without them, she, Marion, her birth mother, and others shared stories and memories about Tommy. Here, for the first time in person, Rachel and Marion exchanged details of their dreams and waking experiences of Tommy‘s presence. In the ensuing years, whenever they would get together, the two of them would talk this way, comparing and processing their spiritual, emotional, and imaginal experiences and personal journeys in grief. Though Marion did initially serve as a guide for Rachel, and though their exchanges conferred meaning to highly charged and uncanny experiences, the meetings themselves were not intentionally ritualistic. That said, Rachel‘s descriptions of the contexts in which they took place do elucidate a few recurring characteristics that seem important. In general, most of these conversations occurred at late at night, either at home or while driving, and after the children had been put to bed. Time of day, day and night, can be associated with styles of consciousness that are respectively Apollonian and Dionysian. For Paris (1990a), day consciousness is ―connected to the sun, dryness, all that is rational and Apollonian,‖ whereas ―nocturnal consciousness‖ signifies ―the moon, moisture, women…emotions, the body and the earth‖ (p. 10). In the day, Rachel and Marion were ―always on the go,‖ running errands and caring for the children. At night, however, they ―had time to relax, time to breathe,‖ a cleared space to express feelings,

196 describe unusual experiences, trade insights, and remember Tommy through ―soul talk.‖ In what I associated with a night mode of time, largely unstructured by responsibility, different dimensions of grief, particularly the ―more emotional side of it,‖ could ―just come up somehow in conversation.‖ As Rachel said, she and Marion could have these grief conversations ―when [they were] relaxed‖ and even ―drift off path‖ into other vectors, like books they‘ve read or metaphors from counseling. Thus, the dialogical process was a free-flowing one marked by a multi-directional significance. That they also talked this way in long car rides, in the time between destinations, further suggested to me that these conversations constituted a transitional space, in which they could ask ―questions‖ rather than seek answers, and simply explore what it meant to grieve the loss of a man they loved very much. On the congruence of her process with Marion, Rachel raised three additional points that I wish to highlight. First and foremost, Rachel chose to confide in Marion ―because [she] had that connection, the essence, that ‗part of him is in me‘ kind of thing.‖ Here, Rachel means to convey ―connection,‖ I believe, in the Dionysian sense of participation, or the depth of intimacy signified by her creation myth, in which she and Tommy first ―meet‖ in a profound nexus of fate. Second, Rachel could empathize with the ―traumatic‖ and dismembering effects of loss on Marion‘s life. Indeed, Marion had constructed her entire life around her connection with Tommy, and he with her, in making a home and a family, even sharing a career in teaching, so her ―life [had] completely changed‖ because of his death. For Rachel as well, the loss coincided with seismic shifts in her life world. Third, like Rachel, Marion experienced a ―soul connection‖ with Tommy in post-death dreams and waking experiences. Further, regarding these instances of ―soul talk,‖ Marion seemed to possess greater experience, insight, and wisdom than Rachel, from which Rachel could learn, and begin to accept and find meaning in her post-death encounters with Tommy. Having framed the origin, context, and ethos of Rachel and Marion‘s mourning from a Dionysian perspective, I now will examine the phenomenology of their post-death encounters with Tommy, with a particular focus on the significance of dreams. Dionysian Dreaming I would characterize Marion‘s two dreams immediately before and after Tommy‘s death as oracular, even Apollonian, insofar as their content consisted of a direct message, prophetic in the first case and admonitory in the second. In related but distinct ways, each of these oracular dreams preceded an imminent departure, one of Tommy from Marion and life itself, and the

197 other of Marion from Tommy. Further, I discerned in her narrative the theme of departure as sacrifice, in that Marion linked Tommy‘s death to a divine purpose and later made an offering of her grief at his funeral, in what I viewed as a means of privileging his legacy. Here, I describe these two dreams to draw a contrast from later ―encounters.‖ Although of tremendous importance in first anticipating and memorializing her loss, they seemed to diverge from subsequent dreams and waking experiences of Tommy. In particular, I differentiated these two dreams from many of those that followed, insofar as the latter did not appear to present Marion with messages as much as a series of visitations that resonated with a felt significance. Just as Rachel had her dream of an embrace while ―really lonely and struggling with coping,‖ Marion often dreamed that Tommy would hug, hold, or simply lay beside her whenever ―things [had] been very hard or emotional.‖ For Marion in particular, the post-death encounters with Tommy were experienced by her in the midst of what I termed dismemberment, of her habitual ways of being-in-the-world and specifically those experiences of grief marked by marginality. Hence, Marion‘s appreciative remark that she is ―lucky to have a dream when [she] most needs it.‖ I interpreted this statement as linking the value of the dream to its emergence out of strife and necessity, and articulating its appearance as an instance of good fortune. From my perspective, fortune, in the sense of a personified power governing the dream, is an apt metaphor for these encounters, much as they were given whenever necessary and distinguished as personified presence through Tommy‘s appearance. For Rachel, the embrace heralded her epiphany of the dream as a place, one where she could behold him as a subtle yet vivid presence—―Wow, he‘s here, he can speak when I‘m sleeping…I can still have a relationship with him even if he‘s physically not here.‖ Likewise, for the first two years of her grief, Marion said that in her dreams it ―felt like I spent time with him…I was getting to see him…I would at least have those pictures of that.‖ Here, in contrast to her oracular dreams, Marion described a series of situated dreams, in which her sense of temporality—―I felt like I spent time with him‖—and spatiality—―in bed with me‖—were part and parcel of their images. Marion and Rachel, in being enveloped in and by the dream, point to a mode of ―situated seeing‖ that continued to resonate for them upon waking. After ―getting to see‖ Tommy again, Marion experienced ―an energy running through her body—almost like a shaking…from the inside…like you do when you shiver,‖ which she referred to as ―love vibrations.‖ Though she experienced the ―love vibrations‖ as inside of her and registering through her body, they neither

198 seemed within her control nor of her body. For Marion, the ―love vibrations‖ signified Tommy‘s spirit surging through her, thus making her body the site of Tommy‘s presence and the lingering significance of the dream. Rachel, in similar fashion, described feeling ―chills‖ on waking from her dream of the embrace, and even afterward, she said she will ―get chills sometimes…trying to remember that feeling and remembering how content [she] felt after that.‖ I associated this felt sense of their dreams with Bromios, an adjective and surname of Dionysos, that is synonymous with ―shivering, buzzing, or trembling…in which body and soul are mutually stirred‖ (Paris, 1990a, p. 6). I therefore interpreted Marion and Rachel‘s experiences as implicating the body as a locus for the immediate and ongoing significance of the dream. Here, the ―metaphorical body‖ is a vessel for the life of symbols and dreams, one that can resonate with and enliven the dreamer without words by evoking his or her idiosyncratic situatedness in the dream image as felt yet impersonal embodiment. Among the dream descriptions, Marion‘s in particular set forth a paradox, a sobering refrain to the ecstatic character of her encounters: While she experienced Tommy as a ―real,‖ animated presence, ―in almost all of the dreams [she] knew he was dead.‖ Thus, her dreaming can be considered from a death perspective, meaning dreams marked by the appearance of the dead as well as the dreamer‘s awareness that they‘ve died. Indeed, an awareness of death constituted the invisible background against which Marion dreamed of Tommy as a visible, living form, and therein, I suggest, inheres a significant aspect of the dream that had important ramifications for her mourning. Following Langer (1953), I venture that, for Marion, dreaming from the perspective of death, Tommy took on a character of semblance, a peculiar otherness, appearing as he did as a presence amidst his own absence. Further, I suggest, though the man who died and the man of her dreams are essentially linked, and both experienced by Marion as real, they are not entirely one and the same. Indeed, Marion described Tommy as both a spiritual presence and a watchful inhabitant of her soul: ―he is with me in spirit. And, in my soul, he is still connected and watching…‖ In this way, Tommy is not resurrected in the dream as much as presented again as a virtual or spiritual or soulful presence, one with whom Marion bears witness to the irrecoverable loss of her husband as an incarnated presence, an actuality. In addition to the context of death, strange and uncanny images augmented Tommy‘s otherness. Often, Marion said, he simply appeared in her dreams, and sometimes in unusual places and positions, like lying on top of her

199 night stand, or on the ground in front of a restaurant. These dream elements exemplify how odd configurations can disrupt the habitual ways the dead existed to us and for us. Further, I venture, insofar as the dead are de-literalized through dreaming, they have the potential to act as co- participants in mourning, rather than subjects of a wishful reunion, or alternatively, the anguished evocation of the loss itself. Identifying the dynamic, integral connection of the living/dead with one‘s life world, Marion reflected that her mourning consisted of recognizing and grieving everything, even down to the ―little things,‖ touched by Tommy. One example—―sitting and reading the paper with [Tommy] at night—illustrates the scope of absence and its extension into a lived, situated context. In addition to doing so in her waking life, I suggest that her dreams afforded her a unique means of mourning these scenes. As Marion put it, ―a lot of times it would be dreams about…normal things. Like, in one dream he and I were in the truck and we were going to the store. That was the kind of thing we did a lot.‖ Here, not just Tommy, but a whole lived context shared by him and Marion takes on an uncanny quality, at once familiar and unfamiliar. Remembered by the dream, a highly ordinary errand is presented again as extraordinary, an instance of a ―little thing‖ made recognizable, and mournful, through its enlargement as a virtual, fading scene. Spiritual Dreaming In the year after her husband died, Marion had several dreams pertaining to his transition out of life. In one dream, Tommy playfully walked down the hallway of the elementary school in which he taught and transformed into ―a small, petite, young blonde woman.‖ The dream had been particularly significant for Marion because a few months later she discovered that the teacher who would replace him was in fact a petite, young blonde woman. From this synchronicity, she imagined that his teaching spirit would be carried forward through this woman. Almost one year after his death, Marion had a dream in which Tommy said, ―I‘m almost home,‖ and she replied, ―You need to go…home. Go be where you‘re supposed to be.‖ For Marion, the two dreams were instances of ―soul talk,‖ in which Tommy revealed to her his continuing presence among the living, and passage into the afterlife. Yet to Marion‘s surprise, Tommy continued to appear in her dreams for years, even after the one announcing his imminent homecoming. With her brother Paul in the hospital, Marion said that she had been faced with making a difficult medical decision and dreamed of Tommy

200 walking with Paul and his dog. When Marion awoke from the dream, she arrived at her decision, having the conviction that no matter what ―everything was going to be okay.‖ Three years after Tommy died, Marion decided to move to New York to be closer to her daughter and start a new life. On the night before she left to find a place to live, Marion dreamed of sitting on Tommy‘s lap, and after saying, ―God is triumphant in people‘s lives,‖ he lifted her up into the sky, where, in the end, she stood ―next a pile of unwrapped presents.‖ I chose to underline these two dreams because they illustrated to me a transformation of Tommy‘s role in Marion‘s dream life—from companion to healer and guide. Regarding the second dream, though I would characterize the imagery of light and ascension as Apollonian, where Marion ends up standing, ―next to a pile of unwrapped presents,‖ bespeaks more of a mystery than a message. Insofar as her move to New York signified an important first step in Marion‘s calling to ―honor God,‖ I viewed Tommy‘s appearance in the dream as suggestive of a supportive role in her spiritual life and embrace of a purpose that she could not clearly discern but chose to follow. Like Marion, Rachel experienced Tommy as a spiritual guide in her grief and mourning. In particular, Rachel recalled that, after Tommy‘s death, she and her boyfriend often referred to him as her ―guardian angel.‖ To symbolize his continuing presence, Rachel said she wished to get ―a tattoo of angel wings‖ on her back. Rachel added that by having the tattoo on her back, it would be as if he were ―always hugging‖ her, thus hearkening back to the poignant dream of the embrace. In addition, Rachel said that the pain imparted by the tattoo would symbolize the sense of dismemberment that she experienced after his death. Therefore, the image would be both emblematic of Tommy‘s ongoing presence and her personal experience of grief and mourning. Rachel‘s description of this symbolic act highlighted for me the key theme of suffering, reflectively and poetically, in her story as well as Marion‘s. Indeed, I take Marion‘s image of the hawk as an especially beautiful illustration of this theme: ―the other day I was watching this hawk. And, how he‘s not moving, he‘s just going on the winds. And, you know, I‘ve kind of had that connection a lot of times where I feel [Tommy]. That‘s him there. That‘s what he‘s trying to tell me is just ride the winds. Just don‘t try to fight what‘s happening.‖ For Marion, the hawk signified both a meditation on our relation to suffering and a poetic image of Tommy‘s ongoing presence. Thus, from the position of stillness, we may be afforded a perspective from which to receive healing images.

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Conclusion In the foregoing analysis, I interpreted Rachel and Marion‘s narrative of intergenerational mourning from a Dionysian perspective, focusing on the unique mode of dialogue by which they described, elaborated, and mythologized their post-death encounters with Tommy. By way of a Dionysian hermeneutic, I specifically attended the motifs of experiential participation, masks and performances, psychological dismemberment, and initiation and revelation, while comparing and contrasting this style of grief and mourning with those that were distinctively Apollonian. For the first section—―Fates, Beginnings, Participation‖—I linked Rachel‘s creation story and Marion‘s prophetic dream to the motif of participation, elaborated as intimate intersections with his fate, in order to establish the depth of the connection they both had with him in his life and death. In addition, given the thematic syntheses of life, death, and fate inherent to these narratives, I placed them in the order of myth, not because I viewed the events they refer to as ―unreal,‖ but because they point to an order of invisible, yet no less extraordinary, transformations. Further, I suggested that this style of mythologizing continued in Rachel and Marion‘s grief in the form of ―soul talk,‖ a mode of relating to Tommy as an autonomous and intentional, and aided in receiving his presence while mourning his absence. In ―Goodbye, Hello,‖ I described two distinctive encounter experiences for Rachel and Marion, and argued that the manner with which they responded to these encounters contributed to their divergent expressions of grief at his funeral. Through Marion‘s experience, I illustrated how contact with the significant dead can sometimes inhibit the expression of grief rather than facilitate it. In addition, drawing from the Dionysian motif of masks, I raised the question of performing grief by presenting Marion and Rachel‘s contrasting views on expressing their pain and sorrow. This further brought up the issue of audience when grief is experienced in a public space, and when, if at all, or for whom, the expression of grief is healing. In the third section—―Grief as Dismemberment‖—I viewed the painful, isolative, and life changing aspects of Marion and Rachel‘s grief through the lens of psychological dismemberment. After presenting the vivid images they used to describe this rending experience, I framed the process of dismemberment as one in grief and loss eroded their habitual ways of being-in-the-world. For Marion in particular, I examined her difficult transition from a position of doing and moving to being and stillness. In addition, drawing again from the motif of masks, I explored discrepancies between Rachel and Marion‘s social and grief personae, and how the

202 process of dismemberment allowed them to beneficially ―see-through‖ identifications with fixed role structures. In the third and fourth sections, I brought forth more explicitly the Dionysian style of mourning and dreaming that I discerned in Rachel and Marion‘s narratives. With regard to mourning, I highlighted the unique relationship in which they compared and processed their spiritual, emotional, and imaginal experiences and personal journeys in grief. Furthermore, I framed this relationship and the contexts in which it was enacted as a transitional space amenable to exploring, questioning, reflecting, and myth-making, understanding myth in the sense that I articulated above. Moreover, I proposed that Rachel‘s congruence with Marion in this relationship, and by extension the healing she derived from it, was based on (1) a shared depth of connection with Tommy, (2) a shared depth of grief, and (3) a shared experience of post-death encounters with Tommy. Drawing from their descriptions of ―love vibrations‖ and ―chills‖ as experiences of dreaming and Tommy‘s presence, I proposed a unique form of dream significance—―felt yet impersonal embodiment‖—in which the body is the locus for experiencing the dream image and the deceased (Bosnak, 2007). In addition, for Marion especially, I developed the notion of semblance, encountering the dead with a death awareness, and its capacity to vivify the dream as well as facilitate mourning. In the final section, ―Spiritual Dreaming, Mourning,‖ I concluded the analysis by considering Tommy‘s transformation in Marion‘s dream life from companion to healer and guide. Based on his appearance in one significant dream, I ventured that he has played a supportive and guiding role in Marion‘s quest to discern a new purpose in her life after his death and the many losses that followed. For Rachel, I noted a similar pattern insofar as she referred to Tommy as her ―guardian angel.‖ Last, I underscored the theme of ―reflective suffering‖ as a particular style of mourning, whose brand of healing is based on a position of stillness and the evocation of poetic images.

