Condolences to Frieda Hughes

Dear Frieda:


Sylvia Plath with Frieda and Nicholas

Please accept my greatest sympathies and condolences on the 48th anniversary of your mother’s death. Each year on February 11 when I am celebrating my oldest child’s birthday and embracing the joy that his arrival brought me, I briefly reflect upon the enormous loss that occurred on February 11, 1963 – the loss of not only a brilliant poet but the loss of a mother for an almost three-year-old and a one year old. Frequently, on this date when poetry fans and scholars remember Sylvia Plath the Poet, they overlook Sylvia Plath the Mother who left two young children behind when she succumbed to her depression and took her own life.

As a young woman, I was drawn to your mother’s poetry due to her haunting images, maudlin themes and tragic tone; her complex relationship with her mother that she so richly captured in her poetics made me reflect upon my own turbulent relationship with my mother. Just like your mother’s absence probably felt like a strong presence in your life, my mother’s presence always felt like an absence. Much of that inexplicable absence subsided when I became a mother and replaced longing with an abundance of love. I hope that you too have found abundance of love despite all the tradegy in your life.

Sylvia Plath with Frieda and Nicholas

So today, it is with sadness that I think about your mother’s maternal experiences cut short and your experiences without a mother in your life. I think about how you, the daughter of two brilliant poets, have persevered and have honored the reputations of both your mother and father. You have been dignified and poised over the years as you have shared details about the Plath-Hughes family. And even though the Plath-Hughes relationship was filled with turbulence, you and your late brother Nicholas were beautiful results of that union -- a union that lives on in their masterful poetry and in you. So today on the anniversary of your mother’s death, I wish you peace, comfort and an abundance of love.

Sincerely,

Garbageman’s Daughter

The New Ted and Sylvia

Sylvia Plath, in speaking about life with her husband, British poet, Ted Hughes, once said: “We drink coffee in the morning in concession to America , and we drink tea in the afternoon in concession to England. “

My husband and I listen to Willie Nelson on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to pay homage to Texas, and we listen to Prince on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday to pay homage to Minnesota (for absolutely no reason since I am not from Minnesota and have never been there).

But, anyway we are the new Ted and Sylvia – well minus the adultery, the divorce, the mother’s abandonment of the children through suicide, the shacking up with the mistress who later gases herself and her daughter who could be the kids’ illegitimate half-sister , the abandonment of the adult children by the father due to cancer, which results in the youngest child’s depression and ultimate suicide.

Okay, so we are nothing like Ted and Sylvia.

Anyway, we listen to Willie Nelson on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and Prince on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday unless my husband is out of town then I listen to Prince every day. Well actually even if he is home, I go to the basement and listen to Prince every day when I am drinking tea. I drink tea and my husband drinks coffee. Okay, we are nothing like Ted and Sylvia. We are just a couple who listens to Willie and Prince and drinks our daily coffee and tea.

I Weep for a Man that I Do Not Know

It’s the middle of the night, and I cannot sleep. I gave my baby a bottle and never made my way back to bed; I felt an urgency to edit, revise, and add a quote to the posting that I wrote about Sylvia Plath on February 11 (the anniversary of her suicide).

In searching for 2007 interview that Frieda Hughes gave Time magazine, I made an unexpected discovery. Frieda’s brother Nicholas Hughes, who is also the son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes committed suicide a few weeks ago.

So in the middle of the night, I weep for man who I do not know. A man who killed himself 46 years after his mother took her life when he just a one-year-old, sleeping in the room beside the kitchen where the poet ended her suffering; a man who grew up without a mother; a man who watched hundreds of scholars, critics, and biographers scavenge through his parents lives and poetry looking for anything that would sell; a man who like his mother battled depression; a man, who unlike his sister, didn’t write poetry and openly talk about his parents but instead dedicated his life to the study of ecology. A man who found poetry in nature; a man who could not overcome the legacy of suicide.

