A slice of a life

What we don't know about the people we know best

Twelve years ago my mother fell in love again.

My father died in 2020 when he was 59 and she was 52. When she told me she was never planning to date again let alone re-marry I thought that was a reasonable choice. She was the oldest child of seven who, in a household with a divorce before that was a thing, was partially responsible for keeping the household on the rails. She met my father in her young twenties, had me by 26, and had to raise us both together. My father had more tantrums than I did and required much more help with his homework.

She was the parent with the steady job, my father was a sculptor with on and off income. Mostly off. As a female Ivy League Professor in the early seventies she was constantly fighting for footing at work. In 2020, after eighteen months of nursing my father through a devastating death I figured she needed a break.

I am months away from turning 50 and now I see how absurd it was to accept her assertion that she would live the rest of her life happily alone.

When she was sixty six, after 14 years of taking care of only herself, she met Robert. He was lots of things one of which was 88. His age was all I could see about him at the beginning.

His career spanned half a century. I knew that he had done first hand interviews with Nazi Doctors, victims of Hiroshima, and soldiers from the Vietnam war. It all seemed “ago” to me. Learning about and from history has never been a strength of mine. I gravitate towards individuals and small groups. I think of systems in terms of how they effect the individual. Big Pharma is broken. This friend can’t get insulin. Higher education creates more debt than opportunity. My friend is still paying off his loans in his forties. So Robert’s research seemed far away in terms time frame and personal relevance.

Over the past three years I have been reading and thinking about alternative treatments like ketamine and psilocybin for major depression and PTSD. Even though Robert is a psychiatrist who studied trauma it never occurred to me to talk to him about it. This summer sitting at my mother’s dining room table in Truro, blinded by the sunset, the topic came up. Robert, it turns out, was part of a small group of doctors who coined the phrase Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and lobbied to get it included in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual. Drawing the line from his research on the atrocity of war, to the effect on victims, to the BENEFITS to people I know was a revelation for me.

We all know the reductive risks of labels yet there can be great benefits in applying them. Sometimes knowing that a constellation of behaviors are symptoms of something that others also suffer from is a relief. Sometimes having a label unlocks services and healthcare. I labeled Robert as old. He labeled victims of trauma as having PTSD. One label has real benefits. The other? Not so much.

Yesterday the New Yorker published a (long) interview with him that helped me once again see how the roots of his career continue to blossom today.

In a 2020 tribute to Lifton in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, his former colleague Charles Strozier wrote that a chapter in “Death in Life” on the psychology of survivors “has never been surpassed, only repeated many times and frequently diluted in its power. All those working with survivors of trauma, personal or sociohistorical, must immerse themselves in his work.” - Masha Gessen

Robert is 97 and he still writes every day. He published “Surviving out Catastrophes” in September. So yes. I still think of him as old. Because, you know, he IS old. Studying human created catastrophe has taught him about the will to survive. A lesson he has taken to heart. Clearly it has served him on a personal level not just professional. And my mother, who planned on living the rest of her life alone, has benefited from it too.

I can read and write about the scope of a long life, the deepest human evil and resilience, and still I bring it back to the individual. Sometimes the slice of a life is the easiest one to see. But it isn’t always the deepest.

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What about you? How is your will to survive? Or- if you want an easier prompt, what age seems old?