Adelaide Literary Award Anthology 2019 - ESSAYS

Riffing on “The Cut, and the
Building of Psychoanalysis

(Volume I and II Sigmund Freud and Emma
Eckstein” by Carlo Bonomi PhD.)

by John Bliss

I began training to become a psychoanalyst at The National
Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in 1986 and grad-
uated in 1997. My training was grounded in classical theory
and Freud was the pinnacle of this orientation. I loved training
to become a psychoanalyst and found Freud’s theories exhila-
rating. Psychoanalytic theory became the foundation of how I
understood the world, well tried to understand the world. Yet,
I had been puzzled by Freud’s use of the word castration to
describe the amputation of the penis since first reading about
it decades ago.

Freud used the word castration and circumcision synony-
mously. He also described castration as the amputation of the
penis as opposed to removal of the testicles. This bothered me.
I would often question it and the responses from instructors
and colleagues attributed my inquisitiveness to my personal

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castration anxiety. These pseudo interpretations never satisfied
my curiosity.

The convoluted use of these words seemed unusual for
Freud, a man who ascribed great significance to the specificity
of language. I maintained an irritable curiosity over Freud’s
corrupted use of the word castration until reading The Cut,
and the Building of Psychoanalysis, Volume I and II Sigmund
Freud and Emma Eckstein” by Carlo Bonomi PhD.

Theodore Thaas-Thinenemm in “The Interpretation
of Language Volume I & II: Understanding the Symbolic
Meaning of Language” addresses the fusion of two words that
creates a third meaning. “In most cases it can be demonstrated
that there is a repressed energy at work seeking outlet by cre-
ating new forms of speech.”

I am indebted to Carlo Bonomi PhD and the accomplish-
ment that he has achieved in these two books. Carlo Bonomi
PhD, president of the Sandor Ferenczi Cultural Association
discovered and developed a concise explanation of the “re-
pressed energy” in Freud that created the fusion of the words,
castration, circumcision and genital mutilation. Bonomi ex-
plained how the word castration was used to communicate
amputation.

I met Bonomi in Rome in 2016 at the International As-
sociation of Relational Psychoanalysts conference. I attended a
seminar introducing the conceptual framework for his writing.
He discovered evidence that Freud’s concept of penis envy re-
sulted from his unexplored counter transference to Emma Eck-
stien and her traumatic genital mutilation in childhood. Penis
Envy is the parapraxis of an unexplored enactment between
Freud and Emma Eckstien. Prior to these remarkable books,
the concept of penis envy and its acceptance or rejection lacked
a coherent and fact based understanding about its theoretical

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development. Bonomi made sense of the emergence of penis
envy and castration anxiety.

Castration fears and penis envy are linked in Freudian
theory. Men fear castration which in Freud’s vernacular is syn-
onymous with not only circumcision but with the amputation
of the penis. In Freud’s view women unconsciously desire the
penis that was once taken away from them and wish their little
penis (clitoris) would grow into a full functioning male organ.
Prior to “The Cut” psychoanalysts either accepted penis envy
and castration anxiety as truth or dismissed the concepts as cul-
ture bound relics of the late 19th century bourgeois mind-frame.

The excitement I experience reading and re-reading The
Cut Volume I and II is similar to the thrill I had when learning
about Quantum entanglement or when a musician friend re-
vealed to me the song Autumn Leaves embedded in Bach’s Al-
lemande in E minor. Bonomi’s application of psychoanalytic
theory to the evidence he discovered proves that psychoanal-
ysis is best understood as a relational practice.

The uniqueness of The Cut lies in the fastidious research
and compilation of facts Bonomi uncovered and connected to
Freud and his treatment of Emma Eckstein. These facts and
his interpretations created a thorough and logical summation
of what transpired in Freud’s analysis of Emma Eckstein and
subsequently formulated the foundation of psychoanalysis.
Lengthy sections of Volume I read like a legal brief labori-
ously documenting a step-by-step analysis of the facts that led
Bonomi to his conclusions.

The denseness of Volume I is possibly a reason that
Bonomi hasn’t received more recognition for his work. It is
as if Bonomi felt compelled formulate an airtight defense to
counter any anticipated argument to his thesis. He found the
material he was uncovering about Freud and Emma Eckstien

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in a sense unbelievable and kept researching. It took Bonomi
30 years to write Volume I.

Freud was often intolerant with colleagues who devel-
oped psychoanalytic ideas that weren’t aligned with his own.
Arguments around Freudian theories like castration anxiety
or penis envy often take the form of litigations, resulting in
polarized divisiveness within the psychoanalytic community.
Bonomi concentrated his efforts on understanding how these
ideas came about.

Psychoanalysis eventually became divided between clas-
sical theory loyal to Freud and the relational or interpersonal
schools. I tried to see the merits of both orientations and often
had one foot in each school of thought. There was an un-
comfortable sense of indecisiveness about picking a theoretical
orientation. Did I lack conviction? Bonomi proved that these
concepts are not separate and the theoretical unity has been
there since psychoanalysis started.

The Cut dispels the traditional notion of castration anxiety
and penis envy and simultaneously integrates these concepts
into psychoanalytic theory. As I will explain The Cut bridges
the schism between classical and relational psychoanalytic the-
ories. The factual link between these orientations did not exist
prior to Bonomi’s work.

Jonathan Sklar, MD in his review in Psychoanalysis and
History calls The Cut an “impressive and complex book.” Ju-
dith E. Vida MD in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis
described The Cut as a “whirlwind of scholarship, destined to
forever alter your understanding of Sigmund Freud, the birth
agonies of psychoanalysis, and the hitherto unacknowledged
origins in trauma of the entire psychoanalytic enterprise”.

Skeptics of Bonomi’s work reiterate their belief in the
truth of Freud’s theories. However there has not been any

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evidence discovered by any other researcher to substantiate a
counter-argument to Bonomi’s thesis.

Samuael Abrams M.D. in his paper titled “Pernicious Res-
idues of Foundational Postulates: Their Impact on Women,”
published in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child discusses the
distinction between hypothesis and hypostatized based theories.
Hypothesis based theories are based in facts and observations.
Hypostatized theories are derived in obscure and ambiguous
ways, yet they are often compelling. Regardless of their lack
of evidence hypostatized theories are often incorporated into
an established concrete narrative. Otto Fenichel discussed this
in his review of Freud’s last book An Outline of Psychoanal-
ysis. Fenichel thought Freud’s last book was hypostasized. Nu-
merous psychoanalytic scholars have recognized that core psy-
choanalytic structures are based on hypostatized theories. The
hypostatized theories are often vehemently defended as factual.

The acceptance of penis envy is associated with the view
of Freud’s imagination as genius. Helene Deutsch was the first
woman to write a feminine perspective on psychoanalysis. In
her two volumes, Deutsche refers to penis envy as an estab-
lished fact and often simply moves on to discuss other topics.
Karen Horney, similar to many feminist analysts renounced
penis envy as idiosyncratic to the predominance of the male
perspective in psychoanalytic theory. Clara Thompson em-
phasized the competitive cultural factors surrounding penis
envy. In “Psychoanalysis and Feminism,” Juliet Mitchell high-
lights that it is the castration complex that differentiates males
and females. As per Mitchell, castration and penis envy de-
fines women as envious naturally. Men are naturally fearful of
loosing their penis when they become aware of vaginas.

The question arises if the castration complex is dispelled
is the psychoanalytic community able the grapple with the

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question of how are men and women different if at all other
than the obvious anatomical qualities. It would seem that
Bonomi is tearing down psychoanalysis’ temple veil. However,
he is actually strengthening psychoanalytic theory by re-inte-
grating the notions of penis envy and castration anxiety into a
relational paradigm.

The Cut begins with Freud’s work in pediatrics early in his
career. Bonomi was intrigued that Freud’s work with children
was virtually ignored by previous theorists, historians and biog-
raphers. From 1886 to 1896 Freud worked three days a week
at The Public Institute for Children’s Diseases in Vienna. Freud
was most likely exposed to the practice of female circumcision
and clitoridectomy at that time.

Bonomi, “The term ‘castration’ in the years 1850-1900
referred almost exclusively to a surgical treatment of nervous,
psychical, and ‘immoral’ disturbances in women (nympho-
mania for instance).” He examined hundreds of medical files
in Vienna that revealed the prevalence of female genital muti-
lation to ‘cure’ masturbation and hysteria. It was a disturbingly
common practice to surgically remove young girls’ labia and
clitoris to “treat” hysteria and hyper sexuality during childhood.

Bonomi determined that Freud’s patient Emma Eckstein
had endured genital mutilation, which in spite of being revived
in her analysis with Freud, was not discussed as a traumatic
event. One crucial piece of evidence is found in the letters
between Freud and Wilhelm Fliess. The specific letters refer
to a female patient of Freud’s who had been cut at a time he
had only one female analysand, Emma Eckstein. Anna Freud
omitted these letters from the initial publication of the Freud
and Fliess letters.

