One Silken Thread: Poetry's Presence in Grief

By Lee D. Scheingold

Lee Scheingold’s rich, painful intellectual and personal journey—following the death of her husband—is described from viewpoints that have informed her life: psychoanalysis, clinical social work, Buddhism and family medicine. Yet it is poetry that is the connecting thread, beginning with the Russian poems which she studied in college. Turning to poetry allowed her to face her grief and a new life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Quid Pro, LLC
• Release date: Feb 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781610271684

Lee D. Scheingold

A long-time MSW therapist with degrees from Duke, University of Wisconsin, and University of Washington, Lee lives in Seattle.

Book preview

Advance praise for One Silken Thread

A wonderful balance of psychoanalytic awareness and poetic sensitivity, an open and revealing memoir of the experience of loss and grief. It took me to another level in reading poetry—looking for and cherishing ambiguity and space. This is the story of how poetry (and Buddhism and psychoanalysis) helps one to come to grips with, or perhaps adapt to or even conquer loss. Best read with the heart.

— Fred Heidrich, MD, MPH, Clinical Professor of Family Medicine, University of Washington

"In One Silken Thread, Scheingold weaves together threads from Buddhism, Psychoanalysis, and Lyric Poetry through the process of her own grief to illuminate the possibility of what she calls ‘the heart of the world’—that which runs deep and connects us all at the level of our feelings. She tells us that she doesn’t write poetry. But this book is lyrical in itself. It is a courageous self-reflection—simultaneously heart rending and affirming of the meaning and beauty possible from a life of caring deeply."

— Ritch Addison, PhD, Clinical Professor, UCSF Department of Family and Community Medicine; Behavioral Medicine Director, Santa Rosa Family Medicine Residency

Coeditor, Entering the Circle: Hermeneutic Investigations in Psychology

When the worst happens, what holds us together? Scheingold probes the depths of loss and finds in it a space for art, love, reflection, and the fiercely energetic life of the mind. Following the ‘silken thread’ of lyric poetry that weaves throughout her personal, professional, and intellectual life, the author’s contemplation of death and the healing powers of art is, like poetry itself, both personal and universal.

— Barbara Henry, PhD, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature, and Affiliate, Jewish Studies Program, University of Washington

Author, Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin’s Yiddish Drama, and coeditor, Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage

"Lee Scheingold has done something extraordinary, linking the truly academic with the truly personal in a way that is neither forced and pedantic nor nostalgic and cloying… It is, in short, real. It’s what an academic does when searching for the light… Somehow, these writings are often too dry, dead, literary, searching for light and staying away from it and its warmth, because both are suspect. The other side is the very personal, about loss, emptiness, hurt, and pain told in a very personal way, but without the distance, separation and understanding that literature and intellect bring to the quest. Scheingold has merged and fully integrated both. This book is very brave and very well done."

— Mark Greenside, Professor of English, History, and Political Science, Merritt College (Calif.)

Author, I’ll Never Be French (no matter what I do) and I Saw a Man Hit His Wife

"One Silken Thread weaves a stunningly intricate tapestry of loves, of the life-wrenching death of a beloved, and of the consolation and self-understanding endowed upon a grief-stricken person by an unlikely troika of Russian poetry, psychoanalysis and Buddhist teaching. In this passionate contemplation on loves lost and found, we readers find ourselves transfixed by poems that express the inexpressible when grief renders us mute, by the revelatory healing of analysis as it is given and received, and by the discoveries of mystery and meditation in dharma practice. Lee Scheingold offers a startlingly self-revealing autobiography of her temporal journey between mind and soul, between love given and love taken away. This beautifully crafted and deeply insightful book speaks to those who are familiar with her three loves, and those who discover them as we turn each page. One Silken Thread must be savored, slowly and meditatively, picked up and put down, until its power is transmuted from one life to the many others on whom it will endow understanding and delight, comfort and courage."

— Terence Halliday, PhD, sociologist and sociolegal scholar; Director, Center on Law and Globalization; Research Professor, American Bar Foundation; Christian lay leader and Presbyterian elder

Author, Beyond Monopoly, and coeditor, Fighting for Political Freedom

One Silken Thread

Poetry’s Presence in Grief

Lee D. Scheingold

Quid Pro Books

New Orleans, Louisiana

Copyright © 2013 by Lee D. Scheingold. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published in 2013 by Quid Pro Books, at Smashwords.

ISBN 978-1-61027-168-4 (ePub)

ISBN 978-1-61027-167-7 (pbk.)