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Discussion Entering the study, I had three broad aims: (1) to learn about the phenomenology of imaginal encounters with the dead for the bereaved, namely through dreams, and the significance of such experiences for the grieving process; (2) to examine stories of grief and loss in terms of personal and archetypal mythology; and (3) to explore and elaborate theoretical and methodological intersections of narrative and archetypal psychology. In this section, I intend to connect the dissertation findings to these general aims, and to chart out horizons that may further elaborate our understanding of dreams, grief and mourning, and qualitative inquiry. To this end, I first shall highlight key points among the participants‘ bereavement stories and discuss the implications of these findings for future research and therapeutic practice. Next, I shall reflect on my personal contributions to the work, and in turn, how it has shaped my assumptions on grief and mourning, dreams, and continuing relationships with the significant dead. Last, I shall present the study as an exemplar of mythobiography, a novel genre of qualitative research. Under the two general headings of (1) imaginal encounters with the dead and (2) mythic aspects of grief and mourning, I shall address the first two aims and discuss important themes emerging from these four stories. Before turning to these themes, however, I first wish to reintroduce for the reader, in short form, the four participants and respective stories that I selected for analysis. Liza, a woman in her early 30‘s, reported two dreams, and one nightmare, of her father before and after his death from prostate cancer in 2010. Notably, she also shared one of her father‘s dreams, which he relayed to her two weeks before he died. The dramatic arc of Liza‘s story consisted in a transformation of identity and vocation, whereby she moved from aspiring artist to healer after a long, painful period of grief and self-examination. Over a period of one and a half years, Hannah, a woman in her early 40‘s, had a series of nightmares and one ―real‖ dream encounter with her mother, who died of a brain aneurysm in 2011. Whereas mother-daughter intimacy comprised the central conflict of her grief story, she also wrestled with an emerging experience of transgenerational mourning, having lost both of her parents and been faced with the responsibility of carrying forward her family heritage. Rachel, a young woman in her late teens, and her 60 year old grandmother, Marion, reported numerous dreams and two waking encounters of Tommy, grandfather and husband to them, respectively, who died suddenly from a brain aneurysm in 2009. Insofar as Rachel and

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Marion engaged in a process of sharing their dreams and encounter experiences, I elected to present their experiences in the form of a single, dialogical narrative. Importantly, however, each of their bereavement stories was characterized by a distinctive arc. Rachel, who lost both a grandfather and a mentor, narrated a story of discovering his ongoing accompaniment following a precipitous, anguished separation from him. For Marion, in addition to losing her husband of almost 40 years, much of what held meaning for the life she had once known fell apart, but along with this pervasive grief, she discerned a spiritual calling for which Tommy‘s presence served as a soul guide. Imaginal Encounters with the Dead Principally, the women I interviewed encountered the significant dead in dreams and nightmares. Here, I shall discuss these encounters in terms of phenomenology, context, and significance, which correspond to how the dead appeared, when in the grieving process the experiences took place, and the value, meaning, and transformative potential of the encounters for the bereaved. I will moreover situate my findings in relation to those of other researchers in the area of post-death encounters. In a rare study of bereavement dreams in particular, Garfield (1996) found that the type of dream varied in accordance with the stage of mourning, the time elapsed since the loss, the nature of the loss, and the relationship of the bereaved to the dead. Of the eleven kinds of bereavement dreams comprising Garfield‘s (1996) typology, the majority of dreams and nightmares reported in this study accorded with six types: (1) ―Alive-Again,‖ (2) ―Saying- Goodbye,‖ (3) ―Advice-Comfort-Gift,‖ (4) ―Approval-Disapproval,‖ (5) ―Taking-a-Journey,‖ and (6) ―Daily-Activity‖ dreams (pp. 188-203). In these bereavement dreams, the dead (1) re- appear as living, (2) bid farewell, (3) provide guidance or reassurance, (4) voice approval or disapproval, (5) serve as guide on a journey, and (6) partake in the routine activities of their lives prior to death. In addition, Garfield correlates each type of bereavement dream with a one of three phases of mourning—(1) ―numbness,‖ (2) ―disorganization,‖ and (3) ―reorganization‖— which correspond to (1) shock and perhaps denial of the loss, (2) recognition of the loss, emptiness, and loneliness, and (3) readjustment to life, orientation to the future, and renewed vitality. Given the broad applicability of her typology to my findings, I will adopt it to organize and differentiate the dreams reported by Liza, Hannah, Rachel, and Marion. Additionally,

205 however, I will use my findings to critically examine the presumed relationship between the type of dream and phases of mourning, and elaborate the role of relationships with the dead in dream phenomenology. “Alive-Again” Dreams In ―Alive-Again‖ dreams, the dead, often in the phase of ―numbness‖ soon after the loss, and to the surprise of the dreamer, appear as living. Liza, Hannah, and Rachel had such dreams as well as nightmares. For Liza, the dream of her father visiting occurred three months after his death, prior to a period of numbness, and engendered shock and surprise with the awareness that he was ―no longer alive.‖ Upon entering the dream home, he turns into a baby, whom she cradles in her arms as he reassures her that he is not ―not going anywhere.‖ Tommy appears ―alive- again‖ in Rachel‘s dream as a set of arms, almost immediately after his death, while she was ―lonely and struggling with coping.‖ Similarly, he offers her words of comfort as he embraced her in his ―arms.‖ Importantly, for Rachel, the most powerful aspect of the dream was the embodied sense of Tommy‘s embrace, so much so that she woke up from the dream crying, overwhelmed by emotion. For both Liza and Rachel, these dreams imparted comfort, reassurance, and the realization that, through the medium of dreams, they could experience their loved ones again. The finding that encounter dreams provide the reassurance of relational continuity has been reported as a common theme in similar studies (Daggett, 2005). In contrast to the aforementioned dreams, Hannah had a series of nightmares of her mother ―alive-again,‖ or in her words, ―not really being dead… [and] trying to tell her that she‘s dead and she‘s not listening.‖ Unlike Liza and Rachel‘s ―alive-again‖ dreams, Hannah did have these nightmares while ―numb‖ to grief for her mother, and, notably, grieving for her deceased father ―all over again.‖ Hannah characterized her nightmares as disturbing and anxiety-inducing, pointing specifically to her mother‘s anger at being dead and the images suggestive of decomposition, particularly her green skin in the third nightmare. For all three women, the ―alive-again‖ dreams and nightmares were highly memorable and strongly affecting. For Liza and Rachel, the dreams conveyed that they could have an ongoing relationship with the significant dead in spite of their physical absence. In contrast, Hannah‘s nightmare suggested to her that she had ―unfinished business,‖ which she associated to her interactions with her mother just before her death. Others studies have likewise shown that the bereaved construe encounter experiences as ―a vehicle with which to resolve unfinished business‖ (Parker, 2005, p. 273) and a

206 means of making sense of the loved one‘s death (Tyson-Rawson, 1996). Most relevant to Hannah‘s experiences are Daggett‘s (2005) findings that in encounter dreams the dead sometimes appear ―under the misapprehension that he or she is still alive,‖ which can coincide with ―the survivor [being] confused about the status‖ (p. 200). In summary, though ―alive-again‖ dreams and nightmares were experienced soon after the loss, they only once occurred in the context of ―numbness.‖ Rather, the bereaved women tended to have these dreams in the immediate, emotional throes of their grief. With regard to the dream and nightmare images, notably, most featured one or another form of physical contact between the dreamer and the dead—cradling dad, embracing grandpa/husband, ―releasing‖ mom‘s hands—that was central to the dream image. Insofar as physical contact with the dead aroused intense emotion for the bereaved, this feature of bereavement dreams might be particularly ripe for exploration in therapeutic practice. This may be especially so if the bereaved is emotionally numb in his or her waking experience of the loss. As reported by the participants in this study, physical contact with the dead and its imaginal context can have profound embodied significance (e.g., ―love vibrations‖ for Marion; ―chills‖ for Rachel) and suggest conundrums faced by the bereaved (e.g., Liza having to carry the one who always carried her). Although the examples of ―Alive-again‖ dreams provided by Garfield (1996) frequently involve physical contact with the dead, she did not underscore its apparent prevalence. Adding to Daggett‘s (2005) general finding regarding the marked emotional texture of bereavement dreams, researchers might focus specifically on the role of physical contact with the significant dead. It also may be that physical contact heightens the lifelikeness of the dead for the bereaved, yet these possibilities need to be explored further. Additionally, Marion‘s experience of ―love vibrations‖ exemplifies Bosnak‘s (2007) notion of embodiment, in which body and imagination intersect by way of dream images. The body as a sensuous and metaphorical locus for the ongoing significance of dream images is an exciting and largely uncharted area of dream research. “Saying-Goodbye” Dreams Typically manifesting in the ―disorganization‖ phase of mourning, one characterized by emotional tumult and chaos, ―Saying-Goodbye‖ dreams involve the dead bidding farewell to the dreamer. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given my focus on ongoing relationships with the dead, only one participant, Liza, reported having a ―saying-goodbye‖ dream. On the other hand, her dream

207 was remarkable in that she had it at approximately the same time that her father died as she lay beside him. Prior to the dream, Liza recalled that she prayed for God to ―take him,‖ and after, said to her father, ―Okay, you can go. You can let go.‖ In contrast to her experiences from the preceding few months, Liza was able to break the silence and address her father regarding his illness. Prior to these parting words, she dreams of him as ―happy and with it,‖ ―rolling himself around in a wheelchair.‖ Significantly, they proudly affirm one another, father and daughter, and he asks her to ―take [him] swimming,‖ wanting ―to go to the water.‖ For Liza, the dream engendered a temporary peace and closure, because she had the opportunity to say goodbye, but more specifically, because she was the one who gave him ―permission‖ to ―let go.‖ In this way, the significance of the encounter was mutually predicated on their exchange in the dream, and the rueful epiphany that set the context for the image. “Advice-Gift-Comfort” Dreams ―Advice-Gift-Comfort‖ dreams refer to dreams in which the bereaved person receives advice, gifts, or comforting messages from the dead, often in the phase of ―reorganization,‖ wherein they are beginning to integrate the loss into their lives. Marion, in relation to her husband, and Hannah, to her father, had such dreams. In one of Marion‘s first dreams of Tommy, he advised her, ―You have to take a break from missing me,‖ which, while unpleasant for her, in part enabled her to take a strong and stoic role at his funeral and pass on his message to his students and grandchildren. However, in her subsequent dreams of him, he mainly appeared to comfort her, frequently when she as experiencing her grief most intensely. Similar to Rachel‘s ―embrace‖ dream, Marion was comforted by her dreams of Tommy hugging or lying beside her. Likewise, Dannenbaum and Kinnier (2009) found that encounter experiences can impart to the bereaved a sense of intimacy with the dead and reduce their loneliness. In these dreams, Marion said, ―he always looked young and real happy and real fit,‖ whereas he curiously tended to appear older when presenting a message. Garfield also refers to ―Young-Well-Again‖ dreams, in which the dead appear young or healthy, and associates them with the ―reorganization‖ phase of mourning. However, Marion‘s extensive experiences suggest that the verbal (i.e., dead giving message) vs. imagistic (i.e., dead simply appearing) dimension of the dream could relate to this phenomenological feature. In addition, the striking contrast between Hannah‘s dreams of her mother and father suggest that the manner in which the dead appear can vary with the nature and

208 quality of the relationship. Future studies in grief and dream phenomenology could explore the possible co-relation of these three factors with the appearance of the dead. Marion indicated that these dreams aided her greatly in the first two years of her grief because it seemed as if she was ―getting to see him.‖ To this point, Marion said quite pointedly that she resented the notion, implied by one therapist, that the dreams were something she simply conjured up to gain comfort—rather, she construed these dreams as instances of her soul connection with Tommy, such that he was truly present with her. The response of her therapist raises the question of how encounters are viewed and worked with in a counseling setting. Aside from a study by Taylor (2005), who found that 80% of respondents were dissatisfied by their therapists‘ responses to such experiences, little research has been done in this area. Further inquiry into this subject could guide practitioners in how to best work with these unique experiences. Marion‘s soul connection with Tommy was further exemplified in a ―gift‖ dream, where Tommy, upon saying that ―God is triumphant in people‘s lives,‖ lifted her up and revealed to her a pile of unwrapped presents. This dream revealed to Marion images of her afterlife and the degree to which her husband had taken on the role of a spiritual guide. Notably, Marion‘s experiences are consistent with Kwilecki‘s (2011) finding that encounters with the dead and religious beliefs can be mutually confirming for the bereaved. While grieving her mother, Hannah said that she wished adamantly for this kind of dream, though she never had one. However, she did have such bereavement dreams of her father when she and her husband were trying to conceive a child, alongside concerns about her fertility. In the dream, Hannah‘s father hands her an iridescent cup, and after giving the marriage his blessing, says that they soon would be parents. The birth of her daughter one year later imparted tremendous significance to a dream whose message she once regarded skeptically. Thus, the dream also can be characterized as prophetic insofar as the gift and what it signified later came to fruition for Hannah in her waking life. Like Marion‘s dreams of Tommy, Hannah said that she experienced the encounter as real contact with her father. Hannah lamented that she did not have similar dreams of her mother, which contrastingly filled her with anxiety. “Approval-Disapproval” Dreams In addition to the three ―Alive-Again‖ nightmares, Hannah had an ―Approval- Disapproval‖ dream of her mother. This kind of bereavement dream, which Garfield associates with the ―reorganization‖ phase of mourning, refers to an encounter in which the dead appear to

209 voice approval or disapproval of the dreamer. A few months into her grief, still numb, Hannah had her ―approval-disapproval‖ dream while struggling to make decisions as co-administrator of her mother‘s estate. In the dream, she only hears the voice of her mother, who, in response to her dilemma, says, ―I can never trust you to make the same decisions I would make. You just have to keep making decisions and moving forward,‖ and disappears as quickly as she had appeared. Though initially frustrated by her mother‘s manner and the brevity of the dream, Hannah said that she ultimately derived comfort from it, construing her mother as spurring her forward insofar as she seemed to direct Hannah to trust her own judgment. Similarly, Sormanti and August (1997) found that the ―negative‖ encounter experiences of bereaved parents were partly attributable to frustration regarding the fleetingness of the encounter. To my knowledge, however, no researchers have examined the prospective value of dreams that are first experienced as aversive or upsetting. Marion had her ―approval‖ dream in the midst of a transition, three years after her husband‘s death. Having decided to move closer to her daughter and her family, Marion dreamed that Tommy, while standing next to her, said, ―You are lucky to have the stamp of approval to achieve and to go on.‖ The dream affirmed for Marion that her decision was the right one in the context of her growing sense of a spiritual calling, once again echoing the finding of Zwilecki (2011) that encounters can augment one‘s religious beliefs. “Taking-a-Journey” and “Daily-Activity” Dreams Marion also experienced an interesting variation on what Garfield coined as a ―Taking-a- Journey‖ dream, usually occurring in the phase of ―disorganization,‖ in which the dead embark on a trip or a journey. Similar to her aforementioned ―gift‖ dream featuring unwrapped presents, Marion dreamed that Tommy took her on a trip to heaven, which consisted of an array of buildings interconnected by channels of water. The dreams, which Marion experienced later in her process of grief and mourning, coincided with the emergence of her calling and Tommy‘s role as a spiritual guide. In contrast to the dreams of heaven, though temporally intermixed with them, Marion also had what Garfield refers to as ―Daily-Activity‖ dreams, in which the dead perform the mundane routines in which they regularly engaged when alive. In one such dream, Marion recalled, she and Tommy were driving the truck to the store as they had often done together before he died. Her dreams of Tommy and her doing ―normal things‖ accorded with her notion that in losing a person you begin to see ―all the things that [they] touched,‖ ―little things‖ that ―weren‘t going to be there anymore‖ that you have to grieve.

