The scar will remain

Could we go back to when you were standing behind a closed door?

I would stand at the door for a long time. Let me set the scene for you: there’s me, after the death of my daughter, and living above me, there’s my neighbour with her dying husband.

How old were you then?

25.

So life had just begun and suddenly, it turned out to be very different from what it was supposed to have been.

Especially since I got pregnant on my honeymoon and it really was a dream come true, that’s how we’d planned it. I think of this time of mourning as a barren desert.

I used to work at a school as a Polish teacher, but I had a fixed-term contract. It expired and I didn’t have the strength to take care of the extension. I knew I couldn’t go back to this job. Maybe if I taught maths or PE, it would have been easier. But standing in front of the class and discussing “Laments” by Kochanowski? Plus, in every child, I would see my own: I’d see who she could have been, but never was. My daughter was born too early. She died ten days after she was born.

I spent that year at home. My husband would go to work, and I would stay in a two-bedroom flat. And there I was, standing at that door, watching through a peephole or from a window an ambulance arriving to get my neighbour’s husband time and time again, watching him being carried out on a stretcher: downstairs, upstairs, downstairs again. And I didn’t have the courage to do anything at all. To go out, help, talk to the neighbour. All I did was walk up to the door and look through that peephole.

But that was a long time ago. It’s like returning to a city in which I used to live. And it’s a good thing I don’t visit that place too often, I’ve moved on.

I’m going back to this time because I wanted to ask you how to get to the other side of the door.

Slowly. I always tell people in mourning that there’s no hurry. Now that I work as a therapist, I tell my clients that such a trauma or loss is like a scar. I mean all the different types of loss: divorces or losing something else that was important to our lives. It’s not like this scar will fade away, it’ll always be there. But it can feel like a foreign body, pulling the skin inward, or it can be soft and elastic, integrated into the skin structure. If I massage the scars on my body from various surgeries, they become more elastic. If I leave them as they are, they will harden.

How do you translate that into life scars?

It’s about treating them with tenderness. When we’re recovering from a difficult experience, we should treat ourselves like we do after a severe illness. Like a convalescent who is not expected to achieve spectacular things or make great decisions. We should ease up on ourselves. Reduce the number of tasks to a minimum. And take care of our bodies. They need to be well rested, well fed, taken for a walk. We should acknowledge how much our bodies take. And how they carry us in our sorrows, in our mourning. And how patient they are.

Recovery is a long process. If we skip it, it will set in within us like a sediment. In my practice, I meet people who have overlooked their traumas.

Can you not notice that something has hit you?

I mean overlooking the healing process. Our defence mechanisms, e.g. rationalisations: after all, I am an adult, parents die, it’s natural, I shouldn’t be so upset about my father’s death. The world around you also tells you that there is a certain time limit for such mourning: a week, a month, but no longer – enough is enough.

There’s no pattern to grieving. I used to work with women who lost a child and they told me very different stories. Some mothers went to the cemetery every day, others were unable to visit the grave.

There’s no pattern, but one sure thing is that it takes time. At the beginning, we are in a phase of derealisation. We know that someone has died, but there are so many things to arrange: the funeral, offices, papers. The real desert begins once everything has been done, everything has been told and then told again. Sometimes it starts after six months, sometimes after a year.

I remember a woman who lost her son after childbirth. After three months, she got pregnant again. She got a shock when she gave birth to a daughter. She fantasised that her dead son would return as another son. She couldn’t feed her little girl. She overlooked her grief, failed to give herself space to manage it with tears, screaming, rest or sleep.

Mourning is necessary in order to ground oneself, to anchor oneself in life, to bounce back. And if it’s not overlooked, it provides the space for post-traumatic growth..

What’s that?

There are studies that show that we can do more than just come out of mourning or other traumas; a lot of people achieve a higher level of development. They are more connected to their values.

What does that even mean?

That we can separate the important from the unimportant. Post-traumatic growth is a result of our survival from trauma and of what we’ve learned about ourselves and life. It’s like before and after a war.

It’s a time that can make us ask ourselves important questions. I also like to compare it to gardening. See which plants are planted by you and which by others. People – your parents, your spouse, those you surround yourself with, those you work with – have seeded various values in you. Are they really yours? Why are you growing them?

What for? You once said that this is your favourite question to ask the people who come to therapy.

It helps to lead a more attentive life. Does what I do with my time, who I spend it with, what I get involved in connect with my world?