The clitoris was often referred to as the little penis. But
it wasn’t a penis that was amputated but Emma’s clitoris. In

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Freud’s castration theory Emma’s dream about her mutilated
clitoris became her envy for a penis. Her trauma was then
projected into Freud’s unconscious psyche. Bonomi states “The
fact that Freud had become the depository of the salvific penis
which Emma fantasized was presented by me as the unconscious
true source of Freud’s phallocentric doctrine. In other words, Em-
ma’s psychic reaction to her cut not only managed to survive be-
yond her carnal body, but became a relic which was preserved and
worshipped in the psychoanalytic crypt.”

Freud wrote, “Circumcision is a symbolical substitute of
castration, a punishment which the primeval father dealt his sons
long ago out of the awfulness of his power, and who so ever ac-
cepted this symbol showed by so doing that he was ready to submit
to his father’s will, although it was at the cost of a painful sacrifice.”
This is indicative of the confusion regarding the word circum-
cision as being described as an amputation of the penis. The
idea of castration was a veneer covering the actual trauma of
Emma’s genital mutilation.

Penis envy was Freud’s interpretive reaction to Emma’s
mutilation and mourning her own severed clitoris. Emma’s
dream about growing a penis was a reparative attempt to cope
with her actual traumatic mutilation. Yet penis envy became the
accepted Freudian truth.

Bonomi writes, “Freud’s reconstruction of the female child’s
psyche that her tiny penis would grow as large as a boy’s, when
that fails the child fantasizes she once possessed a big penis and it
was cut off. Emma’s genital mutilation morphed into a universal
biotrauma.”

Bonomi sheds new light on Freud’s defense of Fliess’s
botched operation on Emma’s nasal cavity. Freud referred
Emma to his surgeon friend Fliess believing his surgery would
cure her hysterical symptoms. The nasal operation almost

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killed her yet Freud defended Fliess. This position was symp-
tomatic of Freud’s unconscious struggle with Emma’s actual
trauma. Freud’s denial of Emma’s genital mutilation led to his
overdetermined defense of Fliess’ nasal mutilation of Emma.
In essence she was re-traumatized by Fliess’ operation and
Freud was unable to process it as such.

Freud’s countertransference to Emma’s traumatic circum-
cision explains his developing a universal psychology that put
penis envy and castration anxiety at its core. According to Freud
the phallus is the primary genital.

Prior to The Cut explorations about Freud’s unconscious
were restrained. Knowledge of the reality of genital mutila-
tion forces us to wrestle with the trauma and its damaging
effects. Penis envy and castration anxiety become an accom-
modating misdirection away from the actual torture that was
inflicted on an unknown number of women including Emma
Eckstein.

Bonomi questions Freud’s self-analysis and its acceptance
as thorough and evidence of his creative genius. Previous ex-
plorations of Freud’s self analysis consistently didn’t go far
enough and lack the evidence and the subsequent formula-
tions made by Bonomi. The Cut challenges this notion of the
analysts’ “supreme autonomy” exposing the absence of any ex-
ploration of Freud’s countertransference to Emma. Previous
writings were concerned with Freud’s transference to Fliess.
The Cut frames these unanalyzed events as a psychoanalytic
enactment between Freud and Emma. Bonomi argues that
this historic enactment between Freud and Emma perpetu-
ated the stifling and institutionalized notion of a one-person
psychology with its fantasy of the neutral and impervious
psychoanalyst.

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The grandiosity implied by the infallible psychoanalyst is
pervasive in psychoanalytic culture. Freud’s theory perpetu-
ated the notion that women exist to pleasure men. For Freud
vaginal orgasm was evidence of mature feminine sexuality. The
clitoris is bypassed as an important nerve center for sexual
satisfaction based on a male centric theory of sexuality. I view
this as a psychoanalytic mutilation/castration of the clitoris by
virtue of the denial and negation of the clitoris’ importance
to women’s sexual gratification. The notion that women are
capable of orgasms without men certainly minimizes the man’s
role and can eliminate it altogether, an unimaginable construct
within Freud’s concept of pathology and normality.

Bonomi’s research re-examines material regarding Freud’s
personal experiences with circumcision and his rebellious deci-
sion to not have his own male children circumcised. The inter-
section between Freud’s emotional reaction to Emma’s genital
cut and his aversion toward the Hebrew ritual is indeed found
by Bonomi as the matrix of many dreams of Freud, starting
with the founding dream of psychoanalysis, the famous Irma
dream, and ending with the dream of Freud’s dissection of his
own pelvis, in which the horrible cut is replicated on his own
body. Thus, in spite of Freud’s intellectual disavowal and dis-
sociation, the genital cut endured by Emma resonated deeply
in him, awakening a series of painful memories while the “cut”
emerges in these dreams.

The Cut exposes Freud’s humanity and that he in part un-
wittingly discovered a method of therapeutic help that incor-
porates countertransference into the cure that psychoanalysis
is capable of. Bonomi has upset the psychoanalytic applecart
and proved the practice of psychoanalysis has been relational
since its inception.

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References:

Abrams, S. (2015). “Pernicious Residues of Foundational Pos-
tulates. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 69:41-58.

Barandon, T., Broughton, C., Gibbs, I., James, J., Joyce, A.,
and Woodhead, J. (2005) “The Practice of Psychoana-
lytic Parent Infant Psychotherapy: Claiming the Baby”
London, Routledge.

Bonomi, C. (2015). “The Cut and the Building of Psycho-
analysis, Volume I & II, Sigmund Freud and Emma Eck-
stein.”: 27 Church Road, East Sussex: Routledge.

Deutsch, H. (1944). “The Psychology of Women Volume I &
II”. New York, Grune & Stratton

Dimitrijevic, A (2017) The Cut and the Building of Psychoanal-
ysis, Volume 1: Sigmund Freud and Emma Eckstein, by
Carlo Bonomi, Routledge, Sussex and New York, 288pp.
Am. J. Psychoanal, 77(1) 87-90

Fenichel, O. (1941). “Review of An Outline of Psychoanalysis,
by Sigmund Freud”. (International Journal of Psychoanal-
ysis 21.

Horney, K. (1942) “The Collected Works of Karen Horney,
Volume I & II, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Koritar, E. (2017), The Cut and Building of Psychoanalysis, Carlo
Bonomi, London: Routledge,Vol. 1, 2015, 275pp: Vol 2,
2018, 271pp. Canadian J. Psychoanal.,25(2):152-157

Magagna, J., Bakalar, N., Cooper, H., Levy, J., Norman, C.,
and Shank, C. (2005) “Intimate Transformations: Babies
with their Families” London, Karnac

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Masson, J. (1984).“Freud and the Seduction Theory, A chal-
lenge to the foundations of psychoanalysis.”: Boston Ma.
The Atlantic.

Mitchell, J. (1976) “Psychoanalysis and Feminism.” New York,
Vintage Books.

Robinett, P. (2010) “The Rape of Innocence. Female Genital
& Circumcision In The USA” PO Box 256, Eugene, OR
97440, Nunzio Press.

Rodriguez, S.B. (2014) “Female Circumcision and Clitoridec-
tomy in the United States”: 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Roch-
ester, NY 14620: University of Rochester Free.

Thass-Thienemann, T. (1968). “The Interpretation of Lan-
guage Volume I & II”. New York, Jason Aronson. Inc.

Thompson, C. (1941). “Penis Envy and Incest: A Case Report.”
New York, Psychoanalytic Review.

Vida, J.E. (2017). The Cut and the Building of Psychoanalysis,
Volume 1: Sigmund Freud and Emma Eckstein, by Carlo
Bonomi, Routledge, Sussex and New York, 2015, 288pp.
Am. J. Psychoanalysis. 77(1):83-86

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Shredding What Remained

by Cynthia Close

The day my father died I fought with my mother. I remember
pushing her, screaming at her as she backed into the laundry
room. With her bare spidery arms flailing, she stumbled, al-
most falling against the closed door that led into the garage.
She was 84 years old. I wanted to kill her.

Can you feel sympathy for anyone who might contem-
plate doing away with (murdering is something I still find dif-
ficult to say) their own, aging, mother? I’m not courting your
sympathy. This admission is an attempt to dig out the root,
expose the under-lying motive for my actions, not to excuse
them, and to put the memory of that encounter to rest.

My mom features indirectly in much of my writing. I ex-
perience her as a two-dimensional being. I don’t actually write
about her, I write around her. She lingers on the periphery of
my life, never actively engaged. A taunting presence neverthe-
less. Anything I may claim to know about her inner-self, her
feelings, is pure speculation.

A narrowly repressed rage roiled my psyche all the years
we were burdened as mother and daughter. The source of the
mutual (you may question that, but I had proof ) animosity
evades me. Perhaps we never bonded at birth. Those were the

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days when mothers–dads were not expected to contribute to
this task–were told to feed babies on a strict schedule. “Let
them cry” the doctors said. My grandmother told me I was a
colicky baby. The bottle-fed formula given every four hours
may have been the problem. The medical profession, almost
all white and all male in post war America considered breast
feeding primitive, unsanitary, not an option for a modern
mother and my mother was not one to question authority.
Who is to blame?

