Heartbreaks

Cambridge, Massachusetts – Washington DC, 1974-1994.

Here starts a part of my story that I have not yet shared with you. It is the tale of my several and painful heartbreaks, culminating in two failed marriages. I waited to tell you this because of the many things that I wanted to discuss first: the losses of my parents, of my childhood home, of my country, of my young life in BA. Losses that I had never mourned. 

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I came to the US in 1968 determined to leave my troubles behind and to start again. The losses, however, did not stay in Buenos Aires. They came with me and remained mostly untouched and unexplored. Some of them started rattling during that first trip to BA about which I told you in Blog 14, Dreaded Words. It was during that trip, two years after arriving in Troy for college, that, eerily, I watched my young self, Jorgito, from afar, across a deep emotional ravine. I could not identify the small boy as being me. It was scary and it landed me in Dr. Friedman’s office in Albany for a year of therapy. The sessions lifted some of the guilt I felt for having wished to be free of Dad. I was able to finally mutter the dreaded word, “orphan.” I had been in denial about it all. That first therapy, however, dealt with low-hanging fruit. I felt guilty after Dad’s death and my burden seemed to lift after therapy. The key word is “seemed.” I thought I was done, yet any deeper mourning was again put on hold.

The endless postponements of grief gained me time for a run of professional achievements. Mine was the story of a young immigrant who, unperturbed by past sorrows, was doing well in America. Lots of education, careers in science and law, my own firm, published articles, international recognition. My emotional life, however, ran along a parallel road full of faults and fissures. Notwithstanding my career successes, the first two or three decades in America hit me with one broken heart after another. I suffered several disappointments in love, each one more hurtful than the previous one.  After a long time, I finally recognized that I had never healed, that I had not mourned properly. I realized that until I dealt with the deaths inside, my life would not—could not—be made whole.

My first heartbreak was with Diana (not her real name). In the summer of 1974, at age twenty-five, I visited Buenos Aires for the second time since emigrating. I had my share of short romances since arriving in the States, but this trip was motivated by love. Diana was a woman about my age, from my adolescent past, with whom I had a brief flirtation before leaving. She was attractive, smart, and caring and we had kept up by mail since my emigration. In the winter of 1973, she announced that she was coming to Cambridge. She moved into my suite at South House and, much to the gossipy whispers of my Radcliffe friends, for the next week showed up at breakfast with me. As was my wont those years I fell for her quickly—too quickly—and, after she returned to BA, dreamt of getting her to America. I imagined that she would help me join my two lives, past and present, and that we would create a bridge across the gorge, uniting the boy of BA with the guy from Cambridge. By the summer of 1974 I went south intent on coming back with her.

I also wanted to protect Diana from the Argentine troubles that everyone saw coming. My trip coincided with the start of the most murderous years the country had ever seen. Argentina was split between violent factions on the left and right, all vying for power. Juan Perón, who by then had returned from Spain, died in BA in July 1974, a few weeks before I arrived. In a move that could only be described as bizarre, Isabel, his new wife, was named president. My old compatriots, in an act of collective surrealism, fancied that Isabel might reincarnate the spirit of Juan's previous wife, their beloved Santa Evita. They hoped that Evita, known to them as la madre de todos los Argentinos, “the mother of all Argentines,” would instill her ghostly presence into Isabel and through her, rule Argentina again. Garcia Marquez did not invent Latin-American magic realism. It was Argentine reality.

In my own private version of the ghostly swap, I arrived in BA around the same time, seeking to convince Diana to come to Cambridge. With the benefit of years gone by, I now realize that Diana, like Evita, was also an Argentine woman from the past who, as the ghost of a dead mother, would, I hoped, make me whole. My mother's and Evita's ghosts danced a brief waltz while my compatriots and I watched. Neither of the ghosts, however, did our bidding. Diana didn’t make me whole—she didn’t even come back to the US—and Isabel didn’t rule Argentina much longer. By the time I landed in BA, Diana’s passion had cooled. She had changed her mind and had decided to stay and brave the coming bad times. I returned empty-handed with a broken heart.

What came next in Argentina was the Dirty War, which lasted almost a decade. Thirty thousand people “disappeared,” some of them kidnapped into the trunks of Ford Falcons that, like wolf packs, roamed the streets of BA. Others were taken from their homes, drugged, and thrown out of airplanes into the Río de la Plata. It wouldn't be until 1983 that democracy returned to Argentina. Thank goodness, Diana survived—and without my help. I have since told Diana that, given my then emotional confusions, coming to the US with me would have been a bad turn for her.  

What came next for me hurt even more than losing my dreams of Diana. Her name was Monica (another fictional name). I had met her a few months earlier at Harvard, where she was a junior studying psych. Monica was smart and playful, but more than anything she was seductive. When I told her of my plans to go to BA to try and get Diana to come to the States, her response was as bewitching as a medieval love potion. "It's OK,” she said, with a sad smile, “I hope that she doesn’t come, but if she does, I’d be happy to share you." No one had ever said that to me, and no one has since. I was smitten—again, too quickly and intensely—by her long red hair, the twinkle in her Irish-green eyes and, more than anything, by her allure. A few weeks after I returned from BA empty-handed, Monica and I became an item. I will never know if, had Diana come, we would have been a threesome. I seriously doubt it.

