What Is a Traumatic Death?

Would you agree that a death (which is always a loss) is an especially traumatic loss if:

·      it occurs without warning

·      is untimely

·      involves violence

·      there is damage to the loved one’s body

·      the survivor regards the death as preventable

·      the survivor believes that the loved one suffered

·      the survivor regards the death, or manner of death, as unfair and unjust [1]

 

If you agree that any sudden needless untimely death, especially your child’s, is particularly grievous, then imagine Aurelia Plath’s grief after her daughter Sylvia died, overseas, at age 30. Told at first that Sylvia died of pneumonia, Aurelia learned days later that it was suicide, and son Warren told Aurelia the context and the details.

 

Aurelia wrote a brief angry note to a London newspaper that says those responsible for Sylvia’s death “know who they are.” She did not mail it, but kept it; it’s in archives. For future readers of this unsent letter, Aurelia added the initials of the suspect parties.

 

I can’t find in Sylvia Plath studies any respect or allowance for Aurelia’s trauma and grief. Her trauma would be as severe and multidimensional as ours if authorities phoned right now to say they found our child dead by suicide on a kitchen floor.

 

Rather than empathy (meaning, feeling what others feel) or sympathy (saddened by what others must be going through), Plath biographies and essays imply that Sylvia’s U.S. death notices – few and short because Sylvia wasn’t famous yet -- do not say “suicide” because prim Aurelia hoped to hide the real cause. No reason besides her personal character flaw.

 

We will be called to account for our assumptions.

 

Studies of mothers whose children died by suicide say mothers have not only the grief of suddenly losing a child but a burden of guilt, and, on top of that, they are judged. Even people who know suicide is never simple still suspect that a young suicide’s parents did not love them enough or in the right way, or were not prescient enough, or present enough, to stop them.

 

Aurelia in 1963 sent Sylvia’s friend Elizabeth Compton a note that was less about Sylvia than Aurelia’s own grief. Compton was offended and later sent Aurelia’s letter to a biographer as an example of Aurelia’s true personality. In summer 1963 Aurelia went to England. Her son-in-law, unable to think of any good reason a parent might want to visit their dead child’s former home and grave and children, thought Aurelia was coming for an “investigation.” And that she might dump too much love on her grandchildren. Remember he too was bereaved, as were the grandchildren.

 

Sylvia’s readers sympathize with her loss of her father and how his death changed her. It would be a truer picture if we saw that his death disrupted and changed her whole family. Sylvia’s 1953 suicide attempt shocked and terrified them. Aurelia wrote that she dreaded a recurrence. For her and her son 1963 was the second time around, only worse. Two families became survivors of a suicide and to this day they have not heard the end of it.

 

The National Alliance on Mental Illness says each suicide directly affects about 115 people and one in five (=23)  are devastated.

 

Living in a time of epidemic suicide we know that survivors of traumatic loss might cope by saying or writing tasteless vengeful unhinged or sentimental things, or frame the death as a murder, point fingers, or try everything to fix or explain it and never heal. A percentage will commit suicide themselves. Sylvia’s traumatic death very obviously colored all that occurred afterward, not much of it worth celebrating.

 

Sylvia suffered. But so did her family.

 

[1] “Traumatic Bereavement: Basic Research and Clinical Implications,” M. Barle, C. Wortman, J.A. Latack, 2017.

The 1950 Censu$ and the Panic of '52

Recently made public, t

Sylvia's high-school yearbook photo, 1950

he 1950 U.S. census tells us more about the Plath household than I thought, slightly altering the overall picture.

Head of household Aurelia Plath, "associate professor" (although her title was assistant professor) stated she worked 25 hours a week, 36 weeks a year, for an annual income of $3,200.

Sylvia and Warren Plath, teenagers, were counted as students. Their live-in "Grampy," Frank Schober, Sr., 69, worked 48 hours a week at the Brookline Country Club, earning $3000 a year.

Those were modest salaries, but in 2023 terms, the five-member Plath household in 1950 earned a tidy $75,000. Yet the two breadwinners seem to have kept their money separate, or nearly. When Grampy retired around November 1952, Aurelia went into crisis mode and took on weekend jobs tutoring and babysitting (Sylvia to Aurelia, Nov. 5 and 11, 1952). Sylvia wrote Warren in May 1953 that financially their mother "was really down to rock bottom" and despite poor health intended to teach summer school. Sylvia wanted to write anything at all that might help her pay her own way and felt increasingly depressed that summer when she produced nothing.

In the 1950 census "Grammy," Aurelia's mother and Frank's wife, is not listed although she lived until 1956. In a much later letter (Jan. 16, 1960) Sylvia mentions Aurelia and Aurelia's sister, Aunt Dot, having clashed over "Grampy's money," suggesting that Grampy and his wife had saved some or all of his earnings for retirement: enough for their daughters to fight over.

"One Sweet Ulcerous Ball": A Chronology

Aurelia Plath suffered from and wrote frankly about her stomach ulcer before studies in the 1980s proved that most chronic ulcers are caused by a bacterium, H. pylori, spread by person-to-person contact and treatable with antibiotics. Before then doctors said stress caused ulcers. In white-collar cases, it was “executive stress,” which gave those ulcers value as proof the sufferers had worked too hard and given too much.