As a teenager the red heat of my simmering urge to oblit-
erate her nearly set the house on fire. By then I had outgrown
submitting to the periodic enemas mom relied on to keep
my insides as spic and span as she kept the kitchen sink. If
it were not for a thin thread of humanity–certainly nothing
approaching love–coiled deep inside, yanking me back from
taking a final full-powered swipe the day my father died I
might be writing this sitting in a jail cell. That act would have
condemned me in the eyes of anyone who cared to look.

When we returned in the sweltering late afternoon south
Florida heat to what had been my parents, now my mother’s
comfortable white and lime green air-conditioned house I felt
aimless, untethered while my mother was on a mission. The
relentless sun ricocheted across the shimmering water in the
turquoise tiled swimming pool in the back yard just as it had
done when we left hours earlier before dad died. It appeared as
though she had no consciousness of the meaning of her actions
beyond that moment. I screamed in an effort to stop her. Had
she suddenly been struck deaf? Did she imagine herself to be
alone, or was her anger blinding her as much as mine did me?

Dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer at seventy, the
same year he retired. The doctors gave him anywhere from
six months to a maximum of two years to live. He was stoic.

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Any fears the diagnosis conjured up were held at bay by his
determination to prove them wrong. He’d faced death before
at nineteen when he piloted a B-17 bomber over Germany.
Like many others of his generation he never spoke of his war-
time experience nor did he complain or give in to his disease.
He willingly tried any new, often risky treatment that became
available. He was one of the first to have radiation pellets im-
planted directly targeting the cancer. Outwardly, he looked
good. He was tall, fair, broad-shouldered, a prideful man. His
thick, wavy blond hair dulled somewhat by gray, often grazed
his forehead in a youthful tousled way. His slender body never
betrayed his drinking or his declining health. I’m not sure
when I became aware of his extramarital affairs. They were
the source, the acrid thing that filled the air with unsaid ac-
cusations, an underlying tension that poisoned our family life.
All those late nights when he never showed up for dinner, my
mother, dutifully stirring pots of food gone cold, her misery
encased the house like a shroud. She became untouchable. Or,
as I chose to believe, she was always untouchable. It was she
I blamed for my father’s search for empathy, sex and love in
the arms of others. My evidence existed in photos. The only
pictures I have being held as an infant, or hugged and kissed as
a child were in the arms of my father. In the few photos where
my mother and I appear together we are adults. We are facing
forward to the camera. Rigid. Not touching. Tightlipped as
though we were afraid our inner thoughts would escape. I
cannot recall the scent of her, the feel of her skin. A kiss was
part of a language my mother didn’t speak.

My own early sexual promiscuity may have been an at-
tempt to mimic my father’s behavior. I didn’t try to hide it
from either of them. My mother acted pleased, charmed by
the boys, always older boys, I would drag home in an endless

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stream until I went off to college and had no need to come
home at all. Though I never told anyone what I knew about
my dad’s infidelity, I felt a deep recognition we were somehow
the same and maybe we were looking for the warmth and love
that was not within the scope of my mother’s ability to give. Or
maybe it was all just a hormonal accident, part of the genetic
makeup of every individual determining our sexuality, the who,
and what, and how much we desire.

I’m not sure what event validated my knowing I shared a
hunger for understanding and connection with my father. Per-
haps it occurred the summer I spent at the Skowhegan School
of Painting and Sculpture in the backwoods of central Maine.
This experience triggered a depth of insecurity I’d managed to
keep hidden from everyone, including myself. I was one of
the youngest artists in residence and I felt diminished, prayed
upon by the older, far more sophisticated talents that summer
of 1966. My star was rising my junior year at the Boston Uni-
versity School for the Arts. The faculty awarded me a presti-
gious full summer scholarship to study at Skowhegan – the
only one offered that year. Confident of my skills in the class-
room, my self-assurance disappeared when challenged by more
worldly-wise minds. Although the studio facilities at the rural
Maine school were more than adequate, my painting sucked.
I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. Intellectually,
I still thought like a student rather than the artist I wanted to
be. Set adrift, unable to present a cohesive image on the canvas,
I had the equivalent of writer’s block. I was drowning in a sea
of insecurity.

A few days before the final end of summer critique my anx-
iety peaked and I couldn’t face it. It was like when Bret Easton
Ellis panicked at Bennington and called his mom to take him
home but that was in the 1980s. This was 1966, long before cell

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phones–there was one public phone available for students. As a
last resort, I called home. At the sound of her hesitant, “Hello?”
my voice cracked. I implored, “Mom, mom, I am desperate, I
can’t think straight. I need to get out of here. Please, please can
you come get me?” I knew this was a cowardly way to act, a
last-ditch effort to avoid facing my own inadequacies. I’d hoped
she’d take pity and drive up to Maine (we lived in New Jersey
at the time) and rescue me. She refused, telling me I “needed
to tough it out.” It was the answer I’d anticipated. Distraught
and ashamed, I’d never failed so completely at anything be-
fore. The urge to run into the woods surrounding the painting
studios and disappear in an attempt to escape my shattered
ego became more intense as the day of reckoning approached.
Two days after my call home dad showed up, unexpectedly,
driving one of his company trucks. I thought I had dreamed
him, conjured him up in my desperation. If he and my mother
had argued about my request he would not say but he never
belittled her just as he did not berate me now. Although sur-
prised he accepted my need to leave this place that at one time
I had so coveted. It was an 8-hour drive from Maine back to
Dover, New Jersey and Dad was quietly sympathetic in spite of
my inability to articulate the panic I felt.

Not long after my dismal summer performance I was back
at college and I think it started around then, I began to write
my father letters, hand-written letters on lined notebook paper
about my life and my relationships with men, how I thought
he would understand and that I knew there were other women
in his life and did not hold it against him. Some of the letters
became confessionals, as long as four or five pages. If I’d been
religious I’d say they were close to feeling like I was talking to
God, talking to that all knowing, all forgiving someone who
would always love you no matter what. Stamped, sealed, and

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sent, the writing went on for years, after graduate school, up
until I was married and my daughter was born. Dad never
wrote back, nor did he acknowledge the letters. They were not
returned to me so I imagined he’d received them. I didn’t ask.
That may seem odd. Our interactions as a family were like
a performance in some parallel universe while we each kept
our private realities hidden just below the surface. There were
hints. When I returned home at Christmas or visited during
the summer my interactions with my dad were relaxed, inti-
mate in a way that told me we held each other’s secrets close.

Unhappiness and disappointment tugged at the corners
of my mother’s mouth and clouded her vision. Rather than
confront the source of her grief she chose a tightly controlled
life of subliminal victimhood. She had the means but never
allowed herself the most feminine of indulgences, the luxury
of a facial, or a perfect manicure. Not that she was homely.
Her wedding photos showed a slim attractive woman with
shoulder length, wavy, dark brown hair, looking out at the
world with an inscrutable expression. Perhaps her self-contain-
ment had something to do with being repulsed by touch, the
feel of skin against skin of one human to another. Esthetic
procedures designed for soothing the body demand a certain
trust. Allowing another person to slather all sorts of creams
and potions on your skin during a facial requires a willingness
to be vulnerable, to let another person see you without your
mask. Like many other human foibles there is a medical term
for the fear of being touched, it’s an anxiety disorder. They call
it haphephobia. At the time I never considered that she might
have this condition.

Dad, on the other hand, relished the sensual pleasures of
life. Good food, expensive restaurants, high-end cars, luxury
motorboats, well-tailored clothes, cologne and holding my

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hand when we walked. He had no problem being self-indul-
gent and neither did I. We also argued. Sometimes those ar-
guments, usually about politics, became intense. My mother
would disappear, unable to join in the fray, fearful of the en-
ergy we generated in the defense of our positions, while dad
and I enjoyed the intellectual jockeying, the challenge of pas-
sionately defending a point of view.

Through a force of will, aided by medical advances, dad
went on to live in relatively good health fourteen more years
after his initial diagnosis. It was only during the last year of his
life, really the final six months when he slid into a sudden de-
cline. His tall frame, once held proudly erect, became stooped.
My mother, aided by a team of nurses, doctors, and health
workers, cared for my dad at home until it was evident his life
was slipping away. When word came that dad should be moved
into hospice care I traveled down from Vermont where I now
lived to help my mom. I felt a moral duty as a daughter to be
there for support, and to see my dad for the last time.

On the day before my father died mom and I entered
the comfortably appointed hospice facility to find dad sitting
in the common room in his wheelchair, late afternoon sun
filtering through the half-closed blinds, regaling a coterie of
admirers, friends, and hospice volunteers with jokes and ribald
stories. I laughed out loud. Mom, unsmiling, her eyes blank,
appeared vaguely annoyed. Dad managed to keep up a steady
repertoire for about half an hour and then tiring, he was helped
back into his private room and to bed. Sitting by his bedside, I
held his warm, deeply tanned, beautifully chiseled hand as he
drifted off to sleep, apparently pleased with his performance.
Mom sat on the terrace outside his room, smoking.