QUID PRO, LLC

5860 Citrus Blvd., Suite D-101

New Orleans, Louisiana 70123

www.quidprobooks.com

Front cover image, entitled Violetas Estructuras, copyright © by Oscar Martínez Heredia. The artist’s website is www.oscar.com.mx, where this and other works of art are presented. The author and publisher express their gratitude for the permission to reproduce his beautiful work for this cover.

Publisher’s Cataloging in Publication

Scheingold, Lee D.

One silken thread: poetry’s presence in grief / Lee D. Scheingold.

p. cm. — (Journeys and memoirs)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-61027-168-4 (eBook)

1. Grief. 2. Loss (Psychology). 3. Grief—Poetry. 4. Russian Poetry—20th Century. I. Title. II. Series.

BF 577.G6 S363 2013

155.8’9.47663—dc22

2013765121

CIP

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Thank you, Will!

This book gives life to my beloved one: it is to Stuart and for Stuart.

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1 • Mourning, the Reflective Space, and Russian Poetry

Chapter 2 • The Long Journey to Insight

Chapter 3 • Narcissism, Neediness, and Regret

Chapter 4 • In Which Dharma Enters the Picture and is Welcomed

Chapter 5 • Family Medicine, Lyric Poetry, and How I Came to Love Them Both

Chapter 6 • From Simplicity to Complexity and Back to Love

Conclusion

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Preface

In the dreadful years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months standing in line in front of prisons in Leningrad. One day someone recognized me. Then, a woman standing behind me with blue lips, who, surely, had never heard my name in her life, came out of the trance that was common to all of us and whispered in my ear (everyone there spoke only in whispers):

—Can you depict this?

And I said:

—I can.

At that moment, something akin to a smile flashed across what had once been her face.

—Anna Akhmatova/April 1, 1957/Leningrad

People tell stories not only to communicate but also to discover who they are as distinctive beings, bound by relations of sameness and difference to the others whose cultural and emotional fields they share. (Laura Engelstein & Stephanie Sandler, Self and Story in Russian History (2000))

I did not know I was writing a book. I began writing a paper for a Russian poetry seminar. It seems I have known so little of what I was actually intending to do during the past two years of widowhood. I did not know that lyric poetry was my, indeed our, inheritance. It was only in the university library stacks that I started to feel profoundly grateful for the bounty of poetry’s presence in my life—I keep wanting to say our lives, because somehow all of those books, these poems, must be for all of us in some way. I myself started to feel included, meant. In the capacious neediness of my emotional state after Stuart’s death, this feeling of being singled out by poetry was powerfully welcoming. The words.

I would not have described the lyric as mixing intense feeling with reflection and analysis: I did not consciously know this yet. What a perfect combination: my shattered heart and my need to observe it as much as I could, were met by poetry. As time went on, I was met by something else: my own need to think about poetry, and then to write about it—what it has been, what it is, what it must be to me and to us.

The older one gets, the more appealing seems the Buddhist notion of causality: everything is caused by no less than everything else. How could it be otherwise? And yet, the notion that causes of events are simple, was deeply appealing to so many of us during the sixties and seventies. I feel grateful to have lived long enough to make this discovery.

While Stuart was writing his last book, The Political Novel, in the early stages we would often talk about how much easier it seemed to write a collection of essays, even those linked by a theme, than to write an actual book in which ideas, thoughts, and themes are linked. The difficult part, and the most challenging and rewarding, we decided, was to find the thread that connects them all and follow it through to some sort of end. Stuart always rose to a challenge, and he did with this one. This rising was not my style, but I have done it now too. Like everything else since Stuart died, I did it only because it seemed the only thing to do. Everything in my life feels like part of everything else, not separate.

I began to wonder how poetry is actually written, though I had and have no inclination to write it myself. This curiosity grew greater as I read more of it and wrote more about it. In a recent New Yorker article (Oct. 15, 2012) about the novelist Hilary Mantel, Larissa MacFarquhar follows the thread of how an organized, controlled person can develop a lightness in writing which cannot be accomplished by simple effort. Then writing becomes non-linear, non-cognitive, and requires a somewhat empty state of mind, which seems to me similar to that acquired in meditation: relaxation is more important than willed effort. What a long time it takes in life to learn this lesson. As I was finishing my concluding words, I came to feel that I might have a glimpse into how poetry is written, and how meaning is made through the power of words. I have been writing my life.

One of the hardest habits to break after losing a partner is saying I and my rather than we and our. It feels wrong, disloyal, and terribly lonely. I have been someone who can, and perhaps even must, turn everything into a relationship. People and words have been the anchors of my life, I now realize. As I came to the end of writing this book, I started a sentence with the words, there is something else I have been meaning to tell you…. I realized then that the feeling of you, of a reader, grew in intensity over the many months I was writing. I had come to feel that you are meant, and that we accompany each other. I invite you, and I welcome you. This then must be the feeling of a silken thread running through this book which connects us. This book is yours now, not mine. Actually, it is ours.