My passion was strong: Monica would be the one to anchor me. Maybe seeking out the Dianas from my Argentine past was not the road to wholeness. I needed to bridge the crevasse between Jorgito and Jorge, but not by importing Mom’s ghost from BA. Yet Monica, much as I adored her, proved an illusion too, one that led inexorably back to my maternal loss. She had her own set of haunting ghosts. Her childhood had been one of  abuse by a stepfather, made worse by her mother’s neglect. She had been removed from her home by the state and raised by foster parents. I wanted to help her heal. But when we got closer, her demons came out in force. As the months passed she started withdrawing, first physically and then emotionally. She soon decided that we needed to break up. She disappeared one day and left me a long letter. She took all the blame, talked of her love for me, but asked for forgiveness, and wished me the best.

My heart broke so badly that my chest hurt. I was unable to get out of bed, unable to go to work. Life came to a halt, I lost my appetite, and I canceled my teaching assistant obligations. I withdrew from everything and everybody. Monica would not return my calls or answer my letters. I remembered Friedman back in Albany saying that, once the tears started they would stop. But he was wrong. My tears did not seem to have an end; they came from a bottomless source. When Monica left me, the sorrow started pouring out, at first like a spurt through a crack in the dam and then like an endless river. I had a serious depression, one that had been incubating for years.

A wise friend who knew me well, said, as she watched my raw distress, “Jorge, you carry many deaths inside.” I had a vague idea of what she meant but I took only minor steps to deal with my festering wounds. I went for a few therapy sessions at the Student Health Services. They made me aware how similar Monica’s leaving me was to Mom’s sudden death of fifteen years earlier. Yet my steps were no more than a bandage. They mended an injured soldier and sent him back to battle. So, I pulled myself together and my tears stopped. I returned to my lab and completed my doctoral research. As I had done in the past, I moved on. Once again, I postponed digging into my losses. A year later, I defended my PhD and went to work in Chris Walsh’s lab at MIT.  

It was there that I met Laurie. She was a Californian of Mexican grandparents doing her doctoral work in Walsh’s lab. She was a good-looking young woman with dark eyes and long black hair. She dressed elegantly in what was a drab sea of students wandering the long hallways of MIT, many of whom looked like they had just gotten out of bed. I fell as much for her Latin-American airs as for her brains. My enchantment was—you guessed it—quick and intense. And the feelings were mutual.

At the end of my postdoctoral stint and Laurie’s PhD, we were married in the Cambridge City Hall in 1978, when I was twenty-nine. We moved to Washington DC and to my new life in patents, including law school. At the start of our marriage things went quite well. We bought a house, moved to the DC suburbs, and had three daughters, Thalia, Mara, and Sasha. We delighted in the semblance of family. Our bliss, however, was not to last. Laurie, like Monica, had her own wounds to deal with. Her life had been marked by an off-and-on relation with a difficult mother, with Laurie’s views and feelings ignored. My then mother-in-law never  approved of our marriage and didn’t talk to us for many years. And, little by little, the ghosts of our pasts took their toll.

As in previous occasions, I again felt that I could help Laurie. I imagined that, together, we would prevail over whatever our earlier lives had dealt us. We could leave our childhood pains behind, take control of our destiny, and move on from our pasts. But we couldn’t. Alice Miller, the psychologist, in the very title of one of her books, Prisoners of Childhood, suggests the main reason why we couldn’t. We were both unable to unshackle ourselves from childhood losses of lives and loves. Our marriage was built on quicksand. Our wounds were forever present, in our denials and our fears. We became silent, withdrawn, and disengaged, with no change in sight. After thirteen years, we were far from each other and we separated. It was a painful divorce, especially for our girls. We had a pitched custody fight, with plenty of lawyers, court-ordered counselors, and mediators. In the end, we split custody. We both stayed a few blocks from each other and I became a single dad on Wednesdays and alternate weekends.

The two-year battle left me reeling. The nasty ending made me even wearier of long-term relationships. It hardened my barely submerged skepticism about love. I became convinced that my relationships were transitory. I developed a sense of dispossession. I felt that, despite the trappings of a married life with children, I would never be entitled to a home of my own, to love, or to happiness. I was a passing guest in the world, watching others enjoy life, but resigned to my predicament as a tourist.

Unable to live alone with all that angst, I was married briefly after Laurie, on a rebound. Her (fictional) name was Sharon and she brought along her own wounds. She and I soon realized that ours was a big mistake, and better to end it sooner rather than later. Three years earlier, Ron, my divorce lawyer, had prepared a tight pre-nuptial agreement and, when the time came, my second marriage ended without as much as a whimper.

Throughout the fog of one more loss, I slowly came to understand that I had never mourned the deaths inside. When I became an orphan back in BA, I had felt anger and guilt, but never deep grief. The losses of my friends and country followed with the same stoicism: no laments, no tears, no looking back. I had been the strong boy that the adults around me wanted me to be, so they wouldn’t fall apart. I had copied Dad’s stoicism so that he wouldn’t fall apart. In the end, afraid that I would fall apart, I had kept the sorrow in. Big boys don’t cry and the rest of that idiocy. The suppressed losses—the denial—had led to fantasies such as bringing Diana from BA, or, after Monica left me, to despair and depression. My two failed marriages were illusory attempts at replacing my lost family and having a home again. These serial failures at love led me to conclude that I had to drain the wounds or they would destroy me. That’s when I landed on a Freudian couch for ten years. I will tell you that story in my next blog, The Red Couch.

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While Laurie and I were unable to maintain the family we so much wanted, we had three beautiful daughters, Mara, Thalia, and Sasha, shown below shortly before our split, ca. 1990. In spite of the troubles that I gave them by my two divorces, they have given me much naches, a fine Yiddish word that describes the joy that only children can bring to one’s life.