I watched the gentle ebb and flow of his breath. The
peaceful rhythm of his breathing wound its way around my

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heart, rooting me beside him. Mom had smoked her last Marl-
boro and wanted to go home. Dad had been doing so well the
doctors thought he was not ready to leave his body but he may
have outstayed his time in hospice. They suggested we should
be prepared to take him home in the morning. Mom and I
drove back in silence to the cool orderliness of their manicured
home. Mom insisted on making dinner. I wasn’t hungry. I of-
fered to help, knowing she’d decline. Being busy was her way
of keeping her emotions at bay. I slipped into my bathing suit
and did about fifty laps in the backyard pool.

We planned to go back to hospice to pick up dad at 8:00
the next morning. The phone rang in my mother’s bedroom
around 6:00. It was the head nurse at hospice, “You had better
come quickly if you want to be here before he leaves this
world.” My dad’s heart and breathing had slowed during the
night. Leaving this world is a momentous trip to an unknown
destination that few of us are prepared to take. I wondered if
my dad was prepared. No time for coffee we hurriedly dressed.
Mom gripped the wheel of her new Buick with determination.
It was one of dad’s last purchases. She often expressed her love
of driving. It was a skill she took great pride in. She’d never had
an accident or got so much as a parking ticket. She often said,
“I feel free and confident behind the wheel.” I trusted her ability
and in spite of the stress of the moment she was focused on
the task and drove faster then she had the previous day when
we were not in a race with death.

The sun followed us as we parked as close to the front
of the hospice as we could. The door opened just as we ap-
proached the entrance. Two grief counselors stood on the
threshold. We were too late. Dad had died ten minutes before
we got there. Collapsing, sobbing into the open arms of the
two middle-aged women who were well practiced in providing

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solace to the living I couldn’t believe the charming man who
was so alive a few hours ago could now be dead. Mom sagged
against me for a moment that passed ever so quickly until she
managed to collect herself.

“Can we go see him?” I asked, unsure what action on our
part was allowed when a person becomes an inert thing. I’d
never been close to a dead body before. “Of course you can
and you can stay as long as you like.” I followed these two kind
ladies as they led us to the room where my dad had died. Mom
hung back, walking hesitantly behind me. Dad was lying com-
fortably, as if napping, his head on a pillow, eyes closed, fresh
white sheet and blanket tucked in neatly around him, his once
strong, bare, sun-bronzed arms outside the covers. I grabbed
his hand hoping to feel any life that might have lingered. His
fingers were still warm and pliable. Hot tears streaming, I laid
my head on his chest trying to imagine the beating heart I had
heard when he’d held me as a child. I wanted to look into his
grey-green eyes one more time, so, pressing my face close to
his I lifted his lids hoping his soul could see me and know I
was there. “Don’t do that!” The deep whooshing sound of my
mother sucking in her breath came from behind me as she ad-
monished me just as she often did when I was a child. Standing
ramrod straight in the middle of the room she was offended
by this sacrilegious act of intimacy. Her initial tears had dried.
She rearranged her face in its usual configuration, mouth set,
looking like she could have been waiting impatiently in line at
the bank, and went out on the terrace for a smoke.

I don’t know how long my head rested on his chest. The
need to touch him, to feel his presence for the last time was
intense. I didn’t want to leave the body I would never see again.
Mom seemed repulsed by the whole affair. Returning from the
terrace she urged me to get up. “He’s dead now. It’s over,” she

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said. The sound of relief in her voice hinted that a weight she
long carried had lifted.

Reluctantly, I untangled myself from the still silent figure
that had been my father. Mom, remote, businesslike, was un-
able to touch the body of the man she had lived with, slept
with for over sixty years. She spoke to one of the managers
of the hospice about the procedure for dad’s cremation. They
would take care of the practical things, packing his clothes,
removing the sheets, and transporting the body to the Lemon
Bay Funeral Home. We scheduled an appointment there the
next day to arrange publication of his obituary and distribu-
tion of his ashes.

The drive home occurred suspended somewhere between
this world and the next. We pulled into the garage. Mom gath-
ered her purse and keys, entered the house and went immedi-
ately into what had been their shared bedroom. She told me
she had to get some papers in order saying, “Your dad kept
some things that were useless, unnecessary documents that
must be disposed of,” and she, “needed to get the shredder.”
Still reeling from my father’s forever absence, mom’s agitation
and desire to create order was not out of character. Cleaning
up, keeping moving, was her modus operandi throughout her
life so it was not surprising she’d set herself a task to channel
the emotion I imagined was suppressed all these months of my
father’s decline.

As I walked toward their bedroom, I heard bureau draws
slamming and then the whir of the paper shredder. Entering
the room, mom was sitting on her white wicker settee, hunched
over the machine, fixated on feeding what looked like the con-
tents of fat envelopes she pulled from a neatly tied stack sitting
on the night table beside her. There was something familiar
looking about the warn, slightly yellowed, lined sheets of paper.

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When she caught me staring she quickly grabbed the small
bundle while furiously feeding the paper as fast as possible
into the compact jaws of the shredder. The letters had all been
opened and neatly folded back in their original envelopes. I
recognized the handwriting. It was my own. Stunned, I came
to the sudden realization my dad had read and kept all those
letters I had written him throughout the years. Our relation-
ship, the observations made and love expressed in those long
ago letters was received, read, and cherished. Our love was real.
Mutual. Not one I imagined. My heart rose with something
that felt like euphoria at the same time my mother was intent
on destroying the evidence of that love. Those precious mis-
sives were dads and mine. They stitched together the past and
the present, the demonstration of a continuum and here she
was, a woman possessed, trampling on any remnant of good
feeling I might have had for her.

What could possibly have motivated such hostility? Was
this a delayed punishment and for whom? My father was al-
ready dead. Was it driven by jealousy of a father/daughter re-
lationship that excluded her? Had she known all along about
those letters? I doubt my father had shared them.

I saw her spindly fingers shoving the last few envelopes
into the gnawing teeth of the paper shredder and I grabbed at
her boney shoulder. She pushed me aside with an unexpected
strength and the last of my letters disappeared, becoming a
tangle of illegible strips inside the black plastic belly of a ter-
ribly efficient machine. There was a skirmish. She stood and
I pushed her out the bedroom door and into the hall. A dark
shadow, a sort of black void is all there is between this moment
and pulling back as this spindly connection of thrashing bones
and flesh slid away from me against the laundry room door and
became my mother again. I stepped back as she struggled to her

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feet. I think I was crying in anger and sorrow for all that we lost
that day and all that never was in the years we were a family.

Knowing I came shockingly close to killing my mother
was something neither she nor I dared face. Admitting I was ca-
pable of the darkest act one human being can inflict on another
elevated the scene to what might have been a Shakespearean
travesty. My motivation may also have been an attempt to
punish my mother for the inadequacies of my own misguided
mothering, a wound that festered across a generation. The
memory of that moment bounced around inside my psyche
for years until I wrote the first paragraph to this confession.

After the incident we formed a kind of détente. The un-
spoken truce permitted mom and I to sit across from each
other at the funeral home the next day making arrangements
for my dad’s body. I wanted a piece of him, some sort of con-
tainer for a portion of his ashes. Shelves lined the walls of the
family conference room in the funeral home where we sat. Dis-
plays of huge marble urns and down-to-earth-friendly baskets
were lined up like items in any department store to appeal to a
broad range of tastes and lifestyles. These were bulwarks against
the ashes to ashes dust-to-dust scenario. Mom didn’t want to
spend the money. I offered to spend my own, even knowing
her hefty bank balance combined with dad’s insurance would
take care of her for as long as she could possibly live. I insisted.
With some reluctance she said, “Pick something small and dis-
crete for yourself nothing for me.” I chose a bronze heart nes-
tled in a velvet box engraved with his name, his date of birth
and death. Some of dad’s ashes would be sealed inside the heart
and kept in a place where he would always be close enough
for me to touch. When the arrangements were finalized, mom
thanked the funeral director for his assistance, headed to the
exit, out to her car and slid purposefully behind the wheel. I
got in next to her and we drove home without further incident.

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Armed with an MFA from Boston University Cynthia plowed
her way through several productive careers in the arts including
instructor in drawing and painting, Dean of Admissions at
The Art Institute of Boston, and president of Documentary
Educational Resources - a film company. She now claims to
be a writer. To support this claim, she is a contributing editor
for Documentary Magazine and writes regularly about art and
culture for numerous publications. Her essays have been pub-
lished in 34th Parallel, Adelaide, Woven Tales Press, The Black
and White Anthology, The Seasons of Our Lives, Across the
Margin, Montana Mouthful, Orson’s Review, Agni and Wagon
Bridge Press among others.

