Out of the Shadows by Walt Odets

Author:Walt Odets
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

I said earlier that Harry embodied a nearly complete catalog of feelings that obstruct grieving, and guilt was a significant part of that catalog. Guilt about both his mother and Harry-2 had been working in destructive synergy to prevent the grieving he needed. Harry had a lot to grieve: his childhood of abuse and neglect, the loss of his mother, the loss of Harry-2 and the life they had known together, the loss of innumerable others to HIV, and the loss of his youth to his own HIV. When I first met Harry, he lived without any sense of a personal future, and I felt his life had been swallowed whole by the unexamined, undigested trauma of all that experience. Robert Jay Lifton describes people who have lived “immersed” in multiple deaths, and the difficulty they have in absorbing the losses and working through the grief. He might as well have been talking about Harry:

This aborted mourning can proceed to the extent that the survivor’s existence can turn into a “life of grief.” Impaired mourning becomes equated with a more general inability to give inner form—again significance—to the death immersion, and therefore to the remainder of one’s life. The survivors may then be especially vulnerable to various kinds of psychic and bodily disturbance, as well as to psychological formulations of their experience.… Unresolved, incomplete mourning results in stasis and entrapment in the traumatic process.22

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