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“Prophetic” Dreams Perhaps because they may be less typical for the bereaved, ―Prophetic‖ dreams do not appear in Garfield‘s typology. However, two of four participants in this study—Hannah and Marion—reported prophetic dreams. For Marion in particular, prophetic dreams were central to how she framed her bereavement experience. The ―Tommy ‘56‖ dream she had three weeks before his death appeared strongly suggestive of his fate, so much so that Marion attempted to persuade him to ―slow down,‖ and failing that, prepared herself for the worst, which ultimately served to buffer initially against the shock and pain of her loss. More specifically, Marion had been assuaged by the belief that God had issued the message to her through the dream, and that Tommy‘s death was part of ―His plan.‖ In other words, the dream, and subsequent experiences conveyed to her an intelligible, albeit mysterious, religious framework in which to grieve the loss of her husband. Marion had her second prophetic dream on the eve of what would have been Tommy‘s 57th birthday, four months after he died. In the dream, Tommy turned into ―a small, petite, young blonde woman,‖ in the elementary school where he once taught. Marion interpreted the dream as ―his teaching spirit had been passed on to someone else‖ and ―a couple months later [she] found out that the woman who took his place was a small, petite, young blonde woman.‖ Whereas the first dream pointed to an intelligible context for his departure from the world, the second signaled his return as a continuing, spiritual presence. For Marion, meeting his replacement, who resembled the woman in her dream, confirmed to her that this was so. Taken together, the dream and the synchronicity served to illuminate for Marion a specific context to which Tommy‘s presence had been relocated following his death. The finding of prophetic dreams among two participants is especially noteworthy in that prophetic dreams are not mentioned in Garfield‘s work, one of very few studies of bereavement dreams. To my knowledge, then, this type of dream and its relationship to the grieving process is an open and unexplored area of inquiry. Researchers might examine prophetic dreams both in terms of their phenomenology and role in the meaning making process for the bereaved. Regarding the former, Marion almost immediately had a strong conviction that her dreams were prophetic, whereas Hannah had initially responded skeptically. One factor underlying this difference may be the spiritual and religious beliefs of the dreamer. Indeed, Marion construed the Tommy ‘56 dream as a message from God and described the dream of Tommy and the ―blonde woman‖ in terms of his ―teaching spirit,‖ which may have accounted for her conviction of their

211 veracity. Still though, the question remains—what aspects of those particular dreams contributed to their prophetic nature? Additionally, Hannah and Marion‘s experiences with prophetic dreams point to qualitative differences in the meaning making process. Whereas Hannah‘s ―cup‖ dream had meaning retrospectively, Marion engaged in a prospective process of meaning making, insofar as she actively sought out connections to her dreams. Insofar as prophetic dreams and synchronicity cohere, arguably, neither with traditional religious nor modern, secular beliefs, future narrative researchers might examine how the bereaved incorporate such experiences, if at all, into their belief systems. Dream Characteristics, Complexity, and Possibility The encounter dreams reported by the women in this study evoked several categories of Garfield‘s typology, which suggests its utility in distinguishing common dreams in bereavement. However, I often had difficulty placing each dream into a single category, a finding that points to a greater complexity than that implied by Garfield‘s typology. Thus, one limitation of this scheme is the reduction of dream content to a single, prevailing feature, such as the dead appearing alive again. To supplement this typology, future researchers could examine bereavement dreams by way of rich, detailed descriptions of the experience that capture all of its characteristics. This approach would preserve to a fuller extent the phenomenological context of the dream, particularly the idiosyncratic and contradictory elements. In addition, this methodology would accord with the notion of grief as a dynamic process, insofar as bereavement dreams can be seen as a medium of possibility rather than one of actuality. In this view, researchers would be able to discern the capacity of bereavement dreams to present imaginative alternatives for the dreamer‘s grief and relation to the significant dead. This last point, distinguishing the dream as a medium of possibility from one of actuality, sets the stage for Garfield‘s claim that the type of bereavement dream corresponds directly to phases of grief and mourning. Here, Garfield assumes a temporal continuity, and one-to-one correspondence, of dreaming with grief. Though the dream is purported to elucidate the status of one‘s grief, the general view tends to be that the character of grief ultimately determines that of the dream. Given the causal role ascribed to grief in dreaming, the dream is therefore constructed as a mirror for waking experience. Yet, adding to the basic finding that the bereavement dreams herein did not always map onto the phases of grief and mourning, the phenomenology and

212 significance of the dreams at times diverged significantly from waking experiences of participants. The first example of this finding is Liza‘s ―goodbye‖ dream that she experienced concurrently with her father‘s death. In the dream, she recalled feeling a sense of ―closure‖ after they mutually affirm one another, and she gives him permission to pass on from this world to the next. Inasmuch as her dream is followed by a long period of grief, in which Liza sought to realize her ―father‘s wish‖ for her, one might view her exchange with him in the dream as presenting a possibility for some kind of closure that she had not yet attained. Indeed, much of Liza‘s grieving process consists of pursuing her father‘s ―wish for [her],‖ albeit with an increasing level of awareness and attention to what she wants for herself. Thus, the dream doesn‘t so much grant Liza what she wishes for—to feel deeply affirmed by her father—as clearly present the wish itself in the form of an exchange with him. Similarly, Hannah‘s ―approval-disapproval‖ dream of her mother conveyed an irreconcilable difference between the two that Hannah struggled to accept for much of her life. Thus, the dream presented her with the possibility of differentiating from her mother, and that doing so might allow her to ―move forward.‖ In the context of her grief, however, the dream did not manifest at a time when Hannah felt ready to ―move forward.‖ On the contrary, she had the dream upon asking her mother for help, doubting her ability to make a decision on her mother‘s behalf. Though the brevity and message of the dream is not necessarily what she ―wanted,‖ it seems to point her in a fruitful direction. In this way, the image of the dream, Ruth‘s words to Hannah, created a context in which her grief could be transformed. These findings suggest that bereavement dreams can be anticipatory and potentially transformational with regard to the grieving process of the dreamer. In therapeutic practice, then, dreamwork focusing on these elements might aid the bereaved in exploring multiple implications of the dream images for his or her grief, identity, and ongoing relation to the significant dead. Moreover, by involving the dead, such as Marion‘s dreams of Tommy urging her on to New York, the bereaved can have the experience of re-building their lives while still feeling accompanied by their loved ones. Type and Quality of Relationship and Dreams In terms of the relationship of the bereaved to the dead, the study included the loss of a father, a mother, a grandfather, and a husband. Garfield‘s (1996) findings regarding the type of relationship—specifically, the loss of a parent, grandparent, and spouse—and bereavement

213 dreams were consistent with the participants‘ experiences. In particular, encounters with the dead manifested in the context of Liza‘s awareness of her own mortality, Hannah‘s incipient sense of orphanhood, Rachel‘s idealized view of Tommy, and Marion‘s experience of dismemberment, the loss cutting ―a chunk out of the center‖ of her life (Garfield, 1996, p. 208). In the following paragraphs, I will elaborate the association between the type of relationship and the bereavement dreams reported by the participants. Liza and Hannah, reeling from the loss of a parent, both recalled having disturbing nightmares and dreams that elicited intense anxiety. Additional commonalities between them included the circumstances surrounding the death of each parent and the nature of the parent- child relationship. First, Liza‘s father and Hannah‘s mother, at the time of their deaths, were both comatose and unable communicate. Second, one could view the sets of parent-child relationships as characteristically ambivalent. To this point, researchers have that noted that more distressing encounter experiences have been associated with ambivalent feelings toward the dead (Parker, 2005; Tyson-Rawson, 1996). Moreover, Liza and Hannah expressed feeling dependent on parents who were emotionally inexpressive. In their respective narratives, Liza, for example, posed the question, ―Why is it hard to talk to dad,‖ and Hannah likewise said of her mother, ―I really want to know how she felt.‖ If we were to construe relational intimacy as affording a kind of fluency for the emotional textures of grief, then Liza and Hannah‘s bereavement dreams convey the compounded difficulty of articulating what it meant for them to grieve persons with whom they rarely discussed feelings. For instance, in contrast to the nightmares of her mother, Hannah‘s dreams of her father demonstrate this fluency insofar as his presence and actions serve to contain and meaningfully structure her grief. Although attachment theory has been empirically linked with continuing bonds in general, I am not aware of any research examining the quality of attachment and dream phenomenology for the bereaved. This constitutes a promising area of research with important implications for clinical practice, presumable with more complicated forms of grief. With regard to the theme of dependency, Liza and Hannah‘s dreams and nightmares presented an interesting reversal, inasmuch as they were placed in the role of caregiver. In Liza‘s dream, her father appears as a baby whom she cradles in her arms, whereas in Hannah‘s nightmares she is her mother‘s charge and soothsayer in the hearse, funeral, and anonymous room where her mother is held against her will. One can view these dreams and nightmares as

214 not only symbolic of the events and dynamics preceding the death of Liza and Hannah‘s parents, but also anticipatory of navigating a future in which the parent figure is absent. These findings accord with the notion of dreaming as indicative of an anticipatory and prospective process. Although Rachel experienced only one dream of her grandfather, it was highly significant for her inasmuch as it presented the possibility of a continuing relationship with him. Her Papaw‘s appearance as an embracing set of arms suggested how their living relationship had focused mainly on Rachel, cultivated her growth, and provided her an enormous source of security. Further, the dream had tremendous embodied significance for Rachel insofar as she felt as if her Papaw had held her, and continued to do so even years after the dream. From the very beginning of their relationship, Marion said, Tommy had been the one person with whom she could talk. More specifically, in the context of her interpersonal world, the relationship with Tommy was an exceptional one given that she frequently assumed the role of caregiver to others, who, when in need, would talk to Marion. In an interesting variation on Liza and Hannah‘s predicament, Marion experienced the compounded difficulty of grieving the one person with whom she discussed her feelings. Thus, his appearance in her dreams was a great source of comfort. Though he would sometimes offer Marion words of reassurance and strength, more typically he would comfort her through his presence, lying with her in bed or hugging her. Insofar as Marion construed her dreams of Tommy‘s presence as manifestations of his spirit and soul, she referred to these encounters as instances of ―soul talk.‖ In the four years that elapsed between his death and my interview with Marion, she dreamed of him continuously and frequently, even when she expected the dreams to end. Encounter Dreams and Semblance All four women had at least one dream in which they experienced the encounter with the dead as real. For Liza, the encounters constituted ―a special occurrence‖ and ―religious-type‖ event, in which her father‘s ―actual self‖ visited her. Hannah similarly characterized her ―approval‖ dream of her mother as feeling like ―real contact.‖ Rachel‘s encounter with her Papaw suggested that ―he‘s here‖ and can ―speak through‖ her dreams. Marion described her encounters with her husband as a form of ―soul talk,‖ insofar as she situated his continuing presence ―in [her] soul,‖ where he is ―still connected and watching.‖ The dreams that the women experienced as actual visitations were also semi-lucid in that the dreamer had the awareness that her loved one had died. However, rather than diminishing the reality of the encounter, it seemed

215 as if this death awareness brought the dream into more vivid relief, and thereby enhanced its significance for the dreamer. In my analysis of Marion‘s dream encounters, I presented the concept of semblance, which, in brief, refers to the manifestation of apparent form, when the reality of that form is known to be different. Fitting this definition to the subject at hand, images of the dead, apparent forms, appear against the backdrop of death, the reality acknowledged through the dreamer‘s awareness that the loved one has died. Here, imaginal presence is superimposed upon the recognition of physical absence. However, the reality of death, though it haunts the dream, does not prevail for the dreamer, for they experience encounters with the dead as visitations. Thus semblance, as applied to the encounter dreams here, is better described as the manifestation of significant form, because what the dream presents refutes what the dreamer claims to know. The significance arises from this very contrast, but flows mainly from the sensuous immediacy of the dead, who, in most cases, seemed to have paid a highly unexpected visit to the dreamer. At the same time, though the dead carry a robust reality for the dreamer, the forms in which they appear can diverge markedly from that which they assumed in life. This peculiar feature of the dream allows the dreamer to de-literalize the manner with which they‘ve previously related to the dead. By presenting loved ones as significant, peculiar forms—Liza‘s father the laughing baby, Hannah‘s mother with green skin, Marion‘s husband lying prone on the nightstand or on the ground, outside of a restaurant—encounter dreams can disrupt the habitual ways that the bereaved once viewed their loved ones. In this way, the dead are presented as patently imaginal figures rather than the literal father, mother, or husband the bereaved related to in life. Thus, encounter dreams can recast the relationship in imaginal terms. I have proposed the paradoxical notion of semblance to address the general question of why the bereaved experience dream encounters with the dead as visitations. Future research in grief and dream phenomenology could further examine the validity of this construct and its contributions to the experience of lifelikeness, particularly the role of the dreamer‘s death awareness. In addition, all of the participants consistently reported encounter dreams in which they inhabited the dream space, as dream figures themselves, with the significant dead. Whether this adds to the verisimilitude, vividness, or emotional intensity of the encounter dream is another interesting research question. Finally, I suggested that dreaming of the dead in odd or unusual forms or spatial orientations can have a ―de-naturalizing‖ effect on the dreamer‘s

216 habitual apprehensions of him or her, and thus facilitate shifts in the grieving process. Future inquiry might explore the relationship between this kind of dream phenomenology and the dreamer‘s previously held expectations of the dead and their relationship. Mythic Aspects of Grief and Mourning Having covered the primary focus of the work, encounters with the dead in dreams and nightmares, I now shall broaden the context of the discussion to include lived experiences of grief by way of a mythic framework. This move is consistent with the imaginative method, mythic reversion, I have employed throughout the study (Hillman, 1979a). To reacquaint the reader, the crux of this method is to discern archetypal images in the text, in this case images of bereavement, and establish resonances not only among the images, but with mythic persons, places, and plots. Here, I will briefly review the mythic figures and themes with which I interpreted the three grief narratives. First, by connecting Liza‘s artistic ambitions to the flight of Icarus, I aimed to amplify the meaning of her descent and dwelling ―under the rubble,‖ key images in her grief. Secondly, I approached Hannah‘s nightmares and grief, which she described as distressing, confusing, and characterized by longing, in terms of the ―mad desire‖ springing from the Artemis-puer tandem. Through this mythic configuration, I developed variations on the theme of love‘s wages and wagers, in life and death, culminating in the notion of archetypal yearning as pothos, and its bearing on transgenerational mourning amidst parental loss. Last, the participatory, imaginative, and dialogical dimensions of Marion and Rachel‘s grief suggested to me a Dionysion style of mourning, whose healing aspects were encapsulated by Marion‘s notion of ―soul talk.‖ In this section, I shall delineate three mythic metaphors—grief as underworld, grief as performance, grief as liminality—that illuminate both the processes and nuances of grief and mourning for the four bereaved women. As I did with the narrative analyses, I shall establish a dialectic between the bereavement images and the myths to which they bear likeness. To conclude, I shall address the significance of the mythic metaphor for our understanding of the grief process. Grief, Hades, and the Underworld In Greek mythology, the underworld is known as the kingdom of the dead, the afterlife for souls separated from the body in death. It is a cold, desolate, and shadowy realm, where souls, without body or sense, appear as inky, insubstantial phantoms roaming about: ―Vague and

217 fluttering spirits, with all the pursuits, passions, and prejudices they had while alive, drift aimlessly and joylessly in the gloom; the light and hope and vigor of the upper world are gone‖ (Morford & Lenardon, 2007, p. 355). So too are the dead dispossessed of other hallmarks of the ―upper world‖—change, development, progress; rather, they appear as frozen forms, fixed by the incursion of death (Albinus, 2000). The underworld is governed by Hades, the god of the dead, whose ―confrontation with [the upper world] is experienced as a violence, a violation‖ insofar as he drags the living into his realm below (Hillman, 1979a, p.27). The bereavement images reported by Liza, Hannah, Rachel, and Marion depicted grief as a rending, oppressive, and disorienting experience. The loss of Liza‘s father ―shattered her bubble,‖ and ―crumbled‖ her ―framework.‖ For Hannah, she experienced her acknowledgement of Ruth‘s death as a ―punch‖ that ―knocked the breath out of‖ her. Rachel characterized her Papaw‘s death as an emotionally painful separation insofar as they had a ―deep connection.‖ After almost 40 years of marriage, Marion and Tommy were like ―one person‖; therefore, his death felt ―like somebody ripped off [her] arm and [her] leg.‖ All of these accounts signify the violent, rending, and embodied nature of grief and loss. In particular, the images offered by Liza and Marion show a continuity between metaphors used to characterized the relationship and the experience of grief. Insofar as Liza imagined her father affording her a ―framework,‖ grief is experienced as a ―crumbled‖ structure. Likewise, if the image of symbiotic wholeness characterized Marion‘s living relationship with Tommy, then his death tears her in ―half.‖ These images exemplify the jarring violence that can accompany the experience of death and loss, imagined here as Hades‘ intrusion into the upper world, pulling the living down into the underworld. In addition, images of descent and submergence into darkness were commonly invoked. Rachel referred to her grief as ―a dive into this huge, muddy pit of things. It was dark. It like held you. It held you back‖ whereas Liza felt ―buried under a lot of rubble, like a building had collapsed.‖ In both of these images, grief is imagined as a dark, oppressive place by virtue of the bereaved feeling pulled or weighed down, into a ―huge, muddy pit‖ or ―under a lot of rubble,‖ respectively. Given these rich descriptions, one can view their experiences in terms of particularized images of a depressed place in which they found themselves, rather than simply a depressed mood. This distinction is important, for the experience of depression is typically construed as being inside of the person and devoid of images or meaning. For Liza and Rachel,

218 the depressed places that they inhabited had an air of stasis, and estrangement with regard to their sense of identity. Liza, in particular, recalled knowing that she would ―not see [herself] for two years,‖ and when meeting new people, describing herself as she was prior to her father‘s death, even while she no longer felt connected to that person. These images signify the entry of the bereaved, after the loss of a loved one, into the underworld, where they become like the dead—adrift, frozen, and cut-off from the vigor of the upper world. In regards to space and time, the participants expressed the overwhelming and disorienting nature of their losses through images of negative space. For Liza, her father‘s death constituted a ―gap in the world,‖ ―a space where something should be but isn‘t,‖ both of which are experienced by Liza and her family as ―a wound.‖ Likewise, Hannah expressed that the loss of her mother, and of her parents by implication, represent ―a huge hole,‖ ―a big gap,‖ insofar as her children will never know their grandparents, and she will have to live the second half of her life without her parents. Lamenting the latter, Hannah imagined herself as ―a boat that‘s lost its moorings.‖ In her grief, then, she is set adrift in the absence of a family that once anchored her. I have imagined these images as a nexus of the upper world and underworld, which I later shall expound in connection with Hermes, insofar as the bereaved experience the world and grief in terms of negative spaces and the fragmentation of time. From a mythic perspective, what significance can dwelling in the underworld have for the bereaved? Perhaps more than any other participant, Liza‘s narrative is instructive in addressing this question, for she acknowledged feeling as if she had died herself—that indeed grief signified a double death. Rather than literal death, the process of death and dying experienced by the bereaved had been metaphorical in nature. In the wake of loss, they reckoned with images previously taken for granted, not only of the dead, but also of their sense of identity and purpose in life. This particular finding, images roused by death, accords with Hades‘ status as ruler of ―hidden presences,‖ (Hillman, 1979a, p. 28) that which is invisible in the upper world, yet visible in the underworld. Marion‘s description of grief illustrates well this way of seeing: ―You know you lost a person and then that starts it, but then you start seeing all the things that he touches— oh, there‘s a lot of things that I have to grieve.‖ In a similar vein, Rachel expressed a felt sense of this perspective, ―I can be really, really happy in a situation, but I can also have… [in the] background…a solemn or even…sad kind of feeling.‖ Hannah‘s loss and nightmares show how underworld images can reverberate with unanswerable and haunting questions, such as ―What

