When My World Fell Apart (article)

Last spring, my wife was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and underwent surgery. She bore severe neurological impairment thereafter and became dependent on me for an almost permanent basis. I experienced this personal tragedy as profoundly unfair before realizing what it could mean for me. I would like to share some of my insights because they allowed me to face this fate more peacefully, with a growing awareness of my grieving process.

A Terrible Sense of Helplessness

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For weeks, I felt as if I were in a nightmare, and my hopes to wake up were in vain. Even before my wife’s operation, I was extremely distressed seeing her refusing to eat, losing her motor skills, and growing weak to the point of not being able to leave her bed. Doctors could not come up with a diagnosis until medical imaging showed a lump under her cerebellum. I was overwhelmed with a terrible sense of helplessness exacerbated by the perplexity of consulting physicians. During her convalescence and as a result of cumulative fatigue, I deemed myself a victim of circumstances. “You are in denial,” she told me rather abruptly on a visit to the clinic. A difficult point to accept considering what I had been doing for her in the last months. A clear “yes” to what we were going through implied acknowledgment of what this tragedy spoke about on a deeper level, of how my own unresolved background was concerned—and therefore the meaning it held for me.

Save My Sister 

In my self-awareness process, I try to be responsive to the emotional upheavals that tend to reconnect past and present to break free from their adverse influence and restore peaceful enjoyment of the moment. What was at stake for me in this case? Of what did such dreadful circumstances “speak” to me? Through family members, I knew that my younger sister almost died of bronchopneumonia—I was three or four years old at the time—but had no memory of this traumatic event. Did our painful situation rekindle a possible trauma? At first a reasonable assumption, this intuition proved profitable.

My sense of helplessness is where I begin. A child witnessing affliction with close relatives pervades the anxieties that family members repress. Alone, he or she cannot put such distress into words and tends to feel accountable for the unresolved grief of others. Our mother, for instance, felt all the more helpless that she had not provided us with a secure emotional bond—a shortcoming her daughter’s illness undoubtedly expressed on a psychosomatic level. With young fervor, I thus internalized the urge to “save my sister”!

Experiencing Deep Emotions

Over the following weeks, I had numerous opportunities to feel the emotional imprint of this resolution concerning my ailing partner. My frantic search for remedies that would cure her included our family doctor’s struggle to find the one antibiotic that eventually saved my sister. My insistence that she absorb a reasonable number of calories brought me back to the unbearable dread of wit-

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nessing my young sibling’s enfeeblement. Once these links were made, I was always surprised to experience deep emotions surfacing from childhood—a way of measuring my distress at the time.

The value of this growing awareness for my wife’s peace of mind came up gradually. “If you only pick my worst times,” she used to say angrily, “you are building a distorted picture of what I’m going through. You’re always projecting your sister onto me!” I held her as an emotional hostage of peculiar sufferings, making her play a bad part to revive the sentiments that haunted my traumatic memory. Most certainly, my obsessions brought me back to my ill sibling: her empty gaze, her loss of weight, her possible death…

Too Much of a Task for a Young Child

As a source of anxiety, I also saw the imprint of a parental injunction. My Christian mother certainly asked me to pray for my little sister and somehow entrusted me with her fate through thoughtless suggestions: “Take good care of her! You are a big boy now and she is so fragile!” At present, by transference onto my ailing companion, I was reliving the ordeal of being charged, as a young child, of too much of a task for me—and feared not to meet the challenge. Evidently, such unconscious comprehension had remained active throughout my whole life.

Thanks to my painful self-analysis, the anxiety over “save my sister” slowly released its grip, allowing me to be more effective in my role as a caregiver. Yet another torment arose: the deep aloneness I felt in the relationship with my young mother. Much to my dismay, I had to think of myself as capable of achieving extraordinary feats—being a “savior” for instance. The way I related to others was still marked by this anxious attachment and, in the current circumstances, the fragile bond I nurtured with my loved one was too.