 

So Aurelia very much wanted her ulcer story, and its dramatic surgical cure, written into the Plath narrative. She tastelessly told People magazine (October 27, 1975) about her ulcer, and in her introduction to Letters Home linked its origin and episodic activity to the burdens she carried as a wife, widow, and breadwinning mother. She linked ulcer attacks to Sylvia’s 1953 suicide attempt in Letters Home (138) and blamed those events for her 1955 subtotal gastrectomy in a letter to Judith Kroll (1 December 1978) and in notes for a speech in 1979. For the latter, Aurelia wrote, in Gregg shorthand, “Mention my operation following her [Sylvia’s] recovery for her breakdown. She had said, ‘You pretended it hadn’t happened.’ With 3/4 of my stomach removed, the long scar on my abdomen alone would not allow me to forget! I lived in dread of a recurrence.” (1)

 

Otto Plath’s final illness and leg amputation haunt Sylvia’s life and later creative work. Aurelia Plath’s 17-year illness, with its gruesome internal hemorrhaging, does not; or maybe it does and no one has yet perceived it. (2) Sylvia’s Journal belittles Aurelia’s bleeding as drama, calls her “one sweet ulcerous ball,” and mentions bad breath, a symptom of H. pylori infection. (3)

 

Aurelia in Letters Home wrote that her duodenal ulcer formed two years before her husband Otto’s death, meaning 1938. The family was then living in Winthrop to enjoy its beaches, so it is possible Aurelia became infected or co-infected with the parasitic Giardia duodenalis from the sewage piped into Boston Harbor. (4) In February 1943, the Plaths’ first winter in Wellesley, Aurelia hemorrhaged while shoveling snow and was hospitalized. In March, Sylvia mailed letters to Aurelia at Pratt Diagnostic Hospital, where Aurelia’s brother-in-law Joe Benotti headed the chemistry laboratory. Aurelia hemorrhaged again in July, and from summer camp Sylvia, age ten, wrote Aurelia c/o Aurelia’s sister, Dorothy Benotti, “Are you well? I worry when I don’t receive letters from you” (July 18).

 

Aurelia had unrelated surgery in September 1947. This is noted in Sylvia’s diary and commemorated in Sylvia’s poem “Missing Mother,” mailed to Aurelia at Carney Hospital. Brief and scattered mentions in Sylvia’s letters, and a few notes, then become our only clues to Aurelia’s health. The ulcer stirs in February 1951; its stressor is not clear. Aurelia’s mother, Sylvia’s “Grammy,” the Plath family housekeeper, falls ill in early 1953 and Aurelia is distraught. On May 13 Sylvia writes her brother that their mother is eating baby food “again.” Aurelia takes that summer off from teaching, but Sylvia’s suicide attempt in August and months of hospitalization vex the ulcer. It begins bleeding, Aurelia noted, in April 1954, but she might have kept this from Sylvia because it is July before Sylvia mentions her mother’s “nasty ulcer pains.” That September Sylvia chides her mother, “You know that any problem makes you sick.” On October 1, 1954, Sylvia writes Aurelia c/o The New England Medical Center, and the ulcer is an issue at least until November.

 

On January 29, 1955, Sylvia comforts Aurelia after another ulcer attack. There is yet another in April. Now Aurelia has been sick for a year. Admitted to Newton-Wellesley Hospital in May, Aurelia is intravenously fed to build her up for her gastrectomy. Then, the death-defying-mother moment: With doctors’ permission, Aurelia on June 6, 1955 travels in a station wagon, flat on a mattress, to Sylvia’s graduation from Smith College. One witness says Aurelia was carried on a litter to the ceremony grounds. The gastrectomy is June 10. On June 24, Sylvia writes Aurelia, “Welcome Home!,” and on July 6 writes her brother that Aurelia is convalescing and friends are lining up to see her.

 

Aurelia, and Napoleon, and that character on Mad Men—if their chronic ulcers came not from responsibilities but from H. pylori, are they still to be admired? Stress aggravates whatever ill one has, but it turns out that “executive stress” is a myth from a misbegotten study of rhesus monkeys, its result pushed by antacid manufacturers. The fact is that ulcers afflict low-status workers much more often than bosses. (5) Today a popular meme blames “working too hard, being strong for too long” for another life-threatening, invisible illness—depression; Sylvia’s cross.

 

(1) Box 9, folder 11, “Letters Home – Notes.” Sylvia Plath Papers, Smith College.

(2) https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324990#symptoms. Sylvia Plath in summer 1951 overheard her employer, a physician, discussing a patient’s duodenal ulcer, and quoted his description of its symptoms in her journal, wondering how she might work it into a story. (Journals, entry 109, p. 87)

(3) Journals, December 12, 1958.

(4) The anti-parasitic drug Flagyl was not available in the U.S. until 1962.

(5) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-myth-of-executive-str/.