219 does it mean when you fall apart?‖ This idiosyncratic style of seeing casts upon the upper world a ghostly, melancholic, and morbid ―dark‖ light, illuminating the hidden desire still lingering within love‘s shadow. Grief as a descent into the underworld has critical implications with regard to our contemporary psychiatric discourse, namely, the manner in which grief is defined in relation to depression. With the removal of the bereavement exclusion from the DSM-V, persons still experiencing grief as few as two weeks after a loss can be diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder. Ironically, then, grief is defined as having a very short life by these standards. By contrast, however, grief as descent suggests a much longer, in-depth trajectory. Indeed, all of the participants reported a process of grief that extended over years, and importantly, that the suffering they experienced held great significance with regard to transformations in their sense of self, relationship with the dead, and view of life‘s meaning. Future narrative inquiry, then, might serve as a counterpoint to this psychiatric discourse, not by championing the suffering of grief, but revealing that it is far from devoid of meaning. On grieving her husband, Marion said, you start to see ―all the things that [they] touche[d],‖ down to the ―little things.‖ Her statement gestures to the textures of loss, insofar as the dead are experienced as absent in the life spaces in which they were once present with the bereaved. Narrative inquiry has the capacity to represent these idiosyncratic textures of grief, while promoting our understanding of their meaning for the bereaved. Similarly, counselors and therapists working with the bereaved might encourage the bereaved to tell ―big‖ and ―small‖ stories of their relationship with the deceased (Freeman, 2010). Whereas ―big‖ stories would encompass the course of the relationship, ―small‖ stories would entail a narration of more localized, routine events and activities, such as weekly trips to the grocery store. Thus, ―small‖ stories correspond to the ―little things‖ alluded to by Marion and my notion of the textures of grief. Likewise, Liza, Hannah, and Rachel shared ―small‖ stories— Liza watching her dad stapling his thumb together, Hannah playing a board game with Ruth, Tommy teaching basketball to Rachel—that strongly evoked the meaning of their relationships. Grief, Dionysos, and Performance In conjunction with Marion and Rachel‘s narrative, I wrote a short but comprehensive overview of the mythemes associated with Dionysos; here, however, I wish to focus on one in particular, Dionysos as the god of drama and theatricality, as it pertains to the notion of performance in grief. In the images of Dionysos adorning ancient cups and vases, he sometimes

220 appears between a set of large eyes gazing outward, which signifies his association with masks, roles, and identity. But as Paris points out (1990a), ―Dionysos is not the God behind the mask. He is the mask‖ (p. 49). Here, I shall discuss the ―roles‖ of Dionysos as they manifested in relation to the dead and the bereaved. Liza‘s narrative illustrates how the bereaved may perform, knowingly and unknowingly, images of the dead in grief and mourning. To this point, Mogenson (1992) has said, ―Their unsung ghosts, lingering on…are the invisible medium through which we see.‖ Thus, images of the dead can become masks through which the bereaved see and experience the world. This kind of performance can be problematic for the bereaved. Liza‘s enactment of her father‘s image in the context of work amounted to playing a part that she later recognized as ―preposterous.‖ I understood the quality of her performance along two dimensions—her awareness of the act and the congruence of the role with her self-image. Liza seemed to suffer most when she sought to emulate her father without knowing she was doing so, and played roles unfamiliar to her as epitomized by her work as a modeling agent. In relation to this experience, Hillman (1983b) observes that an awareness of one‘s performance is critical, ―The essence of theater is knowing it is theater, that one is playing, enacting, miming in reality that is completely a fiction‖ (p. 39). This suggests that performance in itself is not antithetical to healing—rather, for performances to be healing, they must be played knowingly. For Liza, she ultimately did craft a more effective performance—a ―deliberate act‖ that honored her father by incorporating parts of him that ―made sense‖ for her. Here, Liza demonstrated awareness of the stage and a nuanced, practiced approach to the part she wishes to play in retaining her father‘s presence in her life. In a similar fashion, Hannah and her mother participated in a recurring, imaginal drama involving life and death, albeit on the stage of her nightmares. Time and again, Hannah dreamed of encounters with her mother in funereal and deathly settings, ―trying to tell her that she‘s dead and she‘s not listening.‖ Hannah interpreted her nightmares as dramatically re-enacting the final moments of her mother‘s life, a scene in which she played a ―silent‖ role that she later regretted, for it cast her mother as an unknowing victim of death. In Hannah‘s view, therefore, Ruth‘s appearance as ―dead-alive‖ was owing to her mother being suspended between life and death. And yet, as Hannah began to question, ―I didn‘t do anything wrong. I did just what she wanted. She knew this was likely to happen. And, I know she was comfortable, so I think the unfinished business would have been with me.‖ The reversibility of her notion of ―unfinished business‖

221 speaks to Hannah‘s role in the living relationship, one where she often had to imagine what her mother was feeling in the absence of emotional expression. In grief, then, her nightmares manifested in both the emotional and physical absence of her mother. Thus, the imaginal drama of Hannah‘s grief, as exemplified by her nightmares, involved differentiating the boundaries between her and Ruth, and in the context of grief, the living and the dead. Whereas the foregoing reflections on identity pertain to the relationship of the bereaved with the significant dead, I now shall discuss the role of grief in re-visioning the identity of the bereaved more generally. In the context of grief as an underworld experience, Liza and Marion came to identify and shed habitual ways of performing the self, and this process, while a painful reckoning, proved to be highly illuminating. For Liza, her experiences ―under the rubble,‖ and related stasis of identity, paved the way for an in-depth, critical examination of the values and beliefs that had previously undergirded her aspirations and self-view. From the perspective of her father‘s death, and an appreciation of her own mortality, she found that she ―could no longer really operate as [her] own artistic…selfish development mattered,‖ and that her previous approach to life could no longer ―support itself.‖ For Liza, this process entailed not only deep reflection, but ―a call to action‖; therefore, the possibilities borne out of this experience were linked to the assumption of greater responsibility. Prior to the death of her husband, Marion identified as ―being a mover and a doer,‖ and a lifelong caretaker for others. The stillness of grief, and her attempts to fight it, revealed for Marion her association of value with work and productivity, for she experienced herself as useless in the absence of accomplishing tangible goals. The ―work‖ of grief for her, she realized, was to learn to embrace the unknown and stillness, and to discern the value of not ―doing.‖ In addition, through her experiences of being alone in grief, she gained new perspectives with regard to her role as caretaker, and the healing aspects of solitude. Through the lens of grief and loss, Liza and Marion were able to ―see-through‖ the habitual role structures that they once had taken for granted as self-evident, and thereby experienced greater depth and flexibility as related to their being-in-the-world. Here, I invoke the Dionysian perspective to illuminate the provisional nature of identity and the roles we play in our daily relations. On the liberating aspect of Dionysos, Hillman (1983b) has said, ―Healing begins when we move out of the audience and onto the stage of psyche, become characters in a fiction…and as the drama intensifies, the catharsis occurs; we are purged from attachments to literal destinies, find freedom in playing

222 parts, partial, dismembered, Dionysian never being whole but participating in the whole that is a play, remembered by it as actor of it‖ (p. 38). I employed the mythic metaphor of Dionysos to explore the themes of identity and performance in the grieving process of the participants. Liza‘s performance of her father‘s image replicated the findings of previous studies, in which the bereaved take on characteristics of the dead (Lindemann, 1944). Her experiences have implications for therapeutic practice in highlighting a potential pitfall of the continuing bond, namely, that enacting unknowingly images of the dead can elicit feelings of shame for the bereaved. Initial grief work, then, might proceed by identifying the most salient characteristics and values of the loved one and a deliberate process of choosing which of these attributes, if any, the bereaved wish to incorporate into their self-image. In addition, qualitative researchers might also study the process by which the bereaved negotiate their identities with that of the deceased, and the variety of ways the bereaved honor their loved one. Another dimension of the Dionysian metaphor pertained to the ways the bereaved performed grief in social contexts. In contrast to her relationship with Marion, Rachel in particular talked about wearing ―a mask‖ around her friends, effectively hiding her grief from view. The other participants assumed a similar standpoint, which resulted in a relatively private experience of grief as well as the death and dying process as in Liza and Hannah‘s narratives. In light of our cultural attitude towards death, dying, and grief, one arguably characterized by denial and heroic antagonism, future research might focus on how the expression and telling of grief narratives vary depending on the context and audience. Preliminary research in this area suggests that the bereaved tended to shift to a materialist discourse with strangers for fear of being judged or ridiculed (Bennett & Bennett, 2000), a finding that is consistent with Rachel‘s pattern of omitting her dream and waking encounters from her story when talking with people who seemed inhospitable to spirituality or religion. Grief, Hermes, and the Liminal While I have not explicitly invoked Hermes thus far in the work, he has certainly lingered in the background throughout, which is fitting insofar as he is the mediator of margins, including life and death. Now, with Hermes as my messenger, I wish to thematically situate this final section in the margins, borderlands, and liminal spaces of grief and mourning in order to contrast my findings with models that seek to reduce the scope and complexity of bereavement. For grief

223 and mourning, based on the four stories told to me, represents a long, often circular process of transitions, a de-structuring and re-structuring of lives. One key to understanding the significance of Hermes for grief is his relation to Hades, god of the underworld and invisibles. As Paris (1990b) observes, ―Hermes made a deal with the God Hades, guardian of the dead. He would lead souls to their final resting place and keep the register of the dead, and in return Hades would lend him the cap of invisibility‖ (p. 112). Thus, Hermes‘ connection with the underworld and essence as intermediary points to his role in navigating the passage between the upper world and underworld as well as the modes of ―seeing‖ that are associated with these two mythic places. Whereas the myth has Hermes‘ serving as guide for souls both into and out of the underworld, I shall concentrate on the latter to highlight both the quandaries and transformations associated with the experience of grief. Specifically, I shall frame grief as the simultaneity of presence and absence, and evocative of questions of pertaining to purpose as the bereaved rebuild their lives. In my commentary on the significance of the underworld, I introduced an aspect of grief in which the invisible, meaning the absence of the dead, is prominently visible for the bereaved. Though this unique mode of seeing has a base in the underworld, I here wish to elaborate it as a kind of hermetic perception, a double vision of presence and absence, in that the bereaved view the upper world through the lens of loss: ―The absent object, precisely by virtue of being absent, is no longer what we see but how we see. Perception is a nostalgic phenomenon; there is a longing in it, a longing which causes us to see what‘s ‗out there‘ in terms of what is no longer ‗out there‘ at all‖ (Mogenson, 1992, p. 7). I venture that it is by this hermetic perception that Liza and Hannah envisioned ―gaps,‖ signifying not just the absence of the dead in the present, but a dying out of images with which they projected the future—Liza‘s father walking her down the aisle on her wedding day, or Hannah‘s mother playing board games with her grandchildren. Marion began to recognize and grieve the routine events and places of the past that she and her husband had shared—reading the newspaper in bed, or driving to the truck to the store. For Rachel, milestones and celebratory occasions had now taken on a solemn tone in recognizing her Papaw‘s absence. Yet, Liza also experienced her father‘s presence in ―new beginnings,‖ whereas Hannah saw characteristics of her mother in her children. Marion experienced Tommy as a guide on her spiritual calling and in seeing a hawk in the sky ―riding the wind.‖ Rachel‘s tattoo of angel

224 wings, an embodied image, represented for her both the emotional pain of grief and loss, and the reassuring presence of her Papaw as a ―guardian angel.‖ Taken together, the aforementioned places, events, and objects allowed the bereaved to retain a meaningful, albeit bittersweet, connection to the dead. I imagined this experience of presence, absence, and yearning as an afterlife of signifiers—meaningful traces of the dead continued to live on in and through these symbolic vessels. Like gravestones marking burial plots, they afforded the bereaved a means to grieve and feel accompanied by the dead. Drawing from Heideggerian thought, Palmer (2001) regards the messages of Hermes, messages importantly borne out of transitional spaces, as ―fateful tidings‖ and ―world-shaking,‖ insofar as they effect a ―transformation of thinking‖ (p. 3). In all four of the grief narratives, the bereaved were indeed shaken deeply to the core by loss, and for Liza and Marion, so much so that their lives collapsed in the wake of it. The most dramatic arcs were depicted in the narratives of these two women, whose grief consisted of compounded losses and marked transformations in the realms of vocation, values, and identity as they gradually emerged from their respective experiences of the underworld. In addition, each set upon an altered life course that was influenced directly by the double deaths, literal and symbolic, that they encountered in their grief and loss. In the wake of loss, Liza transitioned from ambitious artist to compassionate healer, whereas Marion‘s overarching perspective on life changed from one of ―doing‖ to ―being.‖ To be sure, in so profoundly affecting the course of their lives, Liza and Marion regarded grief as ―fateful.‖ Additionally, Hermes as intermediary continued to characterize these ―fateful‖ transformations insofar as Liza and Marion described a process of needing to reconcile and integrate who they were with who they were becoming. Hermes, then, personifies this notion of being ―in between‖ two identities or stations in life, while having an awareness of each. Importantly, all four women eventually expressed their grief in terms of the future, and what it would mean to live on with the significant dead. Often, this process took the form of questions pertaining to purpose and honoring the dead, which had an ambiguous, open-ended, and searching quality befitting Hermes. Although impelled by death and loss, such questions of purpose and honoring the dead were ultimately placed in the context of life, and addressed to retaining company with the dead while still moving forward. I turned to the myth of Hermes to elaborate the phenomenology of presence and absence of the significant dead and the ―fateful‖ transformations experienced by the bereaved as they

225 sought to rebuild their lives, albeit in accord with significantly altered values, aims, and views on life. For each of the participants, the end of their grief story marked the beginning of a new story, one in which they juxtaposed the memory of loss with a new life purpose. Future narrative studies might examine this process five, ten, twenty years from the time of the loved one‘s death to understand how the bereaved continue to be meaningfully influenced by significant loss and integrate the experience into their lives. Reflections on the Work From the perspective of the ―wounded researcher,‖ I now shall shift the focus of the discussion to my implicit aims, or as Romanyshyn (2007) puts it, my ―complex presence to the work,‖ (p. 136) and consider the ways that I shaped the inquiry, and the inquiry shaped me. I am ending what has been a labor of love for me, not just as a qualitative researcher, but as a person deeply affected by the experience of grief and loss. Moreover, I am bidding farewell to a set of living stories in which I have been long immersed, and seeking to reconcile what I have said with what I had not or could not say. Here, then, I offer several reflections on how the research process affected my views, limitations and avenues for future inquiry, and a reflexive evaluation of the narrative collages that I assembled. To conclude, I shall provide an overview of ―mythobiography‖ as a promising methodology for qualitative research. First and foremost, I conceived of and embarked on this project while ensnared myself in a myth. As I revealed in the introduction and method sections, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice resonates with a significant turning point in my own autobiography, namely the death of my sister Amy, whose absence, or presence in retrospect, continued to haunt me in the years leading up to this work. The spontaneity with which I arrived at this general area of study, in the presence of my family no less, and my identification of Amy‘s central role all comprised my ―complex‖ relation to what I aspired to research. Therefore, throughout the research process as well as my clinical training, I worked to more consciously discern the various dimensions of my relationship with Amy and its bearing on the work. In content and tone, the introduction to the study reflected my initial set of assumptions and values concerning our continuing relationship with the dead. In particular, I argued strongly against modern conceptions of grief and mourning that prescribe a relinquishment of ties with the dead, and, in doing so, implicitly posited that continuing bonds were preponderantly, if not inherently, healing for the bereaved. Although I retain the stance that a continuing relationship

