Betwixt and Between
By Delee Fromm
Lately I have become fascinated with the concept of liminal spaces. Spaces that exist between two points in time, location, or identity. Limen means threshold in Latin and someone in liminal space is on the verge of change or in transition. Physical examples include hallways, stairwells, airports, or streets; areas through which people normally pass from one place to another. Liminal photography, which became popular during COVID, involves photos of these areas void of all people and things.
Liminal spaces can also be psychological, created by life events such as the transition from adolescence to adulthood, the gap created by changing jobs or starting a new profession, or the process of dealing with the loss of a loved one; spaces where people transition from who they once were to what they will become. This space is created when there is a departure from the ordinary rules of time, space and social hierarchy, where participants can experiment with their identity. The world was thrown into such a gap with COVID, and the profound ramifications are still emerging.
My interest is not a passing fancy, although the psychologist in me does love a good theoretical concept. Rather, it was the event of my husband passing five months ago that catapulted me into this shapeless space. For the first time in forty-two years, I was without the person who helped create the fabric of my life and shared it with me. My life’s dance partner. So, in addition to grieving, I was faced with creating a new way of being in the world as I lost my role of wife, partner, and caregiver in an instant. Finding a name for this transition was reassuring and validated my feelings of anxiety and abandonment. Most importantly, it made the experience tangible and created hope of a way through.
I have achieved temporary reprieves along the way. The focus on wrapping up the details of his estate had relieved some distress and deceived me into thinking I was moving forward. Well, maybe not forward, but at least it felt like I was not falling deeper. Sam had left a detailed seven-page memo of things to be done after he died, a memo filed away under “After Sam Goes Home.” We had discussed it several times years earlier, so I knew it existed and where to find it, but each discussion had left me with a heavy heart. To cope, I dismissed the event as being too far in the future to care about and even dismissed Sam as being too particular about things. Too legal. From my perspective, this type of preparation was unnecessary even though he had been ill for some time, starting with heart attacks in his forties. He always believed he would die at the same age as his father, sixty-two. Instead, he died three months short of his seventy-fourth birthday.
The effect of the memo on me after his death was the exact opposite of its effect during his life. Instead of depressing, I found it comforting and invaluable. Sam’s words from the past. His instructions to me. It felt as if I was honouring him each time I checked off another item, and it gave me something to do. It allowed me to focus on something other than my upside-down world. It reduced some fog and helped my Zombie brain. However, this respite was fleeting and, when it ended, darkness swooped back in. Friends and family were beyond supportive, but grieving and navigating this liminal space is a solo journey. No one can step into the vacated space of the departed, but I now understand a little better the people who try to hastily fill the spot. Anything to close the gaping void.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion recounts not giving away her husband’s shoes because he would need them when he returned. For a year she stayed in the family home, believing that any day her husband would walk through the door. I haven’t entertained such thoughts; however, it is still taking a long time to feel comfortable about giving away Sam’s belongings. His clothes remain hanging in his bedroom closet and the front closet, as if moving them out would finalize the loss. Magical thinking defies logic but makes sacred our emotions. The ability to let go is a slow process, and these days I honour the process, even when it makes no logical sense.
The idea of changing identity isn’t daunting. I have done it many times in my life: I changed professions twice and careers three times. I have been married twice and moved multiple times, including across the country. This realization caused me to catalogue the changes and analyse them – not only what they were but when they occurred. And what I noticed was that each major change involved an immediate previous journey in liminal space.
There have been several such journeys, but two stand out. The first time, I had been married for less than two years when I found my husband had been cheating with a coworker. I threw him out. It took only a few days to realize I had dodged a bullet, but I still felt adrift and, more importantly, a failure.
Part of feeling so discombobulated was due to my very clear and fixed idea of how my life should play out and the exact order: earning a graduate degree (check), becoming a psychologist (check), landing a position (check), getting married (check), and having a family. I had been ticking off items on a Life List and, in my need to check off married, had selected badly. You might think, as a psychologist, I would have spent some time contemplating my need for such a checklist or why I had rushed into an ill-advised marriage that family members had cautioned me about, but instead, I created a new checklist. What can I say in my defence? I was in my twenties.
Although remarriage wasn’t on that checklist, going to law school was. Looking back, I believed that any failure could be cured with a new degree. And once again, I was cautioned by family members about jumping into a new profession. I was doing well as a psychologist, I enjoyed the work of conducting leading-edge research with world-renowned colleagues, and I was well respected. I even had time after work for hobbies. But I viewed divorce as a failure, and I needed to redeem myself. This belief was not conscious, nor was the obvious realization that it was my ex-husband who had failed me. So, within two years, I was enrolled in law school and remarried. Luckily, despite another quick jump into matrimony, I found a wonderful man with whom I would spend the next 42 years.