You don’t have to know the answer right away. I try not to rush. I even support them and cheer them on in this ignorance. I tell them that it might be the first time in their lives that they have the courage not to know. That they have the courage to fall to pieces. And to then take a close look at those pieces. With no great expectations, without torturing ourselves. Carefully separating poppy seeds from the sand. What doesn’t suit me in the here and now? What is useful?

What else do you often ask about?

The resources. I’m not the kind of therapist that works on deficits.

What does it mean?

I’m not looking for holes. I’m looking for what’s there.

I often ask the following question – often enough to see my clients roll their eyes: “What has helped you survive this experience?” Because if we’re going to build a boat to help us move on, what’s the use of pointing to things that we lack? “There’s a deficit here that you need to work on”? This way, the patient slides even deeper into misery. I prefer to direct light and energy towards places that I can turn into solid foundations.

And I often set homework: a story of my successes.

That’s the point at which I would roll my eyes.

But in therapy, I see extraordinary results. I was working with a person suffering from depression. This proposal showed that he loves taking pictures, that he once had an exhibition of his photographs and an article about them in the press. But he had already forgotten about it. If it wasn’t for the talk about resources, the person sitting in my office would be depressed, period. There wouldn’t be anything else to work with. It’s the same with people with Down syndrome. This man was bigger than his diagnosis; he’s a wonderful individual.

It works even when we have experiences that will always resonate with guilt, for example betraying someone or causing an accident. But what else is there? Who are we besides that? Another example are my clients who have lost someone close to them and live with a tremendous sense of guilt because they were relieved when it happened. I tell them that to me, feeling relief if someone has suffered greatly is a proof of love.

What if they feel guilty because they couldn’t bear it any more?

There’s nothing wrong with that either. I sometimes use the phrase: “love thy neighbour as thyself”. Only seemingly it’s “the neighbour” who comes first. First, you need to learn to love yourself. Only on the basis of that love do you love others. And what we get is the martyrdom of giving ourselves a wide berth to invalidate ourselves, thus arriving at the ‘beautiful sacrifice’. However, if the one who helps the drowner doesn’t take care of oneself, they will both drown.

Could you tell me about someone you worked with as a therapist who has achieved post-traumatic growth?

I worked with a woman who left the Jehovah’s Witnesses and divorced after over a decade of marriage. Her whole world fell apart. Because leaving this group means a total excommunication. It was amazing to be close to a person who lost everything she had and everything she knew about herself. And it was beautiful to watch her re-establish herself step-by-step. She was casting her skin. Kind of like a snake.

This process can be terrifying and difficult. We abandon what was an integral part of us, and this new identity is still delicate, unknown. That’s why it can’t happen overnight.

After your daughter died, you became involved in helping others. You started a support group for parents who had lost their children. Then you started volunteering at a hospice. You were writing about your hospice experiences on a blog titled ‘Zorkownia’, which was voted blog of the year. The blog turned into a book that inspired many to engage in volunteering themselves. Now you’re helping others as a therapist.

We have no control over random events, but we can control the way we deal with them. Grief or life overshadowed by loss is a life in search of meaning.

My journey began with facing the fact that there was supposed to be a child but there was no child with a complete lack of understanding, with anger and powerlessness. How could I live with the fact that my friends had babies and I had a grave to go to? And I think the first step was to look for people in a similar situation.

Then, when I found myself in a vicious circle, not knowing which way to go or what to do, my therapist said, “If you don’t see a solution right now, maybe you should do something completely different”. And it turned the way I was thinking on its head. I went to a hospice for a volunteering course. And things began to fall into place. My professional life began to sort itself out. At the age of 33, I started studying psychology, although I was terrified, because it takes years.

Yes, I felt that being with people was something that I could do. At first, these were people who had lost their children. Then hospice patients. There were times when the coordinator would send me to the most difficult cases. For example, a 40-year-old woman who was dying and was about to leave behind four children and didn’t want to talk to a hospice psychologist, didn’t want to talk to anyone, didn’t want to say goodbye to her children. And I went to her.

I volunteered for ten years. But I started asking myself how many good things one could do for someone else. And whether I was the only one paying the price. Whether my loved ones, who hadn’t chosen it, weren’t paying the price as well. I remember my wake-up call. There was a patient in the hospice whom I had become close friends with. He was dying. I came home, my husband and I were planning the evening: watching a series together, maybe having a glass of wine. But I looked at him apologetically: “Listen, I think I should go there for another hour”. My husband replied quite calmly: “Go, I can’t win with cancer”. I went, but I knew it couldn’t go on like this.

