Edith Cook
I was horrified to learn of the two-year-old boy in Cheyenne who was tortured to death by his mother’s boyfriend. I try to imagine the trauma the child’s mother and his two surviving siblings are experiencing just now, with the details of the toddler’s suffering in so many papers. Most of all, my heart goes out to the school-age siblings whose lives have been upended; possibly they themselves suffered unreported abuse. Will they be granted the support they need to cope with what has happened? How will memories of the trauma affect them later in life, as they seek to marry and work?
As survivor of childhood abuse whose two youngest brothers, in the span of ten years, killed themselves, I know that nightmares, panic attacks, and flashbacks can wreak havoc with survivors. I was a young woman in California, nowhere near the locale of the suicides; still, for years I kept “seeing” my youngest brother running into an oncoming train and, later, his older brother hanging from a tree. That second suicide left behind children who, even in adulthood, are barely able to function. Alternatively I know of friends and acquaintances who functioned adequately in the workforce only to suffer, in retirement, nightmares, panic attacks, and flashbacks that prompted them to seek therapy.
Survivors are often plagued by a crushing sense of guilt. Edith Eva Eger in “The Choice,” her arresting memoir as death-camp survivor, for decades felt guilty over having survived Auschwitz when her parents perished there. Conversely, male and female victims of sexual assault often confess to a deep sense of shame, as if the attacks were something they precipitated.
As a survivor I have been interested in research on the consequences of abuse, or those of terrifying experiences (either as children or in adulthood) that manifest as Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. From combat veterans to survivors of slavery and other assaults, to fires, earthquakes, car accidents, reports abound of lifelong struggle. Processing the memories is a long and arduous undertaking.
By itself, talk therapy is not enough; neither is medication, asserts Dr. Bessel van der Kolk in “The Body Keeps the Score,” in which he argues that not only your brain but also your body remembers the trauma inflicted. He gained promising results with ten weeks of intensive yoga therapy by combat veterans whose PTSD did not abate with medication.
The field of epigenetics came online a few years after Kolk’s publication, when scientists reported that children exposed in the womb to the Dutch Hunger Winter (near the end of World War II) carried a particular chemical mark (an “epigenetic signature”) on one of their genes. The findings prompted studies of the descendants of Holocaust survivors and of victims of poverty that suggest, we inherit a trace of our parents’ and even grandparents’ suffering, which in turn affects our own health—and perhaps our children’s, too.
Beverly Engel’s “It Wasn't Your Fault: Freeing Yourself From the Shame of Childhood Abuse with the Power of Self-Compassion” is a book that includes fragments of the author’s own experiences along with exercises for her readers. I hope and pray surviving children everywhere, including the two residing in Cheyenne, will sooner or later gain access to books as these.
Jeffrey Berman has been preoccupied, as I have been, with the devastation leveled on survivors by a loved one’s suicide. His 1999 “Surviving Literary Suicide” approaches the subject through the work of four authors who killed themselves and the stories that grew from their acts, sometimes as tales offered by distraught survivors. To a discussion of Woolf, Hemingway, Sexton, and Plath, Berman adds reflections on the writings of William Styron, whose fictional characters tend to the suicidal or actually kill themselves. Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” is another example of an author who fictionalized a suicidal protagonist but did not herself commit suicide. The works of these writers form the content of a graduate course in literature Berman has taught at SUNY, Albany, the rationale for the course being the prevalence of suicidal ideation among young people.
“Surviving Literary Suicide” is dedicated “To the memory of Leonard Port, 1936-1968.” Berman writes that “Words like ‘devastated’ or ‘traumatized’ do not begin to describe how I felt when my best friend committed suicide thirty years ago,” and that “The driving force behind my teaching and writing has been the need to work through the paralyzing guilt, anguish, and confusion that are the legacy--or illegacy--of suicide.” He adds that “Thirty years after his death, I still mourn his loss and have difficulty forgiving him.”
Edith Cook worked as a translator before emigrating to California. She taught at a number of colleges and universities; as writer, she earned the Wyoming Arts Council’s Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award and its Professional Development Grant. Visit her at www.edithcook.com.
