I came across his story in a newspaper column by René Diekstra, a Dutch psychologist who had Benny as a client. Diekstra opens with something he believes happens far too often: the death of a child becomes the death of a relationship, and the death of a parent the death of a family.
What Benny did with his grief
His grief was so great, Diekstra writes, and his inability to mourn just as great, that he slid into depression. He couldn’t carry the loss. He couldn’t ask anyone to help him carry it either.
His eldest, a girl of twelve, stepped into her mother’s place. Young as she was, she took her two younger brothers under her wing and ran the household. With all that on her shoulders, and a father who could neither work through his grief nor share it, she had little room left to grieve for her own mother.
About two years after his wife died, Benny met a woman who had three children of her own. Less than two months later, both families were living under one roof. Diekstra calls the merger a disaster of the worst kind.
Why couldn’t Benny’s daughter accept a new mother?
In Diekstra’s reading, Benny had numbed his loss instead of working through it, and had traded one partner for another. His daughter was then pushed to trade mothers the same way, before she had grieved for her own. She couldn’t. So on top of her mother, she lost most of her father too, at least in how close they were.
She was 16 when she fell into her first real depression, and she was treated with medication. At 27, after two more deep depressions, the last one after a new relationship ended, she began treatment with a psychologist. There, for the first time, she got the chance to grieve. Diekstra adds what that meant: to share it.
People who never let themselves grieve struggle the most to really love.
Diekstra takes it further. People who try to numb or dodge their emotional pain in daily life, he writes, never learn to cope with life as it is. In his view, being willing to learn to bear the pain of loss, however fierce, without making a show of it, is the first and final proof of emotional maturity.
A sentence from 1967
Then Diekstra quotes a book, The Inability to Mourn, by Alexander Mitscherlich, a German psychiatrist, and his wife Margarete, a therapist. It first came out in German in 1967. Diekstra uses the Dutch translation from 1973, and the passage opens like this, in my translation:
“The capacity to mourn is the capacity to love.”
Next comes the reason. Only someone who can mourn the loss of another, only someone who can bear the pain of letting go, can feel the joy of connecting again. Halfway through, almost in passing, you read that to live is to let go. Then the passage closes:
“Whoever is held back in letting go is held back in connecting. Held back in connecting with another person, and held back in connecting with the world, with humanity, with its suffering.”
Did the Mitscherlichs write about one family?
No, about a whole country. Their book is about West Germany after the Second World War. In their reading, many Germans never mourned the leader they had loved, Hitler. They buried that loss in work and in the booming economy instead. The Mitscherlichs saw a striking Gefühlsstarre in the country, German for a freezing of feeling.
The first chapter of their book has the same title as the book itself, The Inability to Mourn. Its subtitle reads womit zusammenhängt: eine deutsche Art zu lieben. In English: and connected with that inability, a German way of loving. So in one chapter heading, the Mitscherlichs put mourning and loving side by side.
Two strangers, one war film
Benny couldn’t share his grief with his daughter. What does that do to the person on the other side? In 2003, psychologists at Stanford University in California, led by Emily Butler and James Gross, tested a small version of it.
They paired up women who had never spoken to each other and seated them two meters apart, on either side of a partition. Both wore a blood pressure cuff and could see the same television. On it they watched a 16-minute war documentary with graphic footage of the aftermath of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Then, in some of the pairs, one woman heard a recorded instruction through headphones:
“During the conversation, behave in such a way that your partner does not know you are feeling any emotions at all.”
Her partner heard bland music. The partition was taken away, and the two talked about the film.
What happened to the partner of the woman who hid her feelings?
Her blood pressure went up more than that of the other partners in the study. In a second round with 84 more women from Stanford, the partners of the women who hid their feelings also felt less connected during the talk. They liked them less, and had much less interest in ever talking to them again or becoming friends.
Benny’s daughter lived for years with a father who couldn’t share his grief. In the study, one conversation was enough to put distance between two people.
For whom the bell tolls
Diekstra named his column after For Whom the Bell Tolls, the 1940 novel by the American writer Ernest Hemingway about the Spanish Civil War. Diekstra ends with Hemingway’s answer: the bell always tolls for you too.
Hemingway took that title from a book more than three hundred years older. John Donne, an English poet and priest who led St Paul’s Cathedral in London, fell dangerously ill and wrote a series of short reflections in bed. He published them in 1624. In one of them, he hears a church bell tolling softly for someone else who is dying. He wonders whether the people around his bed might have had it rung for him, without telling him.
A little further on, Donne writes:
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. (…) any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
The main is the mainland, and thee is the old word for you.
What does a church bell from 1624 have to do with love?
Donne hears a bell for a stranger and recognizes his own death in it. The passage Diekstra quotes ends in the same place: whoever can’t let go is held back from connecting with the world and its suffering. So I read them as one thought. Letting someone all the way in also means letting in the day you lose them.
Letting go, for one hour
I built Last Hour Experience as one hour you spend alone, with headphones, as if it were your last. Near the end, you can write farewell letters to people who matter to you. To write one, you picture letting go of someone while they are still here. If the sentence Diekstra quotes is right, you do that with the same capacity you love them with.
Questions people ask. One of them is me.
Can someone who never grieved a loss still learn to love?
In a newspaper column, the Dutch psychologist René Diekstra describes a late start. His client’s daughter first got a real chance to grieve at 27, with a psychologist, fifteen years after her mother died. Diekstra ends her story there.
Is it wrong to start a new relationship soon after a partner dies?
The Dutch psychologist René Diekstra gives no timeline in his column about his client Benny. He points to a loss that was numbed, and to a daughter who had to trade mothers before she had grieved for her own.
Do the Stanford studies prove that hiding your feelings pushes people away?
The Stanford researchers measured one conversation between strangers: young women at one American university, hiding their feelings because they were asked to. The researchers point out those limits themselves. Still, the other person picked up on it, in her blood pressure and in how little she wanted to meet again.
What does “for whom the bell tolls” mean?
It comes from John Donne, an English poet and priest, who published it in 1624 after a serious illness. When you hear a church bell toll for someone who is dying, he says, don’t send anyone to ask who it’s for. It tolls for you, because every death diminishes all of us.
Sources
Voor wie de klok luidt (Dutch for “For whom the bell tolls”), the column by René Diekstra, a Dutch psychologist, published online by Noordhollands Dagblad, a Dutch regional newspaper, on September 29, 2025. Benny’s story and the quotes come from the printed column, and the English translations are mine.
Der versäumte Abschied von der Volksgemeinschaft (German for “The missed farewell to the national community”), an article in German by Tobias Freimüller, a German historian, about the Mitscherlichs’ book, in Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, an online reference work on recent history. The beloved leader, the booming economy and the freezing of feeling come from here.
Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Geschichte einer Abwehr? (German for “The Inability to Mourn: the story of a defense?”), a 2017 essay in German by Daniel Weidner, a German professor of cultural studies, on the blog of the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin. The subtitle of the first chapter comes from here.
The Social Consequences of Expressive Suppression (in plain words: what happens to others when you keep your feelings from showing), the 2003 study by Emily Butler, James Gross and colleagues at Stanford University, published in Emotion, a research journal of the American Psychological Association. The partition, the film, the instruction and the results come from the full text.
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, the short reflections John Donne published in 1624 about the turns of his illness, readable online at Project Gutenberg, a volunteer library of old books whose copyright has run out. The bell is in the seventeenth reflection. The same edition opens with a short life of Donne, taken from his biographer Izaak Walton, which tells how he wrote these reflections on his sickbed.