272

Ashes, Ashes1

by Deirdre Fagan

Phantom Limbs2
I tell my son each family has a tree.
I pencil lines on a page leading to his father, his sister, me:
“People, like trees, have branches.”
Branches in our tree bow abruptly on one side:
One cracked unceremoniously—it was brittle—
Two committed suicide—snapping off willfully—
Another was in slow decay and was whittled away…
in each, the bark exposed the core.
I know, but do not tell.
I also recall, slowly, with lead, how else it is done:
other boughs break, peeling, cracking, succumbing—
only one splintered edge at a time.

1  First published in the Winter 2018 issue of Orange Blossom Review: A
Journal of Creative Arts and excerpted from an unpublished memoir.

2  First published in the Fall 2011 issue of Boston Literary Magazine.
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On one side of my hand-drawn sketch,
the angled and slanted lines extend only toward absence—
one generation back from the boy, and the whole already
begins to recede,
inching ringless, limbless, toward a well-known cliff.

Completing the halved tree, I tell my son, as I gesture in
his direction:

“All families have trees—this one is yours—.”

I wrote this poem while my husband Bob was driving. It
was winter. The trees were bare. We had driven to St. Louis
from our small town in Illinois for some sort of outing. We
were on our way there or on our way back. Our son, Liam,
and his sister, Maeve, were sitting in the backseat, likely in a
car and a booster seat. I don’t remember exactly how old they
were, but Maeve must have been under a year or two, given
the time frame, and because I hardly remember her in the van.

Liam was talking about family trees in school and maybe
had to write one or was at least learning about them and so
Bob and I were trying to explain what a family tree was. Re-
alizing it wasn’t quite going over as we tried to orally explain
what one looked like, I opened the glove box of the minivan
and searched for a slip of paper and began sketching one out.
Let’s see, Bob, me, Liam, Maeve. Now go up one from Bob:
Bob’s dad, mom, sister, husband, and their three kids. Then,
my side: my parents, me, my two brothers. How do I account
for divorce in a family tree? I wasn’t sure. My mother remarried.
My father remarried. No additional kids were produced. Okay,
I would skip that. Now go back a level. Bob told me whom
to put on his side, only as far back as his own grandparents. I
went to mine. My mother was a foster child. I didn’t know her

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parents. I could list my father’s: mother, father, brother, sister.
The brother married and had one child. The sister married
and had three. I could hardly begin to go one up from there. I
strained to recall any of the names of my father’s grandparents,
except the nickname of one grandmother of which my father
was particularly fond. The more I tried to assemble the tree,
the less it looked like any family tree I wanted to give my son.

I showed Liam the tree and tried to explain the branches.
“This is your uncle, Paul, and your other uncle, Sean. They were
my brothers. This was Papa, my father, you might remember
him. He died when you were three. So did your Uncle Sean.
Uncle Paul died when I was 18. You weren’t born yet. Here
is your grandmother. My mother. She died when I was 23.”
Liam was attentive for a short time, absorbing a sense of what a
family tree was as he leaned forward with the seatbelt straining
against his small chest and me twisted in my seat and looking
back toward him. The stark landscape whizzed by as my hus-
band drove the minivan. My boy was staring at the pattern and
considering it geometrically, but the names and people weren’t
being registered as in any way meaningful. Liam then said,
“Got it,” and as young children do, went back to whatever he
was doing, playing on some device or other, or fiddling with
some object or other, without much care.

I sat in the front seat feeling forlorn and a bit queasy. I
stared out of the window at the trees, the smattering of snow
still on the ground in patches here and there, the starkness
outside the windows resembling what I felt inside. The loss
of my family members had happened to me, and yet the later
two losses had also devastated my husband Bob, since he had
known my father and middle brother well, and had never met
my older brother and mother—had only heard the stories of
them—but I had never had to fully confront what these losses

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were going to mean for our children. Maybe I hadn’t wanted
to think about it, or maybe I was so consumed in my own grief
at first that I couldn’t quite manage the thought, or maybe
because such things were currently far from young children’s
concerns, I didn’t need to think about it, but that day as I
attempted to present what my family looked like when drawn
on a page, I was destroyed by what I was handing my son, my
daughter.

One of the thoughts one has when one has or wants chil-
dren and loses a family member is that the child will now no
longer have an “X”—grandmother, grandfather, and so on. I
was well aware of this. I had had those thoughts when my
mother was dying and I was childless. One of the things I had
said to my mother through tears while she was sick was that I
was never going to be able to give her grandchildren now. Even
if I had gotten pregnant immediately by someone, anyone (I
considered this), there wasn’t enough time for me to have the
child. I had had similar thoughts when my father and brother
died when my son was only three, but I hadn’t had to really
deliver the news to my son, as he was still fairly intellectually
unformed then. He did know Papa was gone, and he grieved
for a couple of days, walking through the house asking where
he was, since my father was, at the time, living with us, but
then Liam just stopped asking. My brother who lived far away,
he had only seen a handful of times so he didn’t know to ask for
him. These were thoughts that had existed primarily for me, or
me and Bob, and were therefore still a part of the loss I expe-
rienced, we experienced, the disappointments I had had about
the history I would be handing my children, but they were not
yet outside of me, existing as a true part of their history, and
in this moment in the car, that became more real to me than
it had ever before. What I had had to shoulder was something

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I had to pass on to them to shoulder, though maybe not in
quite the same way, without memory of the actual people the
names represented, but that burden was not something I had
ever wanted them or anyone to have to bear.

The landscape between St. Louis, Missouri, and Quincy,
Illinois, where we lived is mostly unpopulated and barren.
There are trees, but there are more fields than trees, and it
is mostly flat. As I looked out at those trees, the first line of
“Phantom Limbs,” then bearing a much lesser title, came to me,
and I flipped over that piece of scrap paper and began writing.
The poem went through several revisions after that day—the
writing process and drafts of this poem I often share with my
students since I actually have various versions and didn’t just
hit “save” after every revision—but much of it is as I wrote it,
overcome with emotion, the landscape rushing by at 60 mph,
Bob at the wheel as he always was, and the kids in the backseat.

This must have been somewhere between 2009-2010,
since Maeve was born in 2008, when Liam was five and not
yet in kindergarten. That tree, the one on my lap, as bare as
it was, still had our little unit intact. There we were, on the
page, Bob and I married in 2001, Liam born in 2003, Maeve
in 2008, and this, not the slip of paper, but what it represented
to me, was the greatest gift I was able to offer our children:
two parents who loved each other and them fiercely, and had
fought hard to have and raise them.

I read that poem now, with its last two lines added for
dramatic effect, and am pained. I wince as I read them aloud:
“Completing the halved tree, I tell my son, as I gesture in his di-
rection:/ “All families have trees—this one is yours—.” The end
dash allows for both the son and the reader to enter the poem,
but suggest a quite different mood from the one I actually ex-
perience. These lines may make for a better poem, but they are

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haunting, and almost embarrassing when I stand before dozens
of student eyes judging how a mother might say such things
to her young son and try to explain how lived experience can
become poetry, but must be altered and changed as the piece
necessitates. “In poetry, we obfuscate, unlike in memoir, where
we expose the core,” I explain.

This poem does not reflect the complicated emotions I
experience every time I reflect on passing this halved family
tree to my children. I am the one who is haunted, the one
wanting to mend the tree, somehow repair its branches, sew
them together, glue them, render the branches and the tree
whole again. But trees do not heal. There is so much from
those lost I would like to pass to the children and strive to,
but the deaths of my family members and what led to them
are not something I would ever willingly pass to them, nor do
I want to offer these truths hauntingly, as in the poem. Trees
cannot heal, but they will cover their own injuries, thereby
creating the appearance of mending, with new wood. People,
too, do this. Sometimes, they also heal by covering their own
injuries, as grief doesn’t go away, it simply becomes less present.
And just as the limbs that have broken off create “phantom”
sensations as though they are still there in individuals who
have had amputations, when family trees lose their limbs, the
family members who remain are offered daily reminders of
the continued presence of those branches. These I do offer my
children, with love.

Despite having lost my immediate family, the one I had
created was still thriving when “Phantom Limbs” became one
of my first published poems. It is frozen in a before time when
our little unit, our branch, Bob, the children, and I were as
yet unharmed.

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When I was 19, my older brother Paul “snapp[ed] off
willfully,” committing suicide. He was 25 and was cremated,
against my mother’s wishes. A pine tree was planted to mark
his spot. (At the time, there was no money for anything more).
When my mother died at age 51, I was 23. She was in “slow
decay” from the cancer that took her and was quickly “whit-
tled” away by it each day that summer. She was also cremated;
she had grown accustom to the idea by then. My mother had
been in the Army, SP 1, so her marker was free, issued by the
military, and includes her then married name and her rank.
When I was in my late 20s, I purchased a marker for Paul that
matches my mother’s Army-issued one, even though they have
different last names, since my mother took her second hus-
band’s, my stepfather’s, last name, and only I and a few others
would know while visiting those grounds that the two were
mother and first-born son. I was the only one of my immediate
family to make visits to the gravesite, though my visits have
been infrequent since I haven’t lived in the same state since I
was twenty. Sean, my middle brother, did see Paul’s once, when
he came to see my mother the summer she was dying.