226 can enrich and deepen grief and mourning, I have moved away from the antagonism that I originally imagined—between the modern view and a more ―embracing‖ alternative. Having identified my limited connection with my sister in the years following her death, I now can recognize the personal experiences that contributed to my polemic against the ―breaking of bonds‖ discourse. Furthermore, in regards to the work itself, Liza and Hannah‘s grief and encounter experiences problematized the ideal notion of a continuing bond, particularly when the relationship is characteristically incommunicative and ambivalent. The enactment and ―pathologized‖ imagery (Hillman, 1975) of the dead, while ultimately setting the stage for subsequent insights and transformations, were experienced by these women as shameful and disturbing, precipitating crises of meaning. Therefore, it may be more accurate to characterize the continuing relationship as more conundrum than ―cure,‖ for even when encounters with the dead afforded comfort and reassurance, navigating the ambivalence of presence and absence of the dead constituted a challenging and extended process for the bereaved. On a related point, I presumed, somewhat simplistically, that the encounter experiences would link directly to meaningful and lasting transformations in the grieving process. Although bereavement dreams held great significance, insofar as they were experienced as visitations, and played a healing role, they were only a part of a larger process of grieving underlying the narrative arcs. That said, for all four women, the significance of dreams as a potential space in which to again meet the dead cannot be overstated. More specifically, the presence of the dead often mitigated grief, namely the sorrow of utter absence, in such a way that the bereaved felt accompanied in the experience of loss, ironically, by the very one for whom they grieved. Given that this expectation, so central to my original framing of the study, did not fully bear out raised concerns for me. However, in being forced to let go of it, I cultivated a more nuanced understanding of grief, particularly the experience of stasis, which had been essential to Liza and Marion‘s transformations. Another set of challenges that emerged for me pertained to narrative voice as I assembled the collages and rendered my analyses. In particular, I experienced an ongoing tension in my interpretive stance, insofar as I analyzed the narratives both in terms of (1) privileged and overt and (2) embedded and covert meanings as articulated by the participants in the text (Josselson, 2004). This follows from my underlying assumption that the narrator is simultaneously conscious and unconscious of the story he or she tells. Though I regard these two aspects of

227 interpretation as complementary rather than mutually exclusive, they did create ethical dilemmas for me given the sensitive nature of the research topic and that the narratives of two participants—Liza and Hannah—most exemplified for me how continuing relationships with the dead can pose conflicts for the bereaved in their grieving process. Though each privileged a relatively non-conflictual telling of their narrative, the listening group and I viewed Liza‘s experiences with her dying father and Hannah‘s ambivalent relationship with her mother and nightmares as critical themes. Thus, I chose to include these themes in their respective narrative collages, and explore them further in the subsequent analyses. At the same time, however, in my drawing out this theme I feared that Liza and Hannah might feel offended or betrayed insofar as the conflictual aspects of the relationship did not figure into the preferred view of their loved ones. To complicate matters further, the aforementioned two participants were acquaintances of mine, who I recruited through personal contact. In addition, this theme was also threatening to me as the researcher, in that it countered my somewhat idealistic presumptions regarding the continuing bond. In addressing this dilemma, two aspects of the interpretive process proved beneficial. First, the listening group provided an opportunity to validate, or not, the aforementioned themes and sensitively attend to their nuances. On the one hand, the group process lent convergent validity to the interpretive product insofar as we agreed in our initial impressions, or, after carefully considering alternative perspectives. For instance, we agreed from the outset that Hannah‘s story seemed to have a palpably ambivalent subtext, despite her assertions to the contrary in her narration. However, we disagreed on whether to cast her mother as an antagonist, which, to me, felt too one-sided of a characterization. Through this difference in perspective, I formulated the mythic tandem of Artemis-puer, an interpretive move through which the greater complexity of the relationship was borne out. This example illustrates the important role of ―divergent‖ validity, or disagreement and conflict, for the listening group and the quality of the interpretations that it served. Second, in my representation of the analyses, I strove to rigorously connect my interpretations with the phenomenological descriptions from the narrative text, frequently using the words of the participants to support my claims. Or also, in regards to Marion and Rachel‘s experiences and belief in God, I had reservations about interpreting their grief narratives through an archetypal, polytheistic lens. Again, however, I believe that I rendered an

228 interpretation faithful to both my hermeneutic lens and their experiences by using phenomenology as a bridge for the narrative and mythic elements. My emphasis on archetypal phenomenology leads me to the next point of discussion, namely the limitations of the study. Originally, I conceptualized grief and loss as multiform, meaning that social, communal, and cultural factors presumably contribute to the experiences of the individual, and aimed to have this framework guide my inquiry. In the practice of interviewing, however, I maintained a focus on the phenomenological and relational (to the dead and immediate family/supports) aspects of grief and encounter experiences. In my view, this occurred because (1) the participants primarily narrated their experiences along these lines, and (2) a concern that expanding the scope of analysis could potentially divert from the phenomenological, imaginative dimensions of grief, which can be at odds with these other realms of knowing. By focusing on personal experiences grief, however, I acknowledge that I run the risk of reifying meaning as a highly individualized process, rather than one that is emergent from interactions with a larger life context. To attain a more comprehensive view of grief, I, and other researchers, might allocate more time to the interview process in order to alternate among these distinctive levels of experience, and develop questions that fruitfully evoke relationships between the individual and cultural imagination. Finally, I wish to evaluate the narrative collages in terms of the criteria (Goodall, 2008) that I enumerated at the conclusion of the Method section. Though I believe that the effectiveness of the collages ultimately rests with the experience and critical perspective of the reader, I shall reflect on the degree to which I achieved coherence, experiential anchoring, transference and immersion, a synthesis of intellect and emotion, and finesse. While I primarily approached the narratives in terms of their most salient images, I placed them in dialectic with distinctive arcs that I saw as reflective of the participants‘ grieving process. By discerning and attending to these arcs, I feel like I generally presented coherent stories. That said, Rachel and Marion‘s story was for me most lacking in coherence insofar as I elected to privilege their respective arcs at different times in the story, which may speak to a key shortcoming of presenting somewhat disparate narratives dialogically. I view the second criterion, experiential anchoring, as perhaps the greatest overall virtue of the narrative collages. The participants‘ rich, evocative, and poetic descriptions of their lived experiences constituted the very images by which I structured the collages, and the means by which I and members of the listening group

229 immersed ourselves in the stories. In reading over the collages, particularly Hannah‘s, I feel as if I succeeded in representing the textures of their experiences, and creating evocative openings through which the reader might enter these stories. In regards to balance of tone, I believe that the collages represent both the aesthetic and reflective dimensions of grief and mourning, and more importantly, the interpenetration of these two orders of experience. For the most part, I feel that I demonstrated finesse with regard to transitions. The flow of Rachel and Marion‘s collage, however, at times periodically felt forced due to the fact that I constructed their dialogues from separate sets of interviews. Autobiography and the Imaginal: Mythobiography I now wish to re-summarize my framework and consider the implications of the findings. Based on what I have learned, I next shall chart out a more refined version of this approach, which I refer to as mythobiography, and discuss its application to future inquiry. For this study, I endeavored to learn about the experiences of the bereaved who encounter the dead in dreams, and the storied significance of such encounters amidst grief, and to do so from an archetypal and narrative perspective. I broadly referred to this style of hermeneutics as an ―imagistic approach to narrative,‖ in which I included the specific method of mythic reversion (Hillman, 1979a). In accord with the archetypal perspective, the fundamental premise of my framework was an ontology of the imaginal, or ―a poetic basis of mind‖ (Hillman, 1975, p. xvii), which posits reality as constituted by images. In this sense, images are not just visual depictions, but frames that structure our lived experience—because images refer to not only what we see, but how we see (Casey, 1974), they guide our characteristic ways of being in the world. Furthermore, the notion of image as frame rather than content led me to construe narrative as a matrix of images, insofar as I presumed that the stories we tell reveal our reasons for being, or, the multiple points of view around which the story takes shape. Crucially, however, the archetypal perspective does not regard subjectivity as constitutive of images, but argues, rather, that ego, itself an image, emerges from our being in the world. Though ego consciousness would have us standing apart from reality, Hillman (1975) counters that this dualism of subject and object is an artificial one—rather, he posits, experience is non- dualistic, and moreover, thoroughly imaginative. In seeking to make experience intelligible, ego consciousness, in the epistemological tradition of modern, Western culture, claims to differentiate itself from that which it sees, all the while being immersed in imagination. In this

230 view, because ego does not negate but merely obscures the governing presence and implications of images, in which we constantly participate, ―we are always both conscious and unconscious‖ (Avens, 1980b, p. 75). ―Unconsciousness,‖ then, consists of the images, invisible to us, that pervade ―our viewpoints, ideas, behavior, by means of archetypes‖ (Hillman, 1979b, p. 57). Given these premises, I did not take these stories as tales of self-identity as much as the exposition of a mythical cosmos within which the bereaved narrated their experiences; hence, my use of mythic reversion as a method of amplifying the archetypal background to these storied experiences of grief and loss. Along with a topical interest in the phenomenology of dreams and encounters with the significant dead, I also presumed this kind of experience would constitute an imaginal form of knowing that accorded with my assumptive framework for the study. This dovetailed with my expectation that the encounters would lead to transformations in the grief process. At the very least, I presumed, the mere experience of encountering the dead would be conducive to exploring with participants the imaginative dimensions of their experiences. Just as my framework posits images as ways of seeing, to be sure, the mythic figures and themes that I selected for the analyses and discussion—Icarus, Artemis, the puer aeternus, Dionysos, Apollo, Hades, Hermes—influenced and indeed personified the nature of my findings. However, I want to emphasize they did so in constant dialectic with and deference to phenomenological features of the text, from which they were derived in the first place. For instance, Liza‘s sunny perch in a rooftop pool and painting of Freefall, rendered just prior to her father‘s death, evoked for me the flight of Icarus, and in turn, the listening group and I imagined her experiences with her dying father as a process of Melting. This dialectic between narrative and mythical images enabled me to discern in greater depth the arc of her grief process. In a similar vein, the images of the relationship between Hannah and Ruth resonated with the mythic tandem of Artemis-puer, which then illuminated a set of possibilities for understanding Hannah‘s nightmares and the textures of her longing. Finally, for all four women, a common theme of the rending, dramaturgical, and liminal aspects of grieving evoked for me Hades, Dionysos, and Hermes as mythic frames of imagining that process. I propose that the value of a mythic hermeneutic is that it can serve the dual purpose of grounding and opening up the text, and, by extension, our relation to whatever experiences we so frame. By ―grounding,‖ I mean the capacity of myth to structure seemingly unintelligible, ineffable experiences, while connecting them to broader, archetypal patterns, whereas ―opening

231 up‖ refers to a related capacity for myth to serve as a prism by which multiple interpretive potentials are illuminated in the text. Furthermore, I have chosen the word ―relation‖ because experiences presented mythically can foster our imaginative participation with the text, in that it constitutes a mode of rhetoric that is neither entirely factual in the objective sense, nor fictional in the subjective sense. ―Grounding‖ and ―opening up,‖ as virtues of a mythic method, correspond respectively with Freeman‘s (2006) epistemological and ethical aims for narrative inquiry: ―of increasing knowledge and understanding of the human realm … [while]… increasing sympathy and compassion‖ (p. 142). Whereas grounding can promote a greater knowledge, understanding, and extension of human experience, opening up can attune the reader to the images of the text to the extent that the researcher succeeds in bringing about the metaphorical textures of the story. For this study and one other before it (Schweitzer, 2014), I have exercised this mythic hermeneutic in the narrative genre of autobiography, in which an individual simply tells a story or set of stories about his or her life. I have been particularly interested in life-altering experiences—dreams, callings, death and dying, grief—that serve to challenge the rational, individualistic ego of modern Western culture. More specifically, I have inquired into stories in which extraordinary, presentational (Langer 1942/1963) forms of lived experience relativize the dualistic ego as well as enlarge our relationship to imagination, metaphor, and the sacred. Insofar as imagination, metaphor, and the sacred can serve to animate lived experience, this area of inquiry is also focused on the manner with which persons story alternative, expansive modes of relating in the modern era. Thus, I view such stories as chronicling a paradigm-shift in the order of the personal and cultural imagination. In this particular study, I have examined this process by way of encounters with the significant dead, the lived paradoxes of presence and absence for the bereaved, and the implications of such experiences for grieving. Insofar as the narrator seeks to imaginatively explore and understand these significant turning points, including his or her decentering as subject and the attendant transformations of this process, I refer this genre of storytelling as mythobiography. Mythobiography, as I have envisioned it, is primarily an inquiry into ―big stories,‖ which, according to Freeman (2006), involve for the narrator ―a significant measure of reflection on either an event or experience, a significant portion of a life, or the whole of it‖ (p. 156). In terms of literal, historical time, then, ―big stories‖ may encompass years, decades, and even the entirety

232 of the narrator‘s life. Indeed, the narratives told to me in this study pertained not only to the participants‘ experiences of grief, but also to the history of their relationship with the significant dead. Whereas the ongoing grieving process spanned anywhere from two to five years, stories of the relationship encompassed 18 to 40 years. And in Rachel‘s case, her story of her Papaw begins before she was even born. In addition, the participants also told prospective stories that extended years into the future, an observation that leads us out of breadth into a discussion of narrative depth and its centrality in this approach. I link the dimension of depth with my conception of narrative as a matrix of images, or better, poetic images inasmuch as they depict the emotional and aesthetic textures of lived experience. This notion of poetic depth is not so much a matter of content as a non-literal perspective (Scott Becker, personal communication, April 16, 2012) guiding the total process of mythobiographical inquiry, including the ways that the researcher invites, listens to, talks about, and writes life stories. Following Hillman (1983), ―One need but read each literal sentence of one‘s life metaphorically, see each picture of the past as an image,‖ each an ―essential poem at the center of things‖ (p. 48). Similarly, a mythobiographical approach is a largely aesthetic one, and thus directed to exploring, even imagining with persons the metaphors of experiential knowing—experience as poetry, art. In this way, myth, as a prefix to biography, need not literally involve allusions to Greek mythology—reversion is but one method. Rather, I invoke myth to gesture to a non-literal style of reflecting upon the life story that centers on ―the relation of the visible and the invisible,‖ (Hillman, 1996, p. 94), the experiential and the imaginal. Mythobiographical reflection ―inevitably entails a measure of distance‖ (Freeman, 2006, p. 157) from the dimension of experience to which the inquiry is addressed. Rather than time, however, I suggest with Hillman (1983b) that it is primarily ―imagination that gives distance and dignity, allowing us to see events as images‖ (p. 45, emphasis added). I emphasize dignity because reflecting imaginally, first and foremost, honors the poetry of ―our‖ lives—the complex of ―meanings, moods, historical events, qualitative details, and expressive possibilities‖ (Hillman, 1983a, p. 9) envisioned in the telling of mythobiography.

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Appendix A RECRUITMENT FLYER

DREAMS AND GRIEF

Have you grieved the death of a loved one?

Have you had dreams encountered this loved one in dreams? I would like to hear about your experiences for my dissertation entitled, ―Encountering the significant dead: A narrative inquiry into grief and dreams.‖ In brief, you will be invited to share your story of grief and mourning and describe the role that dreams may have played throughout the process. Participation is voluntary and persons must be at least 18 years old to participate. For more information, please contact Jeffrey Schweitzer, M.A. @ [email protected] or (513)291-1644

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Appendix B SCREENING QUESTIONNAIRE

Instructions: For each item, circle yes or no.

1. Have you ever grieved the death of a loved person in your life? Yes No

2. Has the person whom you‘ve grieved ever appeared in your dreams? Yes No

3. Have dreams of your loved one played a meaningful role in your grieving process? Yes No

4. Would you be willing to share your story with a researcher? Yes No

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Appendix C SCRIPT FOR TELEPHONE SCREENING

―Hello, my name is Jeffrey Schweitzer and I am a graduate student in clinical psychology at Miami University. I am calling because you expressed interest in my dissertation study, ‗Encountering the significant dead: A narrative inquiry into dreams and grief‘.‖

―If you have a few minutes, I‘d like to ask you some basic questions about your experience to see if you would be eligible for the study. Is this a good time for you to talk?‖ [Schedule an appointment/Proceed]

―My first question has to do with the timing of your loss. How long ago did your loved one die?‖

―My second question has to do with dreams of your loved one. Have you dreamed of your loved one after he or she died?‖ [If yes] ―Since the death of your loved one, how long ago did you have your first dream of him or her?‖

If the answer to the first question is not greater than six months or the answer to the second question is not affirmative or greater than three months:

―Based on your responses, you are not eligible for participation. Thank you for your interest in the study.‖

If the answer to the first question is greater than six months and the answer to the second question is affirmative and greater than three months:

―Based on your responses, I would be interested in interviewing you for my study. Do you have ten minutes to talk about the study and interview process?‖ [Reschedule/Proceed]

―Again, the purpose of the study is to understand the experiences of persons such as yourself, who have encountered a deceased loved one in dreams as part of the grief and mourning process. Over the course of two to three interviews, I will invite you to tell your story of grief and mourning, with an emphasis on the dreams you‘ve had throughout the process. I expect that each interview will last 60-90 minutes. In total, the interview process may take anywhere from three to six hours. Prior to the first interview, I will be requesting that participants write about what their loved one meant to them as well as the dreams participants had of their loved one. In

246 addition, I will be inviting participants to bring pictures and/or mementos that relate to their loved one to aid the interview process. Before I describe the process any further, are you still interested in participating?‖

[If no] ―Thank you for your interest in the study. If you change your mind, you can contact me by telephone at (513)291-1644 or by email at [email protected].‖

[If yes] ―Great. First, I want to emphasize that participation is strictly voluntary. You are free to withdraw consent and/or withdraw from the study at any time. There will be no penalty or cost if you choose to do so. Second, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, prior to the first interview, I am requesting that participants write about their grief experience. Here is the first writing prompt: Tell me about the loved one whom you have lost and a time when you were vividly aware of what he or she means to you. Here is the second writing prompt: Now, tell me the dream(s) in which you encountered your loved one. I invite you to write down your dreams, one at a time, and to do so in the first-person, present tense, and in as much detail as possible. To be clear, these writings are not required for participation. However, I do think that they would add to the interview process. Is this something you would be willing to try before we first meet?‖ [Discuss. Repeat prompts as necessary]

―Third, I also mentioned bringing pictures or mementos to the interview. Sometimes, when words fail us, images and objects can more fully express the depth and power of our experience. I invite you to collect images and/or objects (e.g., photographs, paintings, drawings, etc.) through which you connect or have connected with your loved one, your dream encounter(s), and/or significant aspects of your grief and mourning experience. Again, this is not required for participation. However, I do think it would aid us in the interview. If you feel comfortable doing so, I invite you to bring images/objects to the first interview. [Discuss]

―Regarding the location of the interview, we have a few options. First, I have a research space at the Psychology Building at Miami University in which you and I could speak privately. Second, we could also meet at your professional office or home, if that is something you would prefer. Third, we could schedule a telephone interview. That said, the first or second option would allow us to view together the pictures and/or mementos associated with your loved one.‖ [Discuss the

247 three options. Note: For non-local, prospective participants, the latter two options will be presented and discussed.]