A Burdensome Dependence

Nevertheless, my wife’s situation of dependence began to weigh on my shoulders, and again, I asked myself what it reminded me of. “I have the impression that by necessity, my whole world revolves around you,” I told her one day angrily. “It’s becoming painful!” For weeks, I had taken care of her as if she were “a baby,” and the connection became obvious. How did my mother feel about me when I was a toddler? She had left a rewarding job to take care of her first child—but her heart was not there. Meeting a

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growing infant’s needs weighed on her: it was not a clear “yes”! Regarding caring for my wife, I found myself experiencing such ambivalent feelings—a sense of sacrifice covering up repressed anger. I had become vindictive and certainly unfair. At that point, it seemed appropriate to “return” to my mother the belief that she had been a captive of her baby’s necessities. My demonstration of impatience over my wife’s progress had proven counterproductive as she deemed my haste a form of harassment.

A Stressful Hastiness

I still find it difficult to accept that, as a young child, life was entirely centered on my mother’s priorities; her demands usurped my whole vital space. Maybe she was concerned that her children might steal the best years of her life? Consequently, everything had to “go fast”—a stressful hastiness I now displaced on my partner. “How long should I have to take care of you?” I told her anxiously. “All this is taking so much time!”

While confronting such emotional upheavals daily, I learned that regularly the worst part is not in front of me, but way behind—in my childhood, that is. I knew that my unconscious interprets one given situation in resonance with past traumatic experiences, thus giving hints of possible insights. Taking advantage of a car drive to the supermarket, I spoke to my mother and burst into tears: “You made me feel responsible for my sister’s well-being, but that was too much of a concern! You were the one who had to be in charge!” Hoping to receive in return some consideration, I had opened my heartfelt feelings to no avail. In the present, I still could feel the weight of this excessive drain—a heavy task indeed.

Neurotic Dynamic

Yet another anxiety attack allowed me to loosen the awareness of the knot that tightened my chest. The torment of not meeting my mother’s demands generated a sense of desperation: “I’ll never make it!” Unable to avoid her violent reenactments, I had repressed distress by a constant agitation aimed at fulfilling her will. What I felt now was a lifelong sense of exhaustion and the terror of succumbing to fatigue!

The strain of maternal demands, my anxieties, and subsequent exhaustion appeared to me as three wheelworks of a neurotic dynamic I could eventually escape from. I had to question these injunctions internalized in my early childhood instead of submitting to them. By doing so, my anxiety attacks, terror, and fatigue dwin-

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dled. “I feel you are different,” my wife told me. “You don’t rush around anymore as you used to!”

But as months went by, given the course of her disease, the possibility that she might not survive slowly worked its way through my mind. To keep at bay the huge void I was to acquiesce to, I had filled up my days with frenetic activity. By now, I had to consider the prospect of being left alone. As another hospital stay kept my wife away for a few weeks, I gazed at the objects crowding our small apartment: a healthcare bed, infusion pole, or simple night clothes—all spoke about what we had shared and the emotions I had invested them with. How would I take back the energy that had proved futile?

Emotional Catharsis

Opening the drawer where numerous nutritional supplements piled up, I felt the emotion rising: “All this has been useless! My sweetheart will never recover!” This drawer epitomized all I had done, as a small boy, to set my mother free of her obliviousness—alas, with no success! My present anxiety was linked to this unacknowledged distress and beyond, to the emotional loneliness I suffered as a child. As catharsis of my despair, a torrent of tears reassured me.

My wife’s ordeal was recently brought to an end with her passing away, after a 14-month struggle against illness. “I’m not dead as long as I’m alive!” she used to say as an invitation to be grateful for each moment we shared. Now that she left this world, memories of rare intensity remain. An intimacy that bloomed even without her words to share, a presence to one another undisturbed by disability, a letting go that eventually gained a foothold over despair. Self-awareness and emotional expression still help me cope with these difficult times—as a therapist, my life partner showed me the way. Thank you so much for all we’ve shared, my dear Sylvie!

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