After a cross-country trip in my twenties when I had visited
the cemetery and stared at my mother’s spot and the blank spot
next to hers, I felt it needed to be done. Paul needed a marker.
Enough was enough. It had been too long already. I was still in
grad school; I must have charged it and paid for it with student
loans. It was for the tenth anniversary of Paul’s death. It was
1998. My father hadn’t done it. Sean, older than me by three
years, hadn’t done it. They were never going to—it wasn’t some-
thing they cared about, but I did. I had to do it. Being buried
with no marker seemed to negate Paul’s very existence.

The one time I went to a family reunion on my father’s
side, when I was around twenty and had just moved from

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Arizona back to New York, where I was born and raised until
the age of nine, and where my brothers and father had re-
mained when my mother moved me to Arizona, my father
stayed home. I don’t know where Sean was, but he had never
had any interest in my father’s family anyway, partly because
my father displayed so little. I went with my aunt, my father’s
sister, and some cousins, and stood among a hundred people I
did not know or feel any familial connection toward. I hardly
knew my aunt and cousins, having been out of state for over
a decade, but I was curious and eager to create family bonds.
I remember little about the event except one bracing moment
when all of the bodies and faces zoomed away as on an old tele-
vision set where, when turning off the knob, the picture was
reduced to a single dot before disappearing altogether. That
single dot was on a family tree that had been drafted on paper
and taped around the room where the wall met the ceiling. I
followed it looking for the branch of my immediate family.
Finally, I found my father, Frank, and my mother, Maureen,
and two lines leading south to their two children: Sean and
Deirdre. Paul had no line, no branch. He had only died a few
years before, but he had been erased altogether. Or rather, he
had never been drawn. There had been three of us.

Paul and Mom’s ashes and markers lie side-by-side on that
hilltop in Arizona, a place that doesn’t really make sense for
either of them, below the pine tree that was planted when Paul
died. It’s a serene spot, but hardly tended. When I visit, the
grass is typically golden and burnt, the vases of the memorial
park tipped over, plastic flowers littering the place. The grass
has sometimes grown over the corners of their markers, and I
am reminded that that hilltop was never a place they belonged.
They are and were displaced people who are now residing in
what appears to me a displaced cemetery.

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When my father died at the age of 68, “crack[ing] uncer-
emoniously,” he was cremated. When my brother Sean died
unexpectedly two weeks later at age 40, an unintentional sui-
cide, he was cremated. These deaths were a few months before
my 37th birthday. Their ashes sit side-by-side in my hall closet.
Their keepsake vessels, tall and blue for my father, indicating his
role in the family, and short and green for my very red-headed
and Irish looking brother, albeit far taller than my father in real
life, sit in my china cabinet beside the bowl of pine cones from
Paul’s tree, and a “beach in a bottle” I made for my mother the
summer she died—sand and seashells in a plastic peanut butter
jar collected from a Long Island beach near where I had lived
during early childhood, where my mother had lived, married
to my father, for nearly a decade before fleeing to the desert in
Arizona to be near a sibling, a sister. The sand in that plastic
jar represents my mother’s “keepsake” ashes to me. Dad and
Sean’s ashes for burial are in a closet, as yet unburied, but the
literal or figurative “keepsake” ashes for all four members of
my family are in the china cabinet.

Next to the literal and figurative keepsakes in the china
cabinet there are now three more: a silver one for me, and two
identical gold ones for Liam and Maeve. In the closet, next
to Dad and Sean’s burial ashes, are now Bob’s. They are not
displaced on a hilltop. They are next to each other and they
are at home.

When Bob was dying, we had a talk about his ashes. We
sat side by side, he in his lift chair and me in my father’s chair,
which had originally been my grandparents, and I said, “Do you
want to be buried, or scattered, or what?” Bob said, “It really
doesn’t matter to me. It’s not about me at that point; it’s about
you and the kids. If you need a place to go, bury me. If you want
to scatter me, go ahead. I don’t really care.” Reading these words

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on this page as he spoke them, you might think they were said
with anger or sadness, but they weren’t. They were said flatly and
were very matter of fact. This was just how we talked, how Bob
talked. Bob was a philosophy professor and he truly didn’t care.
He wasn’t concerned about his body after death.

Bob wasn’t a religious person, and clearly neither am I,
or those ashes would probably be somewhere else. It was our
shared belief that death, after it occurs, isn’t about the dead;
it’s about those left behind. His sentiments reflected shared
attitudes about death we had both come to adopt long before
my father and brother Sean died, and echo a conversation I
had had with my father years before about his own wishes.
My father wanted to be cremated because it was cheaper and
cleaner, but didn’t much care whether his ashes were buried,
or where, either. He said if we wanted to bury him, there was
a family plot, and I could put him there. Otherwise, I could
do what I wanted.

For the first two weeks after my father’s death, I had plans
to cremate him and place his ashes in his family plot, but then
Sean died, and my brother would have never wanted to be in
my father’s family’s plot in upstate New York, or on that hilltop
in Arizona, and separating father from son somehow seemed
wrong, and what would I do with Sean’s ashes once my father’s
were buried anyway? And so the ashes of my dad and brother
Sean came home to the homestead Bob and I had purchased as
much for them as for our own family until I could decide, and
they had stayed with us since. The concerns about cremation
my mother had had when Paul died, and which I had then
supported, were no longer hers when she was dying, though
she did want to be buried next to Paul, since he was already
there, and those concerns are no longer mine for when I die,
either. But now my husband Bob was dying and I was facing

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yet another decision about what to do about ashes and burial
and death.

Bob was dying. He had been diagnosed with Amyotrophic
Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, in
December of 2011, a mere two months after “Phantom Limbs”
had been published. He had exhibited no symptoms before
December. Bob was 43 when he was diagnosed; I had just
turned 42 the previous month. Our children were three and
eight at the time.

It was now the summer of 2012. Bob was now 44. I was
still 42, having not yet had another birthday, the kids were four
and nine, and we were sitting side by side in the living room
making decisions about Bob’s death.

I looked at Bob and said, “Oh, come on, I can’t have a
closet full of ashes!” I laughed and shook my head. “People
think I’m weird already, with Dad and Sean’s still in there,” I
said as I gestured towards the closet in the dining room, now
Bob’s bedroom, which was opposite the chairs we were sitting in
in the living room. I smirked at him and waited for his response.

The ashes in the closet were always on my mind then; I
hadn’t felt right about sticking them in a closet, at first. I was
just very confused about what to do with them. They were
funny, in a macabre sort of way, and I had frequently made
jokes about them to others in the five years since my father’s
and brother’s ashes had taken up residence, but there was also
a deep absence that placed them there. I had moved over thirty
times in my life even though I was now living in the house I
had lived the longest in—six years at the time of this conver-
sation with Bob. While my father had lived all but the final
months of his life in New York, the rest of us had been no-
madic. Only my father had had roots, and even those had de-
cayed considerably over time. My brothers, my mother, and I

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had had no particular place to call home for long, and without
a shared place to come from, to call home with a capital H,
a place to return, a place where, as Robert Frost wrote in his
poem, “Death of the Hired Man,” “when you have to go there,/
They have to take you in,” all of us had come to call home
wherever we were standing and trying to temporarily take root.

Bob smirked back at me and said, “Of course you can!
You can show people.” He directed his hand to distinguish be-
tween various positions of ashes: “Here are my Dad’s. Here are
Sean’s. Here are Bob’s....” …And then with a sweeping gesture,
he swung his right arm, now bent at the elbow, hand irrevers-
ibly curled, in front of him, from the left to the right, and said,
“and here are all the ashes of every man I’ve ever slept with!”

Bob leaned forward in laughter, and I did too.
After composing myself, “Alrighty then,” I said, with a
knowing, amused nod.
Until Liam and Maeve decide where Bob belongs, or until
we can decide as a family where we all belong, I will keep us all
at home. Until our branch of the family tree has rooted firmly
enough to write a capital H, wherever we are rooted, where we
will grow, is wherever we are.

Deirdre Fagan is a widow, wife, mother of two, and the author
of a poetry chapbook, Have Love, Finishing Line Press (2019),
a collection of short stories, The Grief Eater, Adelaide Books
(forthcoming 2020), and a reference book, Critical Com-
panion to Robert Frost (2007). Her poem “Outside In” was
a finalist for Best of the Net 2019 and her poem “Homesick”
was nominated for a Pushcart. Fagan’s creative and academic
work is available in various creative and academic journals and
collections. Meet her at deirdrefagan.com

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Just the One: Advice ror
What Not To Say to the
Mother of an Only Child

by Elise Radina

One of the things that is hardest about being the mom of an
only child is fielding the thoughtless and insensitive comments
others make when they discover your secret; that you have
“just one” child. And, even sometimes how they react when the
rediscover this fact about you.

