Our dad passed shortly before the pandemic of Covid-19 struck. What a blessing that was, as it would have been hell for him and for all of us to go through. The final couple of years, and worsening over the last months, he was increasingly vacant and absent, barely “there.” It was hard to tell if he was bored and disinterested, if he was hovering on the bridge to the next world, or if his tired old brain cells (those that were left) were not firing anymore. He was almost 93 when he died. When I arrived to visit, his second wife would bellow loudly in his ear “(whatever strange nickname she called him), Ruth is here!” His hearing aids were powered on, intact, and in place, but he usually did not even look up. It was as if I was not there. Sadly, to be perfectly honest, it was not that different from much of my life with him. 

I had the good fortune to make my peace with him, so I enjoyed a stretch of a surprisingly happy father-daughter relationship before he began his protracted fade-out departure. Granted, I did all the healing work on my own without his participation, but that is a story for another day. He did participate in a truly loving relationship with me for a time, and I am infinitely grateful for that.

Our dad’s final years, however, were a quiet agony. Thankfully, my sisters and I were a good team. But having my presence or absence not register, questioning whether those long, vapid visits had any meaning at all, was not only interminably empty and boring for me, but a potent reminder of the years of feeling as if I did not matter or even exist in his eyes. They were a living reminder/stimulus of long years of painful and confusing neglect. Admittedly, I lived much of those last two years in various degrees of trauma activation. Being excessively busy and perennially sleep-deprived, the routine visits took a chunk out of every weekend. But for whatever reason I kept them going diligently until the end – not without confusion and unbearable fatigue. 

Why? Was I afraid I might miss something if I did not take advantage of every possible moment with him? What might I possibly miss? I could rarely ask him questions about his life anymore. I found I would collect stories and topics and come with a “playlist” of things in mind to talk about, to entertain either him or myself. I honestly don’t know which. Due to his various cancers, he had been on a feeding tube for years, so my stories about cheesemaking challenges, my baking masterpieces, or food-related conversations, which are ordinarily pleasurable and easy for me, were off the table, so to speak. Our best bet on a good day was to sing. Interestingly, although he did not remember much of anything else, he did seemingly remember all the songs and their lyrics. Sometimes we filled the time that way, especially when I had the good fortune to visit at the same time as a sister, who brought his old guitar. She played it, but it did seem to awaken and cheer him.

Secretly, however, I remembered an old Cuban song I used to listen to and love: “La vida no vale nada…” life is not worth anything. And even though the song is about how life is not worth anything if others are suffering, I had to wonder, what keeps him going? What would make it worth continuing to live and breathe that vacuous existence? And when I dared to be really honest with myself, why doesn’t he just go?

When there is a long history of trauma, neglect, hard-earned healing, and profound ambivalence about its perpetrators and purveyors, their final years can be complicated at best. Some of us are too enraged and hurt still to be dutiful; some of us too dutiful to allow ourselves to feel enraged or hurt. If we are glaringly aware of both the parents’ own tragic and unconscionable trauma and misfortune and their own tragic and unconscionable lack of healing, it is even more complicated. Add to that whatever feelings we might have about what others (those mythical others) might think about how we navigate the loss of a parent. Some of us care. And many of the feelings are outside our awareness. 

I remember when our mom died in 2000. I was so embarrassed when people expressed sympathetic condolences as I felt nothing but grateful relief – or so I thought. I was driving the day after she passed, however, and my car broke down on the freeway. Much to my own surprise, I fell apart on the phone with the Triple A operator who took my call for emergency road service, crying rather hysterically to her about how my mother had just died. It was as if I and not the car had broken down.

The child of neglect, often virtually from the point of conception, floats in a sea of solitude. Like a fish, the water may not even register, as it can seem “natural” or the norm, the absence of attachment being all that is known. Attachment, however, is not only a birthright – it is nature’s design. To be connected is a survival need, and in effect, nurture is nature. To be left alone and adrift is a crime against nature as far as I am concerned. 

As the child grows older, solitude may become the default, seemingly “preferred” state, most likely not consciously. The less familiar state of being in company or connected with anyone may feel like a strain at the very least, if not foreign, impossible, even terrifying. More than a few neglect survivors I have known found the isolation of lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic barely noticeable or even a welcome “permission” to simply lay low. Often, I have heard their partners complain bitterly of feeling perennially rejected. 

When I first started my anecdotal study and data collection about neglect and began to formulate the outlines of what I came to think of as the “Neglect Profile,” I noticed what I perceived as a seismic shrug, often accompanied by the words “I don’t know what to do!” or “There is nothing I can do!” Going back probably to the beginning of time in their relationship world, they felt that they had no impact at all, so the experience of powerlessness seems to rumble and quake from deep in their core. Often, these people are extraordinarily accomplished and proactive in other ways, be they professional, creative, athletic, or some other significant pursuit. 