This is why I cry in the middle of the night.

If you need someone to talk to you, please call The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

The Poetry of Life and Death on February 11

In her iconic poem Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath writes:

Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

She succeeded in her calling on February 11, 1963 – her second suicide attempt. She was 30.

My first child was born February 11, 1999. I was 25.

Now every February 11 as I celebrate the anniversary of my son’s birth; I take moment to think about Plath, an amazingly talented but deeply-troubled writer, probably known more for her tumultuous personal life and mental health struggles than her poetry, written in the confessional style. This just means she wrote diary entries in stanzas with rhyme, meter and a Smith College educated vocabulary.

On the anniversary of her death, I also wonder about the children who she left behind. The children who miraculously did not die on the day their mother ended her life. Plath carefully sealed the rooms between herself and her sleeping children before she took her life by turning on her gas oven. Frieda was 2 and Nicholas was 1.

Many interesting facts exist about Plath and appear repeatedly in publications: Married to English poet Ted Hughes; posthumously awarded a Pulitzer for her Collected Poems; completed a guest editorship at Mademoiselle; first tried to commit suicide at the age of 20; father died when she was 8; and, she experienced a difficult relationship with her mother. Typically, the children are nothing more than a footnote for the hundreds of publishers, scholars, and biographers who have profited and made careers by capitalizing on Plath’s struggle with mental illness, her disastrous marriage to Hughes, and her tragic death,

With so much drama, the innocent are easily forgotten. I was guilty of the oversight too. During my 20s, when I didn’t make much distinction between leaving behind 2 children and leaving behind 2 books of unpublished poetry, I would have believed that not being around to receive a Pulitzer was a far greater tragedy than not seeing some kids reach adulthood. In those days, I consumed Plath’s poetry, the way Lady Lazarus consumed men, like air. I was a self-indulgent college student who hated my mother for no good reason; wrote horribly bad self-absorbed poetry; and, amused myself by scaring friends and family with vague insinuations about suicide. Whining, not dying, was my art.

Being a good Catholic girl, I feared a vengeful and wrathful God who takes self-murder pretty seriously. And even more terrifying than the threat of an eternity in hell was the possibility of not succeeding and dealing with my vengeful and wrathful mother. My mother was much like Aurelia Plath but meaner. I imagined that she would hand me knife and say: “Do it until you do it right.” Or, she would lock my crazy ass up indefinitely and tell people that her loving, selfless daughter became a missionary in Afghanistan—never to be heard from again. With those thoughts to guide me, I stayed far away far from sleeping pills and gas ovens. I made it into adulthood safely and eventually became both less whiny and a mother of four children.

Now when I read Ariel, I am still amazed by the urgency, the beauty of language and unrelenting tragic desperation in each verse, but that is where my celebration of her poetry now ends. Ariel immortalizes for Frieda and Nicholas their mother’s history of depression, anger, hopelessness, tragedy, and suicidal obsessions.

In her forward of Ariel Restored, Frieda Hughes writes about her mother: "She used every emotional experience as if it were a scrap of material that could be pieced together to make a wonderful dress." For her children, Plath’s wonderful dress is more like corset that is fascinating and strangely beautiful on the exterior but brings excruciating pain to the core.

In a 2007 interview with Time, Andrea Sachs asks: If all of this had happened to your mom now, what people know now, do you think it would have resulted in her death? With modern pharmacology, could somebody have helped her?

Frieda replied: “I think there's no doubt about that. The advancements in the past 30- or 40-odd years are huge. I don't believe there's any way that that situation would have arisen now. She'd still be here.”

If Plath would have gotten the medical attention that she needed, chances are the literary world would have been denied one the best poetry collections of the Twentieth Century. And without her illness, there probably wouldn’t been much art from Plath and most likely no great art. Sylvia Plath would have been another 1960s mother on mood-altering drugs. Frieda and Nicholas Hughes would have just been kids with a mom, who was living with a little help from antidepressants.