―What day/time works best for you?‖ [Discuss]

―Great. Now that we scheduled an initial interview, I want to say one more thing about it. Before we start, I will present you with several consent forms and answer any questions you may have about the study. [In the event of a telephone interview, consent forms will be mailed to the participant along with a pre-addressed return envelope with postage and the beginning of the interview will devoted to reviewing these documents and answering any questions that the participant may have] Again, participation is strictly voluntary and you are free to withdraw consent or withdraw participation at any time. Do you have any questions for me?‖ [Discuss/End call]

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Appendix D INFORMED CONSENT FOR PARTICIPATION

STUDY TITLE: Encountering the significant dead: A narrative inquiry into grief and dreams

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Jeffrey R. Schweitzer, M.A.

FACULTY ADVISOR: Larry M. Leitner, Ph.D.

Thank you for your interest in this study. My purpose is to learn about your grief and mourning experiences in general and dreams of your deceased loved one in particular. While there has been renewed interest in the role of dreams in the grieving process, it has rarely been the focus of psychological research. Thus, your participation will not only contribute to a deeper understanding of grief and mourning, but also the ways that we encounter the significant dead through dreams.

Over the course of two to three interviews, you will be invited to tell your story of grief and mourning, with emphasis on the dreams you‘ve had throughout the process. I expect that the total duration of the interviews should be between three to six hours.

Given the sensitive nature of the subject matter, some participants may experience upset. For the most part, however, participants may find that the self-reflective process will lead to personal insight. Benefits for participants‘ might also include a deeper understanding of their views on life and death as well as the role that dreams may play in shaping psychological experience.

Participation is strictly voluntary. There is no penalty or loss of benefits of any kind associated with declining to participate. Participants will not be required to share any information they do not wish to share. Participants are free to withdraw consent and/or withdraw from the study at any time. There are no foreseeable risks to participants. We do recognize that these interviews may evoke strong feelings from participants. The principal investigator is an advanced doctoral student in clinical psychology and the faculty advisor a psychologist licensed in Ohio. Either can arrange an immediate appointment for any participant in the Psychology Clinic at Miami University (phone: 513-529-2423) should involvement in the study cause significant distress or other reason for concern. There is no deception involved in this study.

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The principal investigator will ask your permission to audio record the conversations that take place during the interviews. The confidentiality of the participants will be protected. Participants will be assigned identification numbers and these numbers will be used to identify all narratives collected. Only the researcher and his graduate research assistant will have access to the narrative materials. Signed consent forms will be kept in a locked file separate from the locked file in which the coded narrative materials will be stored.

If you have questions about the study, you are invited to contact Jeffrey Schweitzer, M.A. by phone at 513-291-1644 or email at [email protected]. Alternatively, you may contact Larry Leitner, Ph.D. by phone at 513-529-2410 or by email at [email protected]. If you have a question regarding the rights of research participants, you may contact the Office for the Advancement of Research and Scholarship at 513-529-3600.

I have read the preceding statements and agree to participate in this study. I also acknowledge that I am 18 years of age or older.

______

Participant Name Participant Signature Date

______

Researcher Name Researcher Signature Date

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Appendix E INFORMED CONSENT FOR RECORDING DREAMS AND QUOTING FROM DREAMS

STUDY TITLE: Encountering the significant dead: A narrative inquiry into grief and dreams

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Jeffrey R. Schweitzer, M.A.

FACULTY ADVISOR: Larry M. Leitner, Ph.D.

I understand that the narrative account of my experiences generally and dreams specifically will be recorded on digital audio and that these audio recordings will be used through the duration of this research study. I further give my permission for the researcher to quote from the dreams I contribute, verbatim, in part or in whole, in any reports of this research, including papers presented at professional conferences, articles in professional journals, or book chapters. I am free to withdraw this consent at any time for any particular dream, in part or whole, or for the entire set of dreams I have contributed. There is no penalty or loss of benefits associated with the decision to withdraw this consent.

I consent to the audio recording and quotation of my dreams.

______

Participant Name Participant Signature Date

______

Researcher Name Researcher Signature Date

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Appendix F INFORMED CONSENT FOR USE OF IMAGES

STUDY TITLE: Encountering the significant dead: A narrative inquiry into grief and dreams

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Jeffrey R. Schweitzer, M.A.

FACULTY ADVISOR: Larry M. Leitner, Ph.D.

Photo Publication

I understand that the photos I bring to the interview(s) are mostly for use as visual aids in our conversation. However, some photos may be included in future publications or presentations of this research.

Photos of people, which might useful as conversational pieces in an interview setting, may not be appropriate for publication. While I may bring the following kinds of photos to the interview, I understand that in order to preserve confidentiality and anonymity they will not be used in their original form in any research presentation. My signature(s) below indicate my understanding of and permission for the use of photos in academic, professional, and/or online publications of this research.

• I am free to withdraw this consent at any time for any particular photo or for the entire set of photos.

• There is no penalty for withdrawing my consent.

I give consent for the photos I bring to the interviews to be used in presentations of this research in an academic and/or professional setting (including PowerPoint presentations at professional conferences, articles in professional journals, or book chapters). I understand that the researcher (Jeffrey Schweitzer) will not publish photos of clearly identifiable people so as to preserve anonymity and confidentiality. This may involve the researcher (Jeffrey Schweitzer) digitally editing the photos so that no persons are identifiable in the photos.

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______Participant Name Participant Signature Date

______Researcher Name Researcher Signature Date

In addition, I understand that the primary investigator will maintain copyright of all photos as they appear in published form (print and/or online):

______Participant Signature Date

I have received a copy of this consent form:

______Participant Signature Date

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Appendix G INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Tell me about your loved one—what did her or she mean to you? 2. What was your relationship like before your loved one died? 3. What are some of your most vivid memories of your loved one? 4. Describe the last time you were with your loved one, prior to his or her death. What do you remember? 5. How did he or she die? 6. How have you responded to the loss? 7. How, if at all, have you made sense of your loved one‘s death? 8. How, if at all, have fit the loss into the context of your life? 9. What particular experiences have influenced the way you make sense of your loss? 10. How, if at all, have you honored or remembered your loved one? 11. Tell me about times you‘ve experienced the presence of your loved one? What was/were those experience(s) like for you? How, if at all, did you describe these experiences to others? How did they respond? 12. Tell me about the dreams that came during your grieving process—when did they come and how did and do you make sense of them? 13. What dreams have you had where you felt as if the dream was speaking directly to your experience of loss? 14. Tell me about the dreams where you encountered your loved one—how do you make sense of these dreams? How, if at all, did you describe these experiences to others? How did they respond? 15. What does your deceased loved one want from and/or for you now, if anything? How do you know? 16. How has your anticipation of the future changed with the death of your loved one? 17. What, if any, insights have you gained from the experience of losing your loved one? How did you happen upon these insights? 18. What does your loved one now mean to you? How would you describe your current relationship with your loved one?

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Appendix H DEBRIEFING FORM

STUDY TITLE: Encountering the significant dead: A narrative inquiry into grief and dreams

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Jeffrey R. Schweitzer, M.A.

FACULTY ADVISOR: Larry M. Leitner, Ph.D.

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY: The purpose of this study is to inquire about the experiences of persons who have encountered a deceased loved one in dreams as part of his or her grief and mourning process. From conversations with persons who have had such experiences, I will analyze and re-tell their stories by means of performative writing, a method that creatively and evocatively re-presents experience through rich descriptions toward eliciting empathic understanding in the reader.

My primary aims for the study are: (1) to contribute to a deeper understanding of the grief and mourning process in general; (2) to understand, in particular, the ways that the bereaved encounter the dead through dreams and the significance of such experiences; (3) to re-present extraordinary stories toward generating alternative discourses regarding the grief and mourning process.

For further readings and resources on the topics of grief, mourning, dreams, and other sense of presence experiences, you can refer the following:

Barrett, D. (1991). Through a glass darkly: Images of the dead in dreams. Omega, Journal of Death and Dying, 24(2), 97-108. Becker, S. H. & Knudson, R. M. (2003). Visions of the dead: Imagination and mourning. Death Studies, 27, 691-716. Belicki, K., Gulko, N., Ruzycki, K., & Aristotle, J. (2003). Sixteen years of dreams following spousal bereavement. Omega, Journal of Death and Dying, 47(2), 93-106. Bennett, G. & Bennett, K.M. (2000). The presence of the dead: An empirical study. Mortality, 5(2), 139-157. Hillman, J. (1979). The dream and the underworld. New York: Harper & Row. Hillman, J. (1983). Archetypal psychology: A brief account. Dallas: Spring. Klass, D., Silverman, P.R., & Nickman, S.L. (1996). Continuing bonds: New understandings of grief. Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis. Romanyshyn, R. (1999). The Soul in Grief: Love, Death, and Transformation. Berkeley, CA: Frog Ltd.

If you have any further questions about the study, you are invited to contact Jeffrey Schweitzer, M.A. by phone at 513-291-1644 or email at [email protected]. Alternatively, you may contact Larry Leitner, Ph.D. by phone at 513-529-2410 or by email at [email protected]. If you have a question regarding the rights of research participants, you may contact the Office for the Advancement of Research and Scholarship at 513-529-3600.

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Appendix I ANALYSIS KEY

Name of Participant: Liza Age: 30 Relation of Participant-Deceased: Daughter-Father Nature of Death: Extended, Prostate Cancer around age 65 Time from Death to Interview: 2 years, 7 months Time from First Encounter to Interview: 2 years, 9 months Encounters: 1 pre-death dream; 1 pre-death dream (father); 4 post-death dreams

Response to Prompts

My dad had this dream a few weeks before he passed away. He recounted it to my mom and I one morning at the kitchen table. I was making him toast. He had stopped making his own meals maybe a week before, because the medication made him lose his small motor functioning. That he dropped and broke several jars of mayonaise and jelly had been a great source of frustration to him, it was hard to relinquish his right to make a sandwich. I'll paraphrase the best I can.

"I was making a sandwich, but it kept falling apart, I couldn't keep the sandwich together. Every time I held on to the bread, the inside would fall out. It was very frustrating. Suddenly I realised why I couldnt keep it together. It was a Water Sandwich!"

And as he said this, he laughed and laughed. Normally my dad did not laugh much, he was pretty reserved, and this was a kind of laugh we had never heard him make before. It was almost a helpless giggle, the way a child would laugh.

I shared this story with my therapist a few months later, and she made the connection of how the body is bread, and the spirit is water. His body could no longer contain his spirit. Even though this was a time of restlessness and agitation, he must have been coming to terms and being more at peace with what was happening and how quickly it was happening. ______

On the morning my Dad passed away, my Mom woke me up at 6. He had been in Hospice care for three days, we set up a hospital bed in the living room and my mom slept next to him on the pullout couch. We had moved their mattress downstairs a month earlier because it was too hard for him to take the stairs. My dad had been very difficult about taking his medication, he made complicated charts about what he was taking and when, but the charts were confusing, he would get lost while writing them. Order of operation with simple things became very hard. He would write letters to people, but you could see how confusing even that had become, for example he had written a whole letter on the outside of an envelope, and then folded it up and put it inside another envelope, which he then continued to write on. You would catch him staring at something like a pair of scissors, or even a carton of ice cream and a spoon, just staring at it with a perplexed and frustrated expression, "I KNOW you do something...I KNOW there is something I am supposed to do here...I just cant remember." One letter I found on the table was addressed to me, and I opened it a few weeks after he died, I was holding on to it, saving it for the right

256 time, wanting to savor whatever words he had for me. When I finally opened the envelope, which was addressed to me in San Francisco, inside was a letter I had written him a few months earlier. And that was one of the hardest most unfair seeming things.

Anyway, he wouldn‘t let my mom help him with his medicine, and he was stubborn about it. But he also could no longer keep track, because the medication had a sort of dementia-inducing quality when it came to his logic. So eventually he let me be in charge of his medicine. In the last three days, he had slipped under, I was just giving him morphine under his tongue every few hours. I would wash it down with chocolate ice cream. My mom woke me up a t 6 because dad was moaning in his sleep. My mom left to go take a shower, and I gave my dad his morphine. I haven't felt Catholic in a long time, but during this time it was hard not to go there for support. I had a moment where I said to God, "he is ready. He is loved in this world, let him go be loved in the next. Please take him." and I kissed my dad on the forehead and said, it‘s okay, you can let go. And then I lay down and went to sleep next to him on the pullout couch. And I had the following dream.

I am in the living room, and Dad is rolling himself around on a wheelchair, which feels really significant. He is really happy and with it. He says to me, "I am really proud to have you as my daughter."and I am somewhat toungetied, I say, "I'm really proud to have you as my Dad." he looks around and says "Tell Desmond he has to go back to school" and I say, "Dad, he DID go back to school. Hes actually at Fordham, your old school and hes on the honor roll." Satisfied with that answer, my dad says "Okay. Take me swimming. I want to go to the water." Interesting detail. The computer speakers are playing Animal Collective sort of loud, and I keep trying to turn down the volume, but dont know how to. Its a little distracting from the moment we are having.

I wake up from this dream, and I hear the machinery that goes with the hospital bed, but I do not hear him breathing. I know he has passed. But I dont want to be the one who gets up and makes sure. My mom is asleep next to me, and I roll over and doze off again. It feels crazy to know that he said goodbye to me. I know I am the only one who got to have that. ______

This dream happened when my dad was sick. At this time, there were new developments every day to adjust to. One of the harder things to adjust to was that he would get up several times during the night to use the bathroom, but would fall down either in the bathroom, bedroom, or hallway. My mom and I both slept very lightly and would bolt awake at the first creak of floorboards. We had to hide, though, so my dad wouldn't know that we were lurking, because he hated it when we would hover. So bedtime was a time of hypervigilence and anxiety and not much rest. I would try to recount these changes on the phone to my boyfriend Matt in San Francisco, but for whatever reason, i didnt like the way he empathized. He struck me as very useless and so i found myself going to other friends for support. I was probably being hard on him, and did not give him a lot of cues but he was not doing a very good job of being there for me through this period.

It is nighttime, and I hear my dad struggling, gasping for breath in his bedroom. I run down the hall and turn on his light. He is in bed, and his skin in very red. His skin is so thin that i can see

257 right through it to the red underneath, and he is scratching and pulling at it. I am very distressed because he is going to break the skin if he keeps doing this. I am trying to stop him but he keeps scratching at himself. Matt is down the hall, I see him walking and I scream at him to stay where he is and not come any closer. I think Matt is just going to mess up the situation even more. I am so angry that he isn't better at solving problems and I cant count on him to do the right thing. My dad is gasping and not really understanding me, it is like he is having a seizure, he is in his own world, he cant hear me or see me, and all I can do is minimize the damage until it runs its course. His eyes start to bleed. Something is wrong with the skin of his eyelids, and the skin all over his body is getting thinner and thinner, very quickly. Now I am really scared because I cant undo this bleeding, things are tearing and I dont understand where his skin is going. And I am so angry because I want Matt to be able to do something, but I also want him to not be here. ______

This dream happened a few months after my dad passed away. I feel like I have had a few that were similar to this, but this is the only one I can remember clearly.

A lot of things happen before this point, but I dont quite remember. But the doorbell rings, and i go to answer, and see through the side window next to the door that its my dad. I cant believe it, because I know he's dead, so this is really an amazing surprise. I am so excited to see him, but the front door is stuck, I can’t get it open or unlocked. I am yelling through the window, "Don't leave! Just stay there, please!" I am so afraid that if I go around the back to let him in, if I let him out of my sight for even a minute, he will disappear. Because there is no reason he should be here, it is an amazing glitch, and he could disappear as soon as he appeared, I cant take that risk. I am really losing my cool and getting frantic. But somehow, ow, he is in the front hallway with me. He is laughing. I hug him and hold him and say, "I was afraid you were going to disappear." He is laughing, he says, "I'm not going away." His body is very small and thin, like he is made of rubber bands. He cant really stand up, he keeps flopping around like a skinny rubber doll, but he is laughing hysterically about this. He gets smaller, so that now I am holding him like a baby. He is very red, his body is tiny now even though his head is still the same size. He keeps laughing and laughing, he thinks it is very funny that I would be so irrationally anxious about his disappearing. "I'm always going to come back" he laughs. I know that this is only going to be for a very short while, but I am so happy he is here, i just laugh and cry and a feel bubbly and blubbery. There is a lot of light coming in through the kitchen windows, it feels like a sun shower. There are a few other people around, and it feels a little like a party.

