Santa Cruz Sentinel

Santa Cruz Style

Subscribe

Amazing resilience

Throughout my professional life as an educator, chaplain, social worker and bereavement counselor, there is one issue that keeps grabbing me by the throat and won’t let go.

I have worked with people who face a life-threatening illness and others trying to cope with the aftermath of homicide, suicide, accidents, death from "natural causes," and countless other catastrophes.

What I continue to find both amazing and hopeful is the resilience, healing, understanding and constructive transitions that have been the product of such intense assaults upon the human spirit.

Events that could, and often do, crush us psychologically (and physically) can also be used for personal transformation and change.

There are some individuals who find hope and opportunity in the midst of adversity.

There are various theories about why some people experience their grief as a transformative process. Beyond that stands the intriguing and overwhelming fact that some people take it a step further by reaching out and helping others, individually or collectively.

Some wish to prevent others from experiencing similar pain or provide comfort and healing to those already affected.

Others wish to change laws, institutions or perceptions. Most find a heightened sense of personal satisfaction, meaning and purpose in life.

Gitta Ryle is one such individual. She lost her father, numerous relatives and friends in Auschwitz and her beloved husband four years ago from cancer.

Gitta has since devoted her life to speaking about the Holocaust and providing counseling for young people who have had a loss in the family.

What follows is an excerpt from my interview with her in "Beyond One’s Own: Healing humanity in the wake of personal tragedy" (Crossquarter Publishing, May 2001).

Gitta Ryle: "I was born in Vienna in 1932. In ’39 Hitler invaded Austria. Since my family was Jewish, we had to flee from the Nazis.

"My father was in the most danger. To avoid capture, he and some other men left almost immediately. My mother, older sister and I stayed on for a while.

"Mother eventually heard of a children’s organization that took Jewish children out of the country to save them. My mother put us on a train with other children to France, where my sister and I stayed throughout the war.

"My mother got a job as a cook in England, where she stayed until the war ended.

"In the meantime we learned that father had escaped to Belgium. Through the Red Cross in Switzerland, we were all able to keep in touch with occasional letters.

"When father discovered where we were, he came to France and worked close by the school we attended. We saw him a few times before some French citizens denounced him. He was captured, put into a camp and shipped to Auschwitz.

"That is where my father died in 1942. My grandparents, on my mother’s side, also died there.

"Other friends and some of our teachers were also killed. Each time the Germans infiltrated our school, they’d rush us out.

"We went from one children’s home to another until they hid us in a Catholic convent. When the convent also came under suspicion, they put us on individual farms.

"I reunited with my mother when we came to America. She died when I was pregnant with my third child in August of 1965. She died of a heart attack in her sleep.

"I believe she died from a broken heart when she’d had to give us up during the war. I don’t know if I could have done that. She was a very courageous lady.

"It makes a difference how you lose someone. When I lost my mother, I was quite pregnant. There was a different type of grieving because of bringing someone to life just when another is leaving. I took it very hard.

"Her death triggered a lot of stuff, but I didn’t have the time to deal with it like I did when my husband died. I had three small children at the time to take care of.

"When my husband became ill, he was sick for eight months. Up front I did not accept that he was going to die, even though in the back of my mind there was that stuff going on that realized it was indeed going to happen.

"His death brought up all the others I had not had time to deal with. For the first year and a half after his death, I was numb. I saw a counselor at Hospice once a week and a wonderful social worker, named Betty, talked with my children.

"A month before Bob (Gitta’s husband) died, his 91-year-old father died. So while I was taking care of Bob, I also took care of his father. He was a very difficult man, but through me being with him I learned a lot of compassion.

"When he died, Bob didn’t want to go see him, but at the last minute said he would. I drove him to the funeral home, went up to his dad, touched him and gave him a kiss on the forehead.

"I cried. I think in some ways I was saying good-bye to my own father. Taking care of my father-in-law and Bob gave me a way to do what I couldn’t do for my father.

"When my children got to the same age that I had been when we were separated from our parents, I started getting ulcers. I was physically sick, and there was a lot of fear in me.

"Bob said, ‘You need to get some help.’ I went and talked to a counselor. At first I talked about things that bothered me everyday, and then we got deeper and deeper, to the point where the guilt and not understanding why someone would want to kill me when I didn’t do anything wrong ... all that stuff came out. That is when I say I started the work.

"When the schools began to discuss the holocaust, they became interested in what a live person who’d lived though it would say.

"When I talk to kids, I give them a little lecture and say, ‘Yes, what happened was terrible, and yes, I went through it and survived. I am who I am because I survived. Nothing is all bad. I could have gone another way. I could have become a killer, but for some reason I chose not to. I chose to be healthy and honest.’"

(To be continued in the next installment of Good Grief.)

Gabriel Constans is a counselor in the Center for Grief and Loss in the Hospice Caring Project of Santa Cruz County, located in Aptos.

Subscribe