April 2016
Clearing a Room of Ghosts by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, BA, BA (Hons), M. Couns., PhD.
It’s a funny thing
reading other people’s letters, particularly when these letters are those
between one’s own father and his lover and cover a period of over thirty
years. It’s unnerving to discover
that they make no mention, at all, of me, and my life and only speak of their
tumultuous love, regrets, and enduring passion. They only speak of wanting to
be together, and his resisting divorcing my mother, and her divorcing her
husband, and on and on. The drama is between lovers and a room full of ghosts.
My own life during
that time was eventful, as most are, between the ages of 16 and beyond. I
graduated from school, and the various degrees of university; I travelled to
Europe a few times, I studied at the Jung Institute in Zurich, I returned, I
married and divorced (and all the related catastrophes), I found and lost God,
I got on various committees, got jobs, moved on, and on. All these events are
not found in the letters I’ve been reading. It is as though I’ve occupied space
in another universe to this lettered one of my father. And yet I knew him too,
and he was beautifully generous to me and I loved him.
These letters are
amongst various other bits and pieces I’m only now looking at. My father died
in 2007, at the great age of nearly 101. This stuff is ancient history. The
lover is probably dead. It is all past.
In amongst the letters is a
very evocative little fairy tale written by my father in 1972. It’s a story
about two lovers. She who married and had children, but hadn’t really found
love, and he who longed for the “perfect” woman and had not yet discovered
“even the shadow of one” and they met “almost by accident” and it was like “two
stars melting into one”. Quote, unquote.
For the likes of me, a psychotherapist, the tale is interesting. It bespeaks of
a mind stuff (even a mind field) populated by notions of “perfect women”, as if
there were such ephemeral beings. This tale is placed together in this
collection of letters, of hers, and copies of my father’s letters to her (for
that was the kind of man he was: he wrote out, without carbon paper [those days
had no photocopiers], copies of every letter he wrote this lover of his). Why
he kept all these letters, I don’t know. Perhaps he thought he would defy death
and live forever, perhaps he didn’t know what to do with them, or maybe he actually did want me to
read them. I shall never know his intent. His fairy tale fantasy does make
mention of his hope that other generations will know the kind of love of which
he experienced.
Mmm. This is all very well,
and I am glad to have read these letters, but my actual impression of them though is not that
it is a saga of true and perfect love, but years and years and years and years
of one person trying to say to the other, “Hey, I’m just an ordinary person,
and not the personification of “the perfect woman”. Hey, I shop, I eat, I get
sick, I travel, I have problems with my kids, I drink – probably far too much,
I smoke – yeah I know that’s really bad, I care for my aged mother, I go to
parties, I don’t get invited to some parties – because of our illicit
relationship, etc, etc.” And the
other person says, “I’ve never loved another as I love you. You are the, my,
perfect woman.”
This is the crux of
the matter. Here is a love story that is probably all about projections and a
room of ghosts, with very occasional brushing against the ordinary world.
You see, I heard it
all from the next room, the arguments, the crying and all that between my
parents, even the words, “Don’t tell Liz.” I was a teenager then and I did not
know, nor could find my voice for many years after this in how to say, “I do
know, and do not like it.”
In the warped wisdom
of my parents at the time when I was sixteen and when the great love affair of
thirty years and more between the woman who was not my mother and my father had
just begun, they thought it a good idea to send me to a psychologist. I’m very,
very glad they did, for seeing the psych gave me my eventual freedom from the
ghosts in the room.
From that time forth I
have been seeking authenticity: how to be real, clear and direct, all my life.
It is likely that this is what drives me to do the work I do with my clients. I
like the clarity that being real brings, and I like the freedom that is made
manifest. It is like the opening
of the doors, the letting in of the light and air and the multiple choices that
reveal themselves. It is the
clearing, and it is wonderful.