One Silken Thread

Introduction

Anything brought out of the abyss is to be honored.

—Russell Edson

I tried lacing loss into these lines,

thinking to bind it safely there.

But when much lifetime had raced by I

saw rather

trapped in the scrag noose, too,

joy and daylight.

—Richard Kenney

This book is about what poetry can mean in a life. It is also a story of terrible grief. My partner in life, Stuart Scheingold, died in June 2010, and left me trapped in the scrag noose, looking for the daylight.

Poetry nourishes me, assists me to explore new territories, fills out previous experiences and understandings, and accompanies me. The words remain with me, as a kind of talisman I carry along, to remind me what life is, and can be.

I was reading an article about the death penalty by Stuart’s co-author and dear friend Austin, some months after Stu died. I wrote him an e-mail and asked him how he wrote so beautifully. How did he focus in that way? Austin wrote back, I do not know about the word ‘focus.’ I can say that it is the work of love. These words: it was like reading the most powerful poem possible. Then, I could start writing.

But things emerging from the abyss reach clarity only if they can be tolerated and treated with respect and with affection. This is the hard part.

I am not the same person when I finished this book as the one who started it. There are certain underlying questions which only have appeared as I write, that I must have been wondering about without knowing it. Like what is the difference between an ending and a beginning? Is there any difference? How did Stuart and I handle difference? What is living well? What about regrets? There are missed chances and chances taken, as in these lines by Melanie Rehak:

I have never once been able to say yes,

now, this is the instant in which

I should begin to live again,

in which this love is the only love

worth having, the richest of all possible shining arts

to hold forth: Here,

I was here and I knew it.

Standing on my own two feet, and saying yes to belonging in the world. I am sixty-eight. It has taken a great deal of experiencing, thinking, feeling, loving to get here. Some of the experiences which have pointed the way for me to bear witness to my struggles and my quietude are psychoanalysis, Buddhist meditation practice, family medicine, Russian literature, marriage, language, grief/mourning, stopping/stillness. We seem to need so many understandings, don’t we, in order to be right here and to know it. To honor everything that comes.

I am reaching the point where I feel that nothing in my life has been wasted, and that even my own acts which I most regret, were what they were. It is almost as if they needed to be. In the course of my grieving for my husband of 42 years, I lost my internal space many times, the space for considering alternatives, for thinking, for feeling, for playing. My interior space was small, collapsed, confining—and there was no way to make it bigger. In fact, I’m not sure I would have wanted to, even if I could have done it. I resist notions of healing, because grief is not an illness: it simply changes one, and then the next experience works another change, and on and on.

About two years before he died, Stuart bought a very fancy red car. I was delighted for him. As we were driving it home, he said, you know, I wouldn’t even be thinking about getting this car if I weren’t sick. I asked him what his point was. He replied, My point is that I am a very shallow person. How could you not love him?! He could always make me laugh.

After so many years of "us as my primary unit of thought and feeling, I had to begin to live a life in which I" did not compute. Yet it was the only option. Poetry renewed a sense of belonging for me, and at first it was Russian poetry. I felt as if I could count on it when I was testing my sense of who I was inside and outside, who I am in the world. As Clare Cavanaugh has written, partly quoting Angus Fletcher:

The lyric tests the profoundly social issue of human belonging or not belonging by continuously tracing and retracing the boundaries that define inclusion and exclusion, as it cross[es] back and forth between an inner self and a world out there. (2009, p. 8)

I have needed this kind of help in negotiating inner self and outer world, and the lyric has helped me with this ongoing task. I recently noticed that the definition of love proposed by the Benedictine cleric David Steindl-Rast is that love is saying yes to belonging.

But the truth is: I only did any of it because I had to. A ragged, ripped-off piece of paper has followed me around the house. On it, in my handwriting, are the words, "Put the word ‘unwilled’ in there somewhere." I have no memory of writing it, but it is the truth: the grieving, the lost, tender feelings, the sobbing from the pit of my stomach: I didn’t want it. But I could not will it to go away, so I had no choice but to live with it, relinquish control, let the rapids flow. And then, to write about it.

1 • Mourning, the Reflective Space, and Russian Poetry

Love is essentially an attitude maintained by the infinite toward the finite. The reversal constitutes either faith or poetry.

—Joseph Brodsky

…the ‘opulent lovely tongue’ of poetry is not only beautiful in itself, but also impels thought. Verbal rhythm is not just a row of stepping stones but a