If the divorce was my first experience with liminal space, the next one occurred after leaving the practice of law. Although I had practised for 20 years, I came to hate its unrelenting pace and lack of creativity. As a commercial real estate lawyer, the work was detailed (not my forte) and dry as dust. I was a partner at a large law firm, the ultimate prize for a lawyer in those days, but the cost was heavy, not only to my mental health but also to my personal life. In the months before I left, my husband had quadruple bypass heart surgery, and my father died. As a result of my work schedule, I did not see my father before he lapsed into a coma. The fact that it happened the night before I arrived in Edmonton from Toronto made it so much worse. Not normally a crier, I sat beside his unconscious body and sobbed after the nurses told me how excited he had been just the day before that I was coming. His death and my husband’s health helped me decide to leave my second profession.
I felt no great loss at leaving, perhaps due to the fact that the decision had been mine. The months that followed were spent up at the cottage with our two dogs. It was the perfect place to slowly relax and regroup. This time no new checklist was created; instead, I let the environment of green trees, miles of beach, and lake views refresh and fill me. I did not grieve the old me but relaxed into the now. The cottage setting was a deeply spiritual place that allowed me to slowly form the idea of a consulting business that could employ all of my experience, skills, and knowledge, both as a lawyer and a psychologist. It also permitted my hard-working husband to think about retirement himself.
Two years later, I started a consulting firm with a childhood friend. As a consultant, I wrote books and created presentations on leadership for law firms and corporations. The pace was my own, and the creative nature of the business fed my soul. It all was seamless and easy – like being a psychologist had been. I took summers off to spend time at the cottage with family. This change had come about organically, without great mental effort or pushing.
This time, the liminal space feels similar to the one I was dropped into following my divorce. The disorientation and feeling of uncertainty are the same, perhaps even greater. However, the excitement of new beginnings or re-creation is absent, although a hip replacement two months ago has me sensing the glimmer of possibilities. But those are fleeting and seem less about new beginnings and more about returning to what I was three years ago – pain-free and active. Perhaps it is too soon to feel bursts of creative energy, and they will come. Or maybe, just maybe, the time for reinvention is over, and it is a time of return.
Jung describes the first period of life, usually from birth to age 40, as the time for building the ego: creating an image, satisfying the need for status, following societal expectations, and gaining others’ approval. The middle stage is a time for self-examination in order to understand ourselves, especially those parts we have disowned. The third period of life, starting at age 60, is referred to by Jung as a return to the soul. This begins when the ego starts to crack or falls away. Keeping busy loses its attraction, and ‘doing’ isn’t as important anymore. Jung likened this process to the arc of the sun; in the first half, the sun ascends to the apex, then descends in the second. What was true in the morning no longer applies in the afternoon and requires a different attitude and approach. We have all seen individuals obsessively clinging to the appearance of youth as they age, and being applauded and lauded for their efforts by the media.
This latter half is not about decline or decay, as society would have us believe, but rather about traveling deeper. A journey into the unconscious. Eckhart Tolle similarly views this expansion and retraction as a fundamental characteristic of the universe, a manifestation followed by a return to the source: the exhale and inhale of breath, the ebb tide and flood tide of the oceans. If this is the same rhythmic cycle for all of nature, why should we humans be different?
Events of aging seem to promote this return, whether one is ready or not: accumulating losses, health issues, and the lessening of cognitive function. Events viewed by most as a decline. However, from the soul perspective, these are prompts, nudges, and if ignored, sometimes pushes, to refocus attention from the outward to the inward. Life challenges call us to become aware of other aspects of self that don’t relate to survival or building ego to help expand self-knowledge.
Returning to soul seems to suit the psychological space I currently occupy. After years of building a business, I let it go last year. It just felt right. Publishing a mystery novel, a dream since my twenties, consumed me for four years, but no longer does. Letting go of that also felt right, natural. No clinging, just release. And when people introduce me as a lawyer and psychologist, it feels odd and slightly off. As if the professional has vacated the building, and the identity no longer fits.
So what does this mean for my moving out of this liminal area? For starters, no checklists. I will instead move instinctively and trust the process of metamorphosis. A new self does not have to be crafted with hammer and tong, as I thought in my late twenties. Instead, now in my seventies, I will let it emerge creatively and naturally as it did in my forties. I will let feelings and intuition guide me as I surround myself with soulful others; those who live with their heart and are blissfully aware they are also in a time of descent, a time of psychological and spiritual maturation. I will let the process play out and not fool myself into thinking I control it. I will not exit prematurely as I did in my twenties. I will not pressure myself with to-do lists or use dates arbitrarily drawn by others to prove I am doing well. I will not shortchange the process and expose the vulnerable caterpillar before it has morphed into a butterfly. This is an inside-out process, and only I will know when to emerge.
Therefore I will follow my heart, listen to my gut, and trust universal guidance, all the while appreciating the taste of the sweet strawberries I encounter along the way. And I will try not to resist life events but will dance with life, my new partner.
About the Author
Author and, in a life that seems far away, a lawyer, psychologist, and consultant.
Delee Fromm is the author of various publications: nonfiction books on career advancement in law and business, research papers on neuropsychology, academic chapters on negotiation, and mystery stories. This is her first personal essay.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/deleefromm