New person: “Just the one?” or “Is she your only?”

Me: Yes, yes she is. Just the one!

The reaction that follows often seems sad or embarrassed. It
is unclear at whom those emotions are directed. It’s as if I have
somehow, by having “just the one,” broken some sort of social
contract. I guess I didn’t realize that by wanting to be a mother
that I had unknowingly signed up to produce an entire brood of
children. The reactions are often laced with looks or comments
of sympathy. In that moment, it is clear that they are making

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assumptions about my fertility and priorities. In response, I
find myself making some sort of comment that addresses their
assumptions or is a feeble attempt to legitimize my situation.
Something like, “Well, it wasn’t for a lack of trying.” By saying
this, I am making it clear that I am not the kind of women they
think I might be (selfish, career hungry). I feel I have to apol-
ogize for “just the one.” Could it be possible that we planned
it that way? We didn’t but I wonder if we did if I’d respond
differently. Yes, we had fertility challenges and yes there were
miscarriages. My daughter should actually be a middle child.

Why does the fact that I have one child warrant curiosity
about my fertility? Do mothers of more than one child elicit
the same prying? Do they get ask things like, “Just the three?”
Did you ever want more?” No one is so impolite to ask if you
wanted less.

Other comments are “Oh, it must be so nice. My kids
keep me running all the time. My partner and I never see
each other.” Well, there you are wrong my friend. My one
kid keeps my partner and I running and we are just as busy as
anyone else with child(ren). We both work full-time. We both
coach her sports. We spend most of the fall on opposite sides
of the soccer field or volleyball court. My kid is involved in af-
ter-school activities and we have to help her juggle homework
and her social schedule too, just like you do with your kids. I
often say that as busy as we are with our family of three, you’d
think my partner and I have a dozen children.

Another favorite is when people I’ve known for a while,
work colleagues or other parents, ask how my kids are. I know
that I’ve told them my secret of being a parent of an only child
before. But they assume, because everyone has more than one,
that I must too. They will ask, “Did your kids start back to
school yet?” In some ways I have learned how to reminding

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someone of my secret politely. I will respond, “No, my daughter
starts next week.”

I find all this attention to my parental status interesting.
Maybe I’m an anomaly but I typically remember the parental
details of these kinds of acquaintances. I remember that Jason
has two kids and that Tracy has four. I remember that my
daughter’s friend Lexi has two older brothers and that Jessica
on the second floor has two girls. Why is it so hard for people
to remember my one?

I think what some people are wondering when they learn
my secret is…is she a spoiled brat? They are too polite to ask
but I have to think at least some are thinking it. Again, I find
this assumption interesting. No, she’s not a spoiled brat. She
doesn’t get everything she wants. She knows how to share. My
partner and I are decent people who are raising a child to be
kind, generous, respectful, and aware of the fact that there are
others in the world that struggle for far less than what she has.
I think we can all think of examples of spoiled children who
come from plenty and want for nothing. All the ones I can
think of have siblings.

Sure, I worry about her ability to problem solve in groups
and to navigate conflict with peers. Maybe it’s the values we’ve
taught her or the team sports and group activities but so far,
she does okay. No worse than anyone else’s child(ren).

Being the mom of an only, at least for me, means I don’t
have to ration my affection or worry about playing favorites (or
having a favorite – depending on the moment she is either my
favorite or my least favorite child). It means my partner and I,
we are raising a kid who is independent and used to relying on
herself. It means she gets my undivided attention and I hers.

So, next time you meet someone new (or see someone
you already know) who tells you/reminds you she has one

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child, try to respond differently. Ask the child’s name and age.
Ask what they child is in to. Whatever you do, don’t respond
by asking “just the one?”

Elise Radina is a Professor of Family Science at Miami Uni-
versity whose research focuses broadly on families and health.
She’s published over 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chap-
ters and has spent the last several years focusing on writing
for non-academic audiences. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio
with her husband and teenage daughter. When she’s not at her
day job or driving for Mom’s Taxi Service, she enjoys knitting,
watching what her husband calls “real-life family drama televi-
sion” (e.g., Counting On, The Little Couple, OutDaughtered,
Hoarders), and hanging out with the other soccer moms on
the sidelines.

288

Ancient Wings

by Patrick Hahn

2 September 2014

I’m standing on the banks of the Casselman River, in the Cas-
selman River Bridge State Park, deep in the heart of the Ca-
toctin Mountains of Western Maryland. It’s late summer, the
day after Labor Day. The sun is shining brightly, but a cool
mountain breeze is blowing in my face. Below me, I can hear
the water gurgling over the rocks. From some unseen location
amidst the riparian vegetation, crickets are trilling. Amidst the
riot of green, splashes of color: daisies, goldenrod, orange jewel-
weed, blood-red columbine, and bayberries the color of indigo.

A doe exits from the thicket alongside the riverbank and
glances at me, regarding me coolly for a few moments be-
fore turning away and trotting off unhurriedly. Two more deer
emerge, both bucks, still wearing the summer coating of velvet
on their antlers. They, too, regard me for a few moments before
trotting away. To my left, a dragonfly is skimming over the
water surface.

I’ve always been fascinated by dragonflies. With their
speed, maneuverability, and brilliant metallic colors, they truly
are the Ferraris of the insect world.

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The dragonflies, along with their cousins the damselflies,
constitute the Order Odonata. Together with the Ephemerop-
tera, or the mayflies, they constitute a major group of insects
called the Paleoptera. All paleopterous insects are found close
to bodies of fresh water, as this is where they grow up. The
females of this group all lay their eggs in the water, and the
newly hatched individual is called a naiad, which is the Greek
word for “water nymph.”

The central fact of insect life is that all insects are possessed
of a rigid exoskeleton that cannot grow. Therefore the insect
must periodically make a new exoskeleton and shed the old
one, a process known as molting. The newly molted individual
is soft and defenseless and usually goes into hiding. It takes in
air or water to expend the new exoskeleton to give itself room
to grow, and remains in hiding for several hours until the new
exoskeleton hardens.

The mayfly naiads are mostly herbivorous, content to
graze on diatoms and other algae encrusting the rocks. By con-
trast the dragonfly and damselfly naiads are voracious preda-
tors, dining on mosquito larvae and other aquatic invertebrates
and even small fish and tadpoles. Members of both groups take
one to several years to grow up, going through as many as fifty
molts before attaining adult size. When that happens, the indi-
vidual crawls out of the water, sheds its last larval exoskeleton,
and unfurls its wings. Soon it is ready to take flight.

True to their name, the ephemeropterans spend only a
few hours or at most days in the adult stage, usually not even
bothering to eat. They have only one thing on their minds.
After mating, the gravid female hits the water surface. Her
swollen abdomen bursts, releasing her fertilized eggs hither
and yon. By contrast, the odonates spend several weeks in the
adult stage. Like their youthful waterborne counterparts, they,

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too, are voracious predators, devouring mosquitoes and other
flying insects with gusto. Males guard territories along the wa-
ter’s edge containing emergent vegetation, which is used by the
female to enter the water to lay her eggs. The male mates with
any female who enters his territory for this purpose, and males
fight with each other over prime oviposition sites.

The word Paleoptera means “ancient wing.” Ancient they
may be, but backward they are not. This group includes the
fastest flying insects, the dragonflies, with top speeds in excess
of 35 miles per hour. A dragonfly can fly forwards, backwards,
side to side, up and down vertically, and can hover for up to
a minute.

The Paleoptera is the oldest group of winged insects that
has living descendants, but they were not the first of their kind
to take to the air. The oldest flying insects appear in the fossil
record over 300 million years ago. These were bizarre, clum-
sy-looking creatures with multiple wings, in stark contrast to
the clean lines and simplicity of design of their modern-day
successors. They call to mind our own species’ first attempts
in the nineteenth century to build powered flying machines –
strange contraptions with multiple wings, that paled against
the clean lines and simplicity of design of the Wright Brothers’
first successful airplane.

After watching the dragonfly zoom off, I turn my atten-
tion to the matter at hand. . I’ve come here to collect specimens
for my teaching collection, the kind of excursion naturalists
have been going on for generations. I’m armed with a fine-
mesh net mounted on a triangular frame, attached to a stout
wooden pole. I step into the stream and place the base of the
triangle firmly on the bottom. I grasp the pole firmly in one
hand, using my weight to hold the net in place, as I stoop over
and upend rocks with my free hand, allowing the water current

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to sweep any dislodged invertebrates into the net. Then I haul
the net up and scrutinize the results of my work.