First Interview

Tone/Process: Dark, melancholic, lamenting, and tragic, yet emotionally inhibited

Dreams/Nightmares: Water Sandwich dream (Father); Red Father nightmare; Goodbye dream; Visitation/Baby Father dream

Waking Encounters/Connections: Extended engagement with image of father through work

Narrative Images/Metaphors: ―Luxuriating in Rooftop Pool‖; ―Father Stapling Thumb‖; ―Surprising Father‖; ―Father Crashing Down‖; ―Father Aggressively Driving Cart‖; ―Silence as a

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Spell‖; ―Letter to Herself‖; ―I‘m a Hollywood Agent‖; ―Wedding Song‖; ―Ghostly Self‖; ―Man Helicoptering Woman‖; ―Buried Under Rubble‖; ―Groundwork‖; ―Framework‖

Themes: Art, Emancipation, Ambition, Homecoming, Patriarchy, Masculinity, Silence, Denial, Death, Decay, Shame, Identity Confusion, Regret, Mimesis, Disconnection

Impressions/Contributions: She tells two distinct narratives—one of her father dying, and the other of her grief—yet both have in common a harrowing quality that undergirds her various means of disconnection.

Second Interview

Tone/Process: Reflective, hopeful, reluctantly triumphant

Dreams/Nightmares: None

Waking Encounters/Connections: Connected with father ―when I‘m excited about something new‖

Narrative Images/Metaphors: ―A Space, Wound, Closed Door‖; ―Gap in the World—Big Shoes‖; ―Bursting of Her Bubble‖; ―Making Space for…‖

Themes: Reckoning, Freedom of Expression, Safety, Transformation, Responsibility

General Impressions: In addition to further recalling and putting into perspective fragmentary aspects of her grief, she tells a third narrative—one of transformation, emerging from the ―rubble‖ and reckoning not only with the loss of her father, but also with her old identity that in hindsight seemed hollow, ―selfish,‖ and even ―delusional‖ in scope.

Listening Group

Prior to her father‘s death and dying, Liza is locked into a struggle to become a person in her own right. Thus, her grief seems to compound these identity issues but ultimately serves a transformative function. The resultant identity is much different and affords her a more solid foundation.

The family does not talk on an imaginal, much less an emotional level. Hence, the denial that characterized the dying process.

Her experiences in the dying and grief process, characterized by denial and forgetting, are mythically analogous to drinking from the River of Lethe.

Image of dad stapling thumb: all-American, self-sufficient, ruggedly individualistic man—how does she grieve/seek to incorporate this image of him?

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What is the role of art and the artistic image for Liza, and how does it bear on the arc of her story?

She ―never catches dad off guard,‖ therefore he always has his guard up. How does this inform how he and the family reacts to dying process?

In the beginning, on edge of feeling like she is coming into success-fragile

She hears mom‘s demand for her to come home as ―grow up,‖ rather than dad is dying

Coming home is a capitulation to mom‘s view of her-identity collapses when she comes home- abandonment of quest for adult identity

Her story is similar to Hannah‘s in that she can‘t talk with her dad and doesn‘t know his emotional life-themes of dependency and reversals in the dreams-parents mysterious to them

Reaction to image of water sandwich-strongest man in world turning into weakest man in the world-dad refuses any kind of caretaking-so difficult to move into position of sympathy/compassion because he won‘t tolerate it

I felt like I had one normal afternoon with him and he got much worse quickly-she doesn‘t acknowledge pathos/tragedy of narrative

Dad‘s ―support‖ consists of attention to pragmatics-food, money, exercise

Liza has wish for him to stay the same, and he does-no one can stand up to him-no ongoing dialogue that a more communicative family might have-no explicit planning in face of death and dying-they surrender to his will, even in his dying process

By the time she gets home from CA, she is bound by necessity/guilt-I can‘t go back to my old life

Striking statement-father is always going to be there to take care of her (a child‘s position)- absence of empathic stance toward dad and participation in other people‘s experience-goes back to her not knowing him-she doesn‘t know him but sees the image of his invincibility as the strongest man in the world-she has always lived inside of that image

Art as serving the image that demands expression-how does Liza fit with this view? Art as a form of protest against the conventions of the family?

Family confronts reality of dying very late in the process-sad, modern, American story of dealing with death through denial until the very last second, and even then being not well equipped to handle it

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Death is unspeakable throughout, and when she talks about finally acknowledging death in the interview, she summarily transitions into reading her dreams-even still, she has difficulty confronting the reality of death

Power of dreams/role of dreams in process is to break the spell, break through the spell of literalism-that is how the invisibles get in-the nightmare turns the denial inside out-Tibetan book of the dead-the agony of death and dying laid bare in the nightmare of dad tearing at his skin

The spell in the service of denying death-the dream makes death visible-dying is no longer deniable-yet, when she wakes up, she still can‘t draw the image, which is taboo in the context of the family‘s denial-somebody might see it-other subtext of dream is rage at boyfriend for not being the right kind of father replacement

Helicopter image-the fulcrum of the narrative-before and after his death

Water sandwich dream-significant because he never had opened up to her that way-first dream he ever shared-not a happy image

Never had a ―talky‖ relationship with dad-she‘s lived in a relationship from the silent movie era- explains her defensiveness when mom asks her to ―talk‖ about dad

Constraints that living relationship can place on imaginal relationship

In grief, unconsciously attempting to embody him through ―work‖

Undergoing death of her own-death of ego, identity that related to art self-consciously

Person she was at time she dreamed of father expressing pride is in-between-not stable enough ego to receive message and be affirmed by it

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Name of Participant: Hannah Age: 40 Relation of Participant-Deceased: Daughter-Mother Nature of Death: Extended, Brain Aneurysm at age 82 Time from Death to Interview: 1 year, 9 months Time from First Encounter to Interview: 1 year 7 months Encounters: 4 post-death dreams; 1 waking imagery

Response to Prompts

Context: I am the youngest of six or an only child, depending on one‘s perspective. Both parents had been married and widowed before marrying and bringing me into the world. There are 24 years between me and the oldest half-sibling. By the age of four I was the only ―child‖ living at home. I‘ve been told that I was an easy baby and a ―delightful‖ child. I was close to both parents and considered them to also be my best friends. My Mom was less emotionally expressive. I would describe her as stable, confident, intelligent, competitive and hard-working. She gave practical advice but was quick to tell me the ‗right‘ way to do things. She led by example and wasn‘t incredibly patient when trying to teach me things the first time. My Dad was quiet, reserved, yet very affectionate. He was always approachable and he was the one I would go to when I was anxious. My happiest memories with him were when I was small and would sit on the arm of his recliner to watch TV at night. He would put his arm around me -- Mom said he kept me under his wing. He died in 2003 and I was blessed to be beside him, holding his hand. When my Mom died in April 2011, my initial grief reverted back to his death. It was a few months until I felt distinct grief over her death. I still feel guilt over this although I‘ve been told it‘s natural.

My Mom died on April 22, 2011, one day after her 82nd birthday. She died peacefully at home with hospice care after the rupture of a cerebral aneurysm. I was the durable power of attorney for her care and while we had discussed her wishes for end of life care, she was not entirely comfortable discussing it. In the year preceding her death she had called me on two occasions to talk about some things she wanted done when she died: to destroy all records of money her kids had borrowed and owed her and to ask that we not have a visitation the night before the funeral in order to save money. She wanted reassurance that my sister and I were co-executors of her will and were still willing to serve in that capacity. She also expressed some worry that if she lived to the same age as her own mother that she would run out of money. I promised her that if it happened I would take care of her. The week after she died, one of the service professionals said she‘d told him, ―I may not be around much longer, but I‘m going to make it until my birthday.‖

Dreams: The dreams I‘ve had of her since her passing have been mostly fraught with anxiety and self-doubt. Three of them have had a similar theme of me trying to convince her she was really dead and needed to lie down and be quiet. I‘ll start with the most recent dream (the first week of December 2012):

I had a call from some unknown person that my Mom was not being compliant and they needed my help. When I arrived, she was sitting upright in a chair with her arms firmly strapped down.

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I released her hands and told her that we needed to talk about her situation. She was visibly agitated and her skin had a green hue to it. I convinced her to lie down while I asked her why she wasn‘t aware of her state. She was angry to be dead and said she wasn‘t ready to be buried. I told her that I wasn‘t ready either, but that it was time and everything would be fine. I realized I was standing beside her casket and helped her lie her hands across her torso taking care to squeeze them so she would know I was there. I told her people would be there soon and she didn‘t seem to want that but said she was confused. I awoke feeling distress and lamenting that her skin had turned green and she was still not accepting her death. ______

Within the first two months of her death, I dreamt that I was trying to manage keeping up with work, my kids, and my Mom‘s arrangements. I was at the end of the road near our house at a small gas station. I got out to check the tires of the hearse I was driving. My Mom‘s body was in the back and had been in there for some time. I recall asking someone how bad the smell would be when I opened the door to drive her back to Illinois. The hearse didn‘t smell bad at all which was a relief, but as I started to drive out, I began sobbing because I didn‘t have time to take her to Illinois before because of work issues and trying to keep up with my kids (ages 3 and 5). I remember saying to the box in the back of the car that I was so sorry I‘d neglected to get her home sooner. ______

My Dad, who had died in 2003, was cremated and his ashes were buried at the cemetery near my parents‘ house. My Mom could hardly stand the idea of cremation but she went along with what he wanted. In this next dream, I had Dad‘s ashes in a box and had taken them to the basement of their house to hide them in the floorboards. I remember talking with my sister about keeping them both in the house they loved. My Mom had been sealed into the ceiling/floor as well and I was bringing Dad to join her. This dream was weird, but not distressing. It also occurred around the same time that we (my sister and I) were trying to sell my parent‘s house. We‘d been doing a lot of repair work. I remember feeling sad at letting the house out of our family, but there were no other options. ______

The third dream I had was intensely distressing. I had taken care of arrangements for the funeral and went into to the viewing room to look at and talk to her before people arrived. The casket was reverse of the way most caskets open/face. I found that to be frustrating at first, but was relieved to see her looking relaxed. I told her how much I missed her already and that I loved her. She looked at me and said she didn‘t know what I was talking about. I assured her that she was dead and that guests would be arriving. She wanted to sit up but I told her to lie down. We did this a few times and she kept insisting that she was fine. I heard someone outside the door and told her to cooperate because the visitation was about to begin. She layed down but did so grudgingly. I then whispered to her how I loved and missed her and closed the casket lid. I awoke crying.

A few months after my Mom died, I had a dream where I knew she was there but I couldn‘t see her. I said, ―There you are! I‘ve been waiting for this visit! There is so much to be done with the house and coin collection. I need advice on what you want me to do. I‘m having a hard time

263 with these decisions.‖ She said to me, ―I know you won‘t make the same decisions that I would but you just need to keep making them.‖ I then told her how glad I was that she had come and there were so many things I wanted to tell her and as I talked, I realized she was no longer there. No anxiety, just comforting feelings with this one.

*I’d seriously begun expecting this dream because of an experience I’d had after my Dad died. I’d seen him and the talk had been longer than this, but still brief. If you want those dreams, too, I can send them. I kept journal records of those because they were so pleasantly vivid and clear.

Memory Triggers: I‘ve thought about this quite a bit. There are four objects that trigger intense ―Mom‖ emotion in me: bright red cardinal birds, morel mushrooms, quilts, and coins. She was a life long coin collector (and that collection was the factor that split the siblings apart). She spent every spring – particularly the month of April – in the woods hunting mushrooms. This began as a formal tradition when her first husband died. She said at one point that it was how she processed her grief over his death. Ironically, they both died in April. The cardinals were her favorite bird and she especially liked their vibrant colors contrasting against snow. I bought her several lapel pins with cardinals, a décor pillow, sets of towels, and a fleece cardigans emblazoned with cardinals. I still have her favorite cardigan hanging in my closet, just the way it was when she died – pockets with tic-tac candies, Kleenex, and rubber bands. I choke up every time I look at it. My Mom was a third generation quilter. I grew up playing under quilting frames (at home and at my Grandma‘s house) and went with her when she taught quilting classes at the area nursing homes. She taught me to quilt and helped me finish my first one. I see the quilts as less of a trigger because I also quilt and it brings peace and the time to ―think‖ (I‘m a total introvert). The cardinals make me feel sad; coins make me feel sick to my stomach, and the mushrooms make me smile. Why they evoke different emotions is interesting, but I do go out of my way to avoid looking at collectible coins.

First Interview

Tone/Process: Sad, angry, plaintive, and defensive/ambivalent regarding relationship with mother

Dreams/Nightmares: ―Hearse‖ nightmare, ―Funeral‖ nightmare, ―Angry-to-be-Dead‖ nightmare, ―I Can‘t Trust You‖ dream, ―I‘m All Right‖ dream (father), ―Glad to See You‖ dream (father), ―Cup‖ dream (father)

Waking Encounters: ―Mom Bobbing Up and Down in Vault‖

Narrative Images/Metaphors: Mom in the garden/woods, collecting morels, mom lying on the kitchen floor, Hannah always having to ―push herself‖ into mom‘s space, mom‘s sweaters, a wad of Kleenex, rubber band, a paper clip and a little box of tic-tacs, coins, mom discovering dad‘s fingernail after his death, Hannah and mom at her deathbed, mom‘s factual letters, the ―big gap,‖ showing scars to her daughter

Themes: Mother-Daughter Relationship, Ambivalence, Intimacy, Mystery of Mom‘s Emotional Life, Imitating Mom, Mom‘s Two Lives/Emergent Narrative, Mom‘s Aversion to Dependence,

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Honoring Last Wishes, Mom ―Falling Apart,‖ Unfinished Business, Longing of Grief, Family Legacies, Transgenerational Grief, Time as Currency, Orphanhood

General Impressions: Hannah‘s grief for her mother is characterized by longing and disappointment, which echoes the living relationship and her ambivalent feelings about her mother. Relatedly perhaps, the encounter experiences are anxiety-provoking, disturbing, and nightmarish for Hannah, except for one dream which is disappointing but ultimately meaningful. In her grief, Hannah is feeling displaced and struggling to imagine the rest of her life without her parents.

Second Interview

Tone/Process: Reflective, inquisitive, sad, frustrated, guilty, regretful

Dreams/Nightmares: N/A

Waking Encounters: N/A

Narrative Images: Do Mama‘s Ever Cry, boat that‘s lost its moorings, grief like punch in the stomach, mom presenting oral history to Hannah, mom opening up doors and windows of home, Hannah breaking in mom‘s shoes

Themes: Confrontation with Silence, Family Strife, Delayed/Recurrent Grief, Honoring Parents Memory, Protective of Mom, Orphanhood, Anticipatory Grief, Dying and the Life Review, Unfinished Business

General Impressions: Intimacy of the mother-daughter relationship, a theme raised in the first interview, seemed to strongly resonate with Hannah based on the way she began the second interview. The emotional dimensions of her grief/continuing bond constellate around their lifelong relationship, her experiences on her mother‘s deathbed, the emergent narrative of her mother‘s past, and imagining life without her parents. Her grief for her mother opens up to a grief for the loss of family/kin as poeticized by the image of the ―boat that‘s lost its moorings.‖

Listening Group

At the outset, I note the presence of nightmares as unique to this narrative and the continuing bond.

Rog hears the story and the relationship in terms of attachment theory: How secure was the relationship to mom in childhood? This may have contributed to the intensity of her anxiety and guilt in grief. Mom is lost in the woods, and Hannah wants to play house.

The living relationship seems to have a disruptive effect with regard to the post-death experiences. Hannah and Ruth at odds in post-death encounters/dreams. My dream mother won‘t die. Is that the fault of the dream mother or is it that I can‘t let my mother die? She can‘t seem to let mom go. Is that on mom or is that on me?

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Hannah seems ambivalent in response to my suggestion that we invite her mother into the room, the conversation.

Hannah‘s leading statement, ―I knew I was loved,‖ seems defensive in that it blocks further inquiry into the mother-daughter relationship.

When I encourage her to deepen into feelings about her mother, she seems to shut it off—another instance of defensive stance. Her telling carefully modulates the amount of feeling that comes in.

The one place, the woods/garden, where mom shows emotion is a place where Hannah doesn‘t feel comfortable.

Hannah has to mostly imagine/figure out the dimensions of her mother‘s emotional life. How does she understand her without experiencing overt expression? It sounds like this is quite damaging to her. She doesn‘t frame it this way, but that‘s how it comes across. She seems to project an image of a loving relationship, but we hear it much differently.

