Post 4 – Session 2 Separation and the Weight of Loss
An Internal Family Systems (IFS)–inspired digitalfoot project
Curated by: Latasha Pennant | Morgan State University, Urban Educational and Leadership Doctoral Program
Focus: Family separation, parental loss, and grief
Murray, P. (2018). Song in a weary throat: Memoir of an American pilgrimage (V. Schomburg & P. Ware, Eds.). W. W. Norton & Company.
Client: Pauli Murray
Date of Birth: November 20, 1910
Date of Death: July 1, 1985
Therapist: When you float back to early memories about your parents, what comes to your awareness?
Client: My first memory is of standing on the floor of our kitchen in Baltimore when I was around three, entangled in my mother's billowing white skirt to which I clung as she went about her work. I cannot remember her face or her voice—only her movements and the warm fragrance of her body. My only memory of my father when he was alive is a brief visit to him in the hospital when I was eight. I never used the familiar words “Mama” and “Papa” growing up; I always spoke of my parents as “my mother” and “my father.”
In this session, Pauli revisits the earliest fractures in her sense of safety and belonging. Her story begins in separation — a rupture that shaped her internal world and reverberated throughout her life.
The client shared that most of what she knew about her parents came from photographs, letters, and the recollections of others. These objects became her fixed points of identity — the only tangible evidence of belonging she could hold.
Through imagery work, the client connected with her younger self — the small child standing in the kitchen, the little girl later carried to North Carolina to live with Aunt Pauline as her mother’s health failed. She recalled sensations of fear and confusion amid the chaos of separation, and the silence that followed.
When invited to witness her parents through her adult eyes, Pauli expressed empathy for their struggles. She noted that her father, William H. Murray, was a Baltimore public school teacher and Howard University graduate — a rare achievement for a Black man at the time — and her mother, Agnes Fitzgerald Murray, was a nurse trained at Hampton. The client recognized their resilience as an inheritance that shaped her own pursuit of education and justice.
She also recalled a pivotal moment following her mother’s death when her two aunts, Pauline and Rose, discussed who would care for the children. Aunt Pauline asked her directly, “Who do you want to live with?” Pauli said she burst into tears before answering, choosing to stay with Aunt Pauline. She reflected that it was “the first of many hard choices I would have to make.” The therapist and client discussed how this moment of forced decision-making may have imprinted a lifelong pattern — linking love to sacrifice and safety to loss.
Despite inherited burdens — including violence, loss, and mental illness within the family line — Pauli acknowledged the emergence of inner protectors that allowed her to transmute grief into determination. This marks the first session in which she began to identify both her Exile parts (the fearful, abandoned child) and her Protective parts (the determined scholar and moral advocate).
As I read Pauli’s account of choosing to stay with Aunt Pauline while watching her siblings go to another home, I could feel the confusion and heartbreak of that moment. It was too much for a child to hold — a decision no child should ever have to make. What she needed was comfort, not choice.
I also recalled her visit to Crownsville, where she saw her father confined and unwell. I imagine the dissonance of recognizing him as both familiar and unfamiliar — a father she could not reach. Her quiet promise to return for him became an anchor of hope, one later shattered by his violent death. When she touched his hand — the only part of him she recognized — I could almost feel her sending warmth to a body that had no warmth to return.
As I sat with these memories, I sent warmth to her child parts — the little girl who longed to be held, the daughter who witnessed too much. In that offering, I imagined a soft ancestral reunion: Ancestor Pauli and Ancestor Murray, meeting again in tenderness beyond words.
Even when the body could no longer respond, love still reached across the silence.