Amidst the leaves and other debris is a squirming gray-
ish-black insect, wet, glistening, about an inch in length. Three
slender filaments emerging from the terminal abdominal seg-
ment allow me to identify it as a mayfly naiad. Each of the last
two thoracic segments bears a pair of wing buds, while each ab-
dominal segment bears a pair of flattened, paddle-shaped ap-
pendages called tracheal gills, which the animal uses to breathe
underwater. I know that if I were to look at these appendages
under a microscope, I would find each one was invested with
numerous vein-like tubules called tracheae which convey ox-
ygen to the tissues. A lay person might say these tracheal gills
resemble tiny wings, but it would be more accurate to say that
wings are oversized tracheal gills.

When Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution
by means of gradual accumulation of many small successive
changes, one of his contemporaries, George Mivart, raised the
perfectly reasonable objection: What good is 50% of a wing? It
won’t get you off the ground. The answer to this question may
be found in the concept of exaptation – the idea that a feature
that arises in response to one kind of selection pressure, just by
chance, fits its owner for an entirely new role.

We may imagine the ancestor of winged insects as a simple,
inconspicuous-looking creature, similar to a modern-day sil-
verfish. We may imagine this creature spent its days crawling
amidst the rocks alongside a stream, into which it would ven-
ture from time to time, perhaps to search for food, perhaps
to avoid predators. Now, any slight extension of the lateral
body wall would be favored by natural selection, because it
would increase the surface area for oxygen uptake, allowing
this animal to stay underwater longer. We may imagine these

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extensions increased in size until they developed into the tra-
cheal gills we see in modern-day mayfly naiads, enabling these
creatures to spend their entire lives underwater.

Once these appendages reached a certain size, they could
have used for an entirely new purpose, enabling these insects to be
blown around by the wind. This would be of obvious advantage
for an animal that lived in fresh water, because fresh-water habitats
are ephemeral – they dry up – and any feature that allowed these
insects to find a new home would provide an obvious advantage.

Having taken on this new role, these appendages would
be subject to selection pressure for further increase in their size.
We may imagine that the next step was the addition of muscles
onto the inner walls of the thorax, for attitude adjustment, and
from here it would be but a short step to powered flight.

The oldest winged insects had one pair of wings for each
thoracic and abdominal segment. But natural selection is re-
lentless in her quest for efficiency of design, and soon the su-
perfluous wings were jettisoned, and flying insects adopted the
same streamlined design we see today.

Of course, no one was there to watch all this unfold. But
this theory, known as the tracheal gill theory of insect wing or-
igins, plausibly explains how a complex structure such as an in-
sect wing could have arisen through the gradual accumulation
of many small successive changes, and it also neatly accounts
for the fact that all the members of the oldest living group
of flying insects begin their lives in the water. The mayflies,
which are acknowledged to be the most primitive living order
of flying insects, still retain the paired abdominal tracheal gills
of their ancestors in their aquatic larval stages, although these
gills are absent in the terrestrial adult stage. The dragonfly and
damselfly naiads have dispensed with these appendages alto-
gether, having developed other means of breathing underwater.

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4 September 2014

Two days later, I find myself in Ruxton, Baltimore, just north
of the city-county-line. It’s a brilliantly hot afternoon. I’m
standing by the side of the light rail track, listening to the
hum of the approaching train. As soon as the coast is clear,
ignoring the sign that says “Trespassers will be prosecuted,”
I sprint across the tracks – giving the big buck on the other
side the surprise of his life. With an explosive burst of speed,
he crashes through the briars on the opposite embankment
and makes his getaway. I follow as best as I can, ignoring the
thorns and stinging nettles lacerating the exposed skin of my
arms and legs.

I follow a well-worn trail alongside a field of goldenrod
and reach the banks of Roland Run. The plan is to follow the
course of the river until it empties into the north end of Lake
Roland, hoping that somewhere along the way I will encounter
suitable habitat for dragonfly naiads.

This is easier said than done. There is no path, as such,
to follow. The water has cut a deep channel through the mud,
leaving sheer embankments of dubious stability overgrown
with brambles right up the edge. The only way to go here is
to wade right through the water, which in some places is an-
kle-deep, in others waist-deep, and surprisingly cold. Several
times the stream divides and I have to decide which is the main
channel. More than once I decide wrong, reach a blind end,
and have to backtrack. Eventually it occurs to me that I am
lost. I have no idea where I am.

I keep walking. A great blue heron soars overhead, silently,
majestically.

Through an opening in the trees I espy open water and
begin heading toward it. The sycamores give way to willows,

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which give way to cattails, which give way to watercress, which
gives way to duckweed and filamentous green algae. I have
found what I am looking for. This is Dragonfly Central. Flit-
ting to and fro above the water surface are hundreds of dragon-
flies, a variety of makes and models and colors –emerald, ruby,
cerulean, and jet-black.

I step into the pond, which feels hot as bath water, and
immediately sink halfway up to my knees in the soft, stinking
black mud. Using the net handle as a kind of third leg, I ma-
neuver myself into position and jab the net at the base of some
cattails, then take a look at what I have found.

I see several dragonfly naiads, each about an inch long,
sleek, torpedo-shaped, an indeterminate grayish-green in color.
Each one sports a pair of prominent bug eyes and two short
spiky antennae. I know that if were to look at them under
the microscope, I would see each one also bears a protrusible
mouth appendage called a labium, armed with a pair of curved
dagger-like spines it uses to impale unwary prey. I select half
a dozen of the best specimens, and, with only a momentary
twinge of regret, consign them to their deaths in a vial of al-
cohol.

I notice an adult male hovering over a willow twig
emerging from the water, on which it comes to rest. I pause
for a moment to admire his form – electric-blue body, out-
stretched wings refracting the sun’s rays like diamonds. His
huge eyes, which take up almost the whole of his head, turn
alertly this way and that. Another male enters his territory,
and he takes to the air and veers straight at the intruder, who
zooms off.

It’s time to go back. I walk back to the stream and begin
heading back the way I believe I came. But the terrain looks
unfamiliar, the water is getting deeper, and my footing on the

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soft muddy bottom feels increasingly treacherous. I decide
making my way through the brambles is the lesser of two evils.
Eventually I happen upon an abandoned railroad bed and de-
cide to follow it, confident that it must lead to somewhere. I
emerge into a clearing and view the waters of Lake Roland
cascading over the walls of a concrete dam into the Jones Falls
River, in the south end of Lake Roland Park. I am miles away
from where I thought I was, but at least now I know where I
am.

I follow the smooth blacktop driveway out to Lake Av-
enue, turn left, walk for a mile and a half, turn left again onto
Charles Street, walk for another mile, and turn left onto Bel-
lona Avenue. The word “avenue” seems to suggest that we’re
still in the city, but this is in fact a steeply descending narrow
winding country road. I can hear the cicadas chorusing, singing
their song of another summer about to end. I arrive back at
my car tired, aching, thirsty, scratched, bleeding, and spattered
with dried black mud. It’s been a great day.

I reach into my pocket and extract a small, hard, rectan-
gular plastic object. It’s my cell phone, soaking wet, ruined. I
toss the phone into a nearby trash can, toss the net into the
back of my car and turn for one last look behind me before
heading home. The sun is already beginning to set, splattering
the western sky with a palette of colors – rose, salmon, peach,
gold, and even violet.

The sun is beginning to set on my life as well. I definitely
have more years behind me than in front of me. I think back
to my boyhood, growing up in rural Pennsylvania. It seems
like yesterday, but it was over forty years ago.

I remember I had an aquarium stocked entirely with
creatures I had captured from the local streams and ponds
– tadpoles, minnows, water striders, whirligig beetles, snails,

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flatworms, and my pride and joy – two crayfish, each of which
I had daringly plucked from the water with my own fingers
before sprinting home with my prize.

People don’t really change with the passing of years – they
just become more like themselves.

Patrick D Hahn is the author of Madness and Genetic Deter-
minism: Is Mental Illness in Our Genes? (Palgrave MacMillan).
Dr. Hahn is an Affiliate Professor of Biology at Loyola University
Maryland.

297

Journey to Amazonas

by Daniel Bailey

“I killed my daughter. I killed my daughter,” the man said over
and over beside the rolled SUV, rivulets of blood on his face
and forearms. His likewise lacerated wife paced the scene. She
stopped once to call out a prayer in an indigenous language
the white family knew. Their unhurt daughter of seven paced
too, shrieking. Two older daughters lay on the ground. One
still, one writhing.

This account of a Mardi Gras tour to southern Venezuela
ends in a coda beginning thus. You may not want to read
it. Twenty-three years in Venezuela showed me a country of
matchless beauty and horrific suffering, in Fauvist colors both
compelling and cruel.

Saturday, 4:00 a.m., February 9, 2010: Tour operator José
Capino collected me from my Caracas dwelling. Our destina-
tion: Uripika Ridge in Amazonas, Venezuela´s second-largest
Washington-sized state harboring but one percent of the
country´s population. The goal: climb clear of surrounding
jungle for a close view of Autana, a tepui or mesatic mountain
375 miles south of Caracas. The Piaroa people hold it sacred.
Our group of 13 included bluff Jesús, my confederate in age
(60ish); fit young Virginia with her two unruly sons, Diego

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