Mom leaves children of first family for two years—qualifies resentment of other children and view of being abandoned. To what extent did mom attach to anyone?

Characterizes mom positively but gives examples that are contrary to characterizations

Always defending mom to siblings—more broadly, defending mom ―all the way through‖

Has difficulty acknowledging emotional barrenness of relationship

Changes the subject when talking in more depth of mom not being responsive to her

―I love you, I kind of like you, too.‖ Relationship that requires the use of force (Hannah ―always having to push [herself] in‖)

―I‘d rather dream about her in happy terms,‖ yet she has these nightmares – J: Do you have a sense of what she wants? (long pause). Dominant story: I did what she wanted. Yet, the mother is sitting up in the casket still wanting something of her. Frames the encounter in the day world past to clear her conscience, yet her conscience isn‘t clear.

Pattern of being with each other, but not connecting with each another

Not at peace with the circumstances of her mother‘s death or the relationship itself

―Approval-Disapproval‖ dream-Hannah never gets the approval to the degree that she needs it. Not that she‘s disapproved of but the absence of positive affirmation. Mom is not a negative presence as much as a neutral non-presence, which in some ways can be more damaging. With the ―negative‖ mother, one learns to stop trying.

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Imagining mom in underground vault-she can‘t let mom be dead yet-fully animated, sensing body that is both uncomfortable and decomposing-struggling to let go of mom consciously-she cannot bring herself to bear it-she can‘t let it go because she was never ready for her mom to die- she never got what she wanted and hoped for, the affectionate mother she longed for

In dreams of dad, he is young, robust, vital-in dreams of mom, she is decomposing, turning green

Hannah, regarding the ―approval-disapproval‖ dream-―I still wanted more, but that‘s all I was going to get‖

Experiencing the edges of her mother without ever getting to the center

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Name of Participant: Rachel Age: 18 Relation of Participant-Deceased: Granddaughter-Grandfather Nature of Death: Sudden, Brain Aneurysm at age 56 Time from Death to Interview: 3 years, 5 months Time from First Encounter to Interview: 3 years, 5 months

Response to Prompts

1) Tell me about the loved one whom you have lost and a time when you were vividly aware of what he or she means to you.

The loved one I lost was my birth grandpa Tommy. He died suddenly on 4-1-09 when he had a brain aneurism. He was very special to me and we shared a special bond: it was actually me that brought him to Christ (when my mom was pregnant with me he, at first, wanted her to get an abortion, however she was adamant about having me. After my grandpa did some research, he realized how wrong it was and then became a Christian.) Also, I'm his oldest grandchild and so he always challenged me to be the best I could be.

2) Now, tell me the dream(s) in which you encountered your loved one. I invite you to write only the dream, one at a time, and to do so in the first-person, present tense, and in as much detail as possible.

I had two dreams about him:

1) The first dream was that I was really lonely and struggling with coping. This dream happened right after he died. I just remember vividly that I was crying and he told me everything would be okay and that I was never alone. I felt him give me a hug and just hold me.

2) The second dream was more of a daydream. I was reflecting in theology class and was missing my grandpa, and all of a sudden I saw his face vividly and heard his laugh.

The above-questions constitute the two writing prompts. Please feel free to write as much or as little as you see fit. Below is the third request:

3) Sometimes, when words fail us, images and objects can more fully express the depth and power of our experience. I invite you to collect images and/or objects (e.g., photographs, paintings, drawings, clothing, etc.) through which you connect or have connected with your loved one, your dream encounter(s), and/or significant aspects of your grief and mourning experience.

I will bring a picture of the two of us as well as his hat. I also connect with him through coffee and basketball. One time we were at an ice cream place (shortly after he passed) I couldn't decide which ice cream to get, but then something deep down told me to choose the coffee ice cream. (We always got coffee ice cream when we went).

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First Interview

Tone/Process: Pressured, enthusiastic, passionate telling of story, relieved to have receptive audience, tearful, gratitude

Dreams/Nightmares: ―Embrace‖ dream

Waking Encounters: Encounter at Scoops, Encounter in Theology class

Narrative Images/Metaphors: Rachel‘s Creation Myth, Papaw in Casket, ―You Should Call Marion,‖ Conversations with Marion, ―Time to Breathe,‖ Tattoo of Angel Wings, Chills

Themes: Faith, Growth/Challenge, Transformation, Fate, Diagramming Experience with Images, Compounded Loss, Perceiving Absence, Culture of Invisibles, Presence in Emotional Pain, Performing Grief

General Impressions: Rachel told her story enthusiastically as if her story was one she hadn‘t been able to tell as much as she would like. Later in the interview, she said that the story of her grief changes depending on the audience for fear of being judged or misunderstood. What she tends to omit are the encounter experiences with her grandfather, whose ―reality‘ she herself questioned when first experiencing them. Her relationship with her Mamaw, with whom she shared her encounter experiences, was healing for her insofar as it validated these experiences.

Second Interview

Tone/Process: Enthusiastic, passionate, reflective

Dreams/Nightmares: N/As

Waking Encounters: N/A

Narrative Images/Metaphors: Papaw‘s sweatshirt, Angel Wings, Letter to Papaw, Downward Spiral, A Muddy Pit, Crossing the Finish Line

Themes: Healing Dialogue, Grief/Suffering as Reflective, Wearing Masks, Performing Grief,

General Impressions: In addition to reiterating the healing nature of dialogue with her Mamaw, Rachel talked a great deal about grief and whether and how she expressed it. She introduced the mask metaphor, elaborating on contexts in which she would show or hide her grief. Rachel described her grief as ―a downward spiral‖ into ―a muddy pit‖ that held her in place. Even having ―crossed the finish line‖ Rachel talked about experiencing life, particularly joyous and momentous milestones, through the lens of grief and loss.

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Listening Group

Creation Story-Rachel/mother play role in Tommy‘s fate/transformation-she challenges him before she was even born-in their subsequent relationship, he challenges her

Modernist approach to grief Apollonian/women in this family represent something else, Dionysian perhaps

The role of pain/grief in Rachel‘s story is central-she is quite open about how she suffered

Ordinary transformed into extraordinary through lens of grief-like choosing a flavor of ice cream which now takes on enormous significance-liminality-where you‘ve always been but now open to something else-defies Rachel‘s (analytical/logical) character while shaping it into something else (imaginal)

Papaw‘s death one of first tragedies in her life

Terror of liminality-seeing her Papaw in the casket-uncanniness

People were sympathetic but didn‘t understand depth of relationship-were encouraging her to overcome and move on from grief

―Essence‖ of Papaw in imaginal encounters as well as sharing them with Mamaw-the most healing aspect of grief-she is validated by her Mamaw which preserves meaning of experiences

Rachel‘s loss imparts a tragic perspective on life

He is present when she suffers most-context for ―embrace‖ dream-emotional pain ushers in these kinds of experiences

Adoptive mom and mamaw participate in imaginal experiences-family culture accepts and openly supports this kind of experience-reminiscent of communal matriarchy-go see the wise woman (adoptive mother sending Rachel to Mamaw)-initiation into the imaginal realm for Rachel and Mamaw is her guide-you have these, we do too, and it‘s real

Dream of embrace illustrates embodied significance of dreaming

―Time to breathe‖- sharing of dreams occur in a quiet, reflective space

Scars become symbols-tattoo will be tangible marker of grief and it keeps it present-pain is experiential condition in which he presents himself-guardian angel is watching over her closely- it can be called on

Her narrative of the encounters changes depending on the context in which she is telling it

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The dream means that she is not alone-that she can continue to have a relationship with her Papaw

Emphasis on how important it is to have supportive social environment in which to share experiences or else they can‘t endure-she‘s cultivating a living network of remembrance-she‘s networking his presence

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Name of Participant: Marion Age: 60 Relation of Participant-Deceased: Wife-Husband Nature of Death: Sudden, Brain Aneurysm at age 56 Time from Death to Interview: 3 years, 6 months Time from First Encounter to Interview: 3 years, 6 months

Response to Prompts

I am Rachel's birth grandmother. She wanted me to tell you about my husband Tommy and the dreams I have had since he passed 3 1/2 years ago. That would be a lot to tell you because I have had 1-2 dreams every week and I write them down. I will just give you some of them.

I met Tommy when I was 17 and a senior in high school. He was 17 at a different high school. We were friends until I asked him to go with me to my Homecoming. We have been best friends ever since that night. We grew up together as we married at 19 and raised our 2 kids. When he died, I was torn in half, never to be the same person again. But life goes on, and so have I.

The first dream I had was the 2nd morning after Tommy died. I saw just his face very close to me and he said,"You need to take a break from missing me!" I was startled, but I new he wanted me to get this message.

I had dreams before from people who had died. When my Mom died she came and said, "What do you want?" and I said, "I just want to hug you." So we hugged.

I also had several dreams of my principal who committed suicide. She was letting me know that she was OK. First I saw an older couple, then I saw her looking young and smiling.

So I knew to expect dreams from Tommy, but that message seemed like a lot so soon. I came to realize how important my handling his death was to my 6 grandchildren and all the students Tommy had taught, and were at the funeral.

The dreams continued regularly, especially on days when my grief was overwhelming. One of those days he came to me and as he was standing next to me, he said, "Do not let go!"

Some dreams were connected to special events. When my niece, whom I am very close to, graduated from high school 2 months after Tommy died; he came in the dream wearing the same shirt that Emma's Dad had on at the graduation. He was walking around the side of the house, smiling. He wanted me to know that he was at that ceremony.

The following Fall when Tommy should have been going back to his 5th grade classroom, on the night before his Aug.1 birthday, I had a dream where I was walking down the hall of [his]…Elementary School passing the teacher's lounge and I heard Tommy laughing. I looked in the door and he held up a finger to tell me not to say anything. He got up to walk towards the door and he changed into a small, petite, young blond woman. I knew that meant that his teaching spirit had been passed on to someone else. A couple months later I found out that the

272 woman who took his place was a small, petite, young blond woman!

Another dream I had, Tommy was standing with me and he said, "You miss Dana don't you? What are you going to do when I die? Drive!" Dana is my daughter who lives with her husband and 2 kids in Pennsylvania.

This summer I was on vacation with my sister's family. In the dream I was sleeping on the air mattress in the hotel, just like I really was, and Tommy came and laid down with me.

I have had many dreams where Tommy comes and hugs me, usually when things have been very hard or emotional for me.

I left Aug. 31, 2012, for New York to look for a place to live near Dana and her family. On Aug. 23, In the midst of the preparation I had a dream where Tommy was standing next to me and he said," You are lucky to have the stamp of approval to achieve and to go on."

On Sept. 3, I had a dream where we were sitting together and he said, "God is triumphant in people's lives." I woke and fell back to sleep and in the dream he said, "Let God take you there."

I know that my soul mate is helping me each day. I do not get to have a dream every time I want one, but I am lucky to have a dream when I most need it.

Tommy loved to spot hawks when he was outside and when he was driving. I see hawks often and they remind me of him. He also loved his red Dodge Dakota truck and seeing one of them drive by is like Tommy is winking at me. Every morning and night I look at his picture with his 'knowing eyes'. His spirit is with me. Some days I feel that stronger than other days. I hope I feel that today when I go to look at the condo I think I am going to buy.

First Interview

Tone/Process: Somewhat defended, initial emphasis on strength, unity, positivity in response to loss rather than pain of grief and implications of loss

Dreams/Nightmares: Daughter‘s dream of Tommy while he was in coma, Tommy ‘56 (prophetic dream), ―Take a break‖ dream before funeral, ―laying in bed‖ dream, ―laying on top of nightstand‖ dream, ―almost home‖ dream, ―driving to the store‖ dream, ―turning into blonde woman‖ dream, ―lying in front of restaurant‖ dream, ―heaven‖ dream, ―Tommy and brother‖ dream, ―stamp of approval‖ dream, ―God is triumphant‖ dream

Waking Encounters: N/A

Narrative Images/Metaphors: ―Everybody talks to you. Who do you talk to,‖ always ―growing together,‖ putting arms around Marion while ―unconscious,‖ being ―sucked through a portal,‖ ―tiny offering compared to Calvary,‖ ―torn‖ in ―half‖ by grief, ―somebody ripped off arm and leg,‖ love vibrations, soul talk, sanctuary

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Themes: Faith, Strength, and Unity, Sacrifice, Performing Grief, Loneliness of Grief, Calling, Solitude and Stillness, Doing vs. Being, Grief as Sacred

General Impressions: Marion‘s description of her relationship with Tommy and the immediate aftermath of the loss seemed to me like a ―censored‖ version of her narrative insofar as she tended to gloss over conflicts in the marriage, and at first, painful aspects of her grief process. Upon further inquiry, however, Marion characterized her grief as a lonely, rending experience which others were at a loss to fully understand. In this period of solitude, Marion experienced a radical transformation in how she approached relationships and life in general. Furthermore, she became attuned to an emergent spiritual calling in which deepening her relationship with God constituted her main life purpose.

Second Interview

Tone/Process: Hopeful, expectant

Dreams/Nightmares: N/A

Waking Encounters: N/A

Narrative Images/Metaphors: ―All the things he touches,‖ a ―connection of souls,‖ ―ride the winds‖

Themes: Solitude and Stillness, Doing vs. Being, Total Loss, Acceptance, Calling, Grief Therapy, Fate, Fear and Grief

General Impressions: Marion further elaborated on the values emerging from the darkest, loneliest, and fearful period of her grieving process, namely, acceptance and the importance of acknowledging all that she had lost and all the her husband had ―touched.‖

Listening Group

Within context of religious beliefs, how does she make sense of ongoing dialogue with husband? Doesn‘t seem like orthodox Christian belief. He‘s very present throughout the narrative. What story might I tell here-what‘s the unique contribution? She tells relationship, death, grief, and transformation narratives. The last seems most striking-new possibilities of being are revealed to her through the process of grieving.

Story arc reflects differences between old and new covenant-from law-like to a more mystical frame for religious life

The three songs she hears prior to Tommy‘s funeral, in an unusual, synchronous experience, resemble the structure/arc of her narrative and her journey - (1) Tiny offering to Cavalry, (2) Let your life crumble, (3) God is light at end of tunnel.

This is a remarkable glimpse into one‘s religious life

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God has elected to take her husband for a preordained, divine reason that she cannot understand. But she‘s willingly to accept it on faith as long as God supports her through it.

She cannot remember the year she was married and says that the last four years of the marriage were the best. What does this say about the relationship/marriage? Married young, Tommy working 90 hours a week, drinking with friends, unavailable. What does this mean for her life at the time? May account for the sense that her narrative of the relationship is somewhat ―laundered,‖ cleaned up in the telling.

―Everybody talks to you. Who do you talk to?‖—basis for initial bond

Brother moves in 10 years after marriage with Marion, husband, and two kids-Marion teaching and husband working 90 hours a week-this period must have been a struggle for her

Group aware of our process-keened attention to disguised conflict

A sad narrative-they seemed to struggle over the course of the marriage, and then, in the last four years of the marriage, the happiest time, he dies.

For the first time in the telling, Marion provides a fine-grained account in talking about her husband‘s death and dying-this is the beginning of the story she wishes to tell

She frames four day period (after aneurysm) as time when the strength of their faith-its hers but she attributes it to her husband equally-can be displayed for the ―problematic‖ others, the disbelievers-this is an explicitly religious narrative that functions to demonstrate the power of faith-a tidy narrative (―narrative smoothing‖)

Husband unconsciously embracing her, his condition instilling faith-instances of religious myth- making, in which Marion views events as ―intended‖ by Tommy

Immediacy of memory circle, and focus on positive, happy memories, so soon after his death is striking

The tone of her response to my amazement with regard to her remarkable, uncanny experiences suggest that they continue to fill her with awe, in spite of the fact that they have been happening for so long and so frequently

The dreams/encounter experiences seem to make perfect sense, but at the same time they are entirely mysterious to her

Tommy‘s presence in daughter‘s dream is another experience put in the service of myth-making

Beginning in the time of his coma, he is being transformed by Marion into a spiritual being

Tommy ‘56 dream construed by Marion as a message from God-marks the beginning of her grief process insofar as she is convinced of its veracity-constitutes a sacrificial narrative-her sacrifice

275 is to accept it on faith/to let go of him

Tommy ‘56 spurs her meaning-making process-making connections, which always lead back to God

In ―Take a break‖ dream, she turns away from Tommy and toward God-forced to choose between grief and faith-brings up distinction between underworld and dayworld, Dionysos and Apollo-movement between these two occurs on a vertical axis-she can descend into grief or be lifted up by her faith

Grief as messy, breaking down vs. unity, strength, stoicism associated with faith-points to different expressions, performances of grief

Encounters are a source of comfort that have embodied significance

In dreams, he is presented in strange and unusual positions-he is ―de-naturalized‖ insofar as he is presented in these odd positions

Noting ―all the things he touched‖-grief is highly disruptive to the routine events that constitute the fabric of our lives-loss tears apart this fabric

Opening /channel between dream world and waking world-soul talk

Grief tears her apart-the dream enters through those ruptures and ―wholes‖ her-this points to the significance of ―love vibrations‖

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