The domain of relationships confronts the child of neglect with their core paradox: the central conundrum that plagues them, whether or not they are aware of it. It is what local treasure, Berkeley attachment researcher Mary Main, calls the dilemma without solution. If they allow themselves to feel their natural longing for connection, they are faced with a story and the ongoing threat of agony and, at the very least, vulnerability. What is to be done? Most likely, the only viable adaptation is to freeze or avoid. Often this also is the complaint of their partners: numbing, avoidance, even paralysis.

(Warning: this story may contain content that is disturbing to some readers.)

As the world reels from the recent death of a young Iranian woman at the hands of the “morality police,” I heard a recent interview with another young woman who was stopped, but thankfully not detained, for the “incorrect” wearing of the hijab, the controversial mandatory head covering required for women in Iran. Her breathy recounting of the story, her experience of the event, and its aftermath was like reading the checklist of PTSD symptoms from the DSM. She could check every box: flashbacks, nightmares, terror of even leaving the house, and fearful aversion to even the thought of the street corner where the trauma occurred. Listening to her sent a chill from my belly and up through my whole body.

It was a familiar chill, taking me back to my Aleph class, the first grade of Hebrew School, which corresponded to third-grade regular school, making me about seven or eight years old. I remember watching the grainy black and white newsreels of the Nazi concentration camps, seeing the naked skeleton-like bodies, some of them very small, being kids like me, or too emaciated to tell if they were young or if they were shrunken by starvation and suffering. Clearly, they were almost or soon to be dead.

The chill, the same sensation I was feeling once again, even then, resonated with something as yet unremembered in my own life; that kept me awake or awakened by nightmares and horror. Why they were showing those films to such young kids and without helping to make sense out of them, if there was any sense to be made, continues to be beyond me. The rallying cry of the then-radical Jewish Defense League was “Never Again!” But still, seven- and eight-year-olds?

That same chill, like an intractable ghost, revisited my belly and nightmare-ridden nights in my first year of college. It was another September 11th milestone that became a haunting anniversary in my annual date book: September 11th, 1973, when the bloody Pinochet dictatorship overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile. Thousands were rounded up, brutally tortured, raped, murdered, and/or disappeared during a reign of terror which spread over much of the Latin American continent. Having grown up on a diet of such stories, I was both riveted and haunted. Many of the torture stories were hideous and graphic, often involving genitals, that lingered in particular in my horror-ridden mind and body.

When we went to hear football legend Jerry Rice speak about Black History Month a few years ago, what struck me perhaps the most was the immense size of his hands. Getting my picture taken with Number 80 was a thrill, and having his arm around me momentarily for my photo op reminded me of the old song, “He’s got the whole world in his hands!”  

I love that picture. I am no fan of football, and that is for sure. I have never watched even a fraction of a game in my life. But somehow, Jerry remains on my shortlist of iconic heroes, mostly for the fact that he got everywhere that he got, which was quite far, through perseverance and essentially out-efforting everyone else. That I identify with. 

Jerry grew up in the deep American south in a small town of 500 people. He was the sixth of eight children in a poor family, so I can imagine how much attention he got. I found out he had learning disabilities when he spoke about literacy to a crowd of Oakland middle school kids. As a very young child in a family where there was rarely enough food, Jerry helped his dad, a bricklayer. At age 5, he learned to catch bricks tossed by his brother and handed them to his dad one by one as the walls went up. That will give you some hands!

I had a client who thought recovery was supposed to be like building a brick wall. Once you lay the foundation, you place brick upon brick and build a whole new structure. She was frustrated, believing she had spent years trying to lay a foundation, and felt terrible failure, disappointment, loss, anger and shame that she had not put any building on it. She certainly felt let down by me! I was startled and rather jarred by her metaphor, which was so far from my own vision of recovery. 

My Oakland office is in a lovely quaint Victorian building. It was not built on the site where it now stands – rather, the old house with whatever its story was transported from some other part of town, deposited in this upwardly mobile neighborhood, and remodeled into a rather classy office building. I once saw a picture of a house being moved across a town. What a strange and disorienting sight, a large vehicle with a family-sized dwelling occupying the whole width of a city street. 

My vision of healing is far from a brick-and-mortar construction or a “fix,” but something much more organic. Just as neurofeedback is not something we do “to” someone or “on” someone, but a shared endeavor I do with someone, in a swaddle of caring, attentive psychotherapy. Similarly, I think of healing as something that arises, that emerges gradually from the inside out. It seems to me to be something that grows. How did Jerry’s hands get so big? There was some raw material, and then there was some long-term repeated action, and they emerged big and strong.