Right now, I’m at a point in my life when I’m able to say “no”. Very consciously. Probably also the fact that my dad was diagnosed with leukaemia made me realise that I have to make room both for him and myself right now.

You don’t work at the hospice any more?

I haven’t for almost a year. It wasn’t easy. People used to come to volunteering courses with my ‘Zorkownia’ in their hands. It was a bit as if – while maintaining relativity, of course, because I am not on the same scale nor have the same amount of charisma – Jurek Owsiak or Ewa Błaszczyk gave up what they were doing. How could they? But I think that there is a way out. That maybe I’ve done enough.

I’m not just Saint Zorka of Hospices. Such a role begins to feel like a corset. I know a few people who do a lot of publicly beautiful and important work, and I see what it’s like from the inside: how their family life suffers, how they have somehow been trapped in this image of nobility.

I found the following passage in Judith Viorst’s book Necessary Losses: “Another defensive measure used to protect oneself against the experience of loss may be the compulsive need to care for others. Instead of suffering ourselves, we help those who suffer. And through dedicated service, we relieve our former sense of helplessness. We identify with those for whom we so eagerly take care.”

I kind of got myself caught in that trap. I thought that if I focused on other people with similar experiences, I’d do a good job. And I did. But how many problems of my own did I run away from in the process? Now I see patients in my office, but within certain hours, within a professional framework and within my human abilities.

I just saw that you deleted a large group of friends from your Facebook account.

Almost 400 people.

Didn’t they take offence?

Some probably did. Too bad.

“I am tired of notifications, I am sad about the time I waste here and the superficiality or even illusiveness of contacts”, you wrote on Facebook.

I think that being on-line and gazing at the screens of our smartphones for several hours a day causes a lot of damage. There’s a lot going on there, friends are constantly uploading photos, you need to navigate through all that content, you need to perform so many tasks and constantly refresh the page and read the updates.

After ‘Zorkownia’, I was appalled by the number of ‘friends’ I had. This book was quite visible and therefore a lot of people appeared in my life. No one knew whether I’d be a good investment, but people figured out that it might be worth being around me, so there were dinner invitations and phone calls. I wasn’t fit for it. I shook it off real quick. Although it left me so petrified that I haven’t been able to write ever since.

We started with ways to recover from difficult experiences. But what you’re saying shows that we need to recover from success too.

Yes, because it’s an experience that ejects you from your world. I was simply writing a blog for my friends and I didn’t anticipate what would happen if it went public. It just happened and it had to be dealt with. But I have one life, I’m almost 44, not much time is left. And I think about what is more important: constantly being the talk of the town, building your eminency, seducing people to remain on this wave of fame? What for?

“I used to quote Szymborska, saying that ‘my identifying features are rapture and despair’. Today, I say ‘breathe in, breathe out’. I try to live my life attentively, which doesn’t always work out. It’s okay, just the way it is.” Breathe in, breathe out?

It’s something we always have with us, right here, right now. Inhaling means taking in a part of the world, exhaling – giving something in return. This concept entails a certain fullness and wholeness. Breathing in – what’s ahead. Breathing out – what we need to give up on. And that’s about it. Nothing extraordinary.

It’s fine just the way it is? We shouldn’t want too much

We should be on the side of what is there. This is something I tell myself a lot. But this work never ends. And I don’t want to sound like some Yoda who already knows all this. I work on it every day and I don’t always succeed.

I only have one child. It’s not how it was supposed to be. This hunger and longing will always be with me. But it helps me to say: “Look how much you have”. To think that I might not even have had him. My son was premature too. He had so many health problems that I don’t remember having a happy motherhood with a baby in a pram and sunshine in the park.

But I think about how I can choose who to be. A mum of a baby lying in an incubator in a plastic box for three months? Or a mum of a 17-year-old DJ who runs his own YouTube channel, writes rap music that is dirty to the limit and has his own, very specific identity?

This is the beauty of life: that it doesn’t belong to me. I can only be there and get angry with it or admire it. I’d rather admire.

Violetta Szostak talks to Agnieszka Kaluga

Graphics: Arkadiusz Hapka

• Agnieszka Kaluga – psychologist, psychotherapist. Lives in Poznań. Co-founded the association DLACZEGO [WHY] supporting parents who lost their children and parents of terminally ill children. For several years, she ran a blog called “Zorkownia”, where she wrote about her volunteer work in the Palium hospice. Znak publishing house published “Zorkownia” in the form of a book.

The interview was published in "Wolna Sobota” magazine of "Gazeta Wyborcza” on 3 October 2020