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Dead Mabelle

By Elizabeth Bowen

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The sudden and horrible end of Mabelle Pacey gave her a publicity with the European press worth millions to J. and Z. Gohigh of Gohigh Films Inc., Cal., U.S.A. Her personality flashed like a fused wire. Three-year-old films of Mabelle – with scimitar-curves of hair waxed forward against the cheeks, in the quaint creations of 1924 – were recalled by the lesser London and greater provincial cinemas. The Merry Magdalene – Mabelle with no hair to speak of, in a dinner jacket – was retained for weeks by the ‘Acropolis’ and the ‘Albany’, wide-porticoed palaces of the West End; managers of the next order negotiated for it recklessly and thousands had to be turned away during its briefer appearances in Edinburgh, Dublin and Manchester. The release of her last, Purblind, was awaited breathlessly. Her last, when brimming with delighted horror, horrified delight, with a sense of foreknowledge as though time were being unwound from the reel backwards, one would see all Mabelle’s unconsciousness under the descending claw of horror. Nothing she had ever mimicked could approach the end that had overtaken her. It was to be, this film, a feast for the epicure in sensation; one would watch the lips smile, the gestures ripple out from brain to finger-tips. It was on her return from the studio at the end of the making of this very picture that she had perished so appallingly.

The management of the Bijou Picturedrome at Pamsleigh considered themselves fortunate in having secured The White Rider, a 1923 production. Since dusk, on a framework erected above the façade of the Picturedrome, green electricity scrawled ‘Mabelle’ in the rainy sky. She was with them for three nights only; the habitués streamed in; uncertain patrons, pausing under her superscription, thumbed the edge of a florin, looked up and down the street, and when the metal ticket finally clicked out, dived still two-thirds reluctant into the stifling tunnel of tobacco fumes and plush. From half-past five, for half an hour before the first showing, the entrance curtain never settled down into stillness; at half-past eight another rush began.

William Stickford’s afternoon at the Bank went by distractedly. He was intelligent, solitary, self-educated, self-suspicious; he had read, without system, enough to trouble him endlessly; text-books picked up at random, popular translations, fortnightly publications (scientific and so on) complete in so many parts, potted history and philosophy — philosophy all the time. On walks alone or lying awake in the dark he would speculate as to the nature of reality. ‘What am I — but am I? If I am, what else is? If I’m not, is anything else? Is anything …’ He would start awake, sweating, from a nightmare of something that felt like an empty barrel rolling over the ups and downs in his brain and bumping into craters that were the craters of the moon, or of going round to the house where he lived to pay a surprise call on himself and being sent away with a head-shake, told point-blank he had never been heard of here. Sometimes – an idle but anguishing sport of the mind – he told himself he was the victim of some practical joke on the scale of the universe of which everybody and everything, from the stars and the Manager to the pipe-cleaners, tooth-soap and bootlaces fringing his existence, were linked in furtive enjoyment.

He never ‘went with a girl’; his landlady deplored this; to do so, she said, would make him more natural-like. She liked a young fellow to be a young fellow, and William apparently wasn’t. His Manager, a kind unperceptive old man who believed in the personal touch, asked him up for a musical evening to meet his nieces, but William achieved being shy and aggressive, looked askance round the side of his glasses, snubbed the nieces and couldn’t relax with the Manager. The girls discouraged their uncle from asking him home again. A fellow at the Bank called Jim Bartlett succeeded in knowing him up to a point; he couldn’t get Jim quite into focus but he supposed he liked him all right. Jim would force his way in of an evening, paw his books with a snigger of admiration and sit with his feet on the fender and the soles of his boots steaming till twelve o’clock, till one’s brain went stiff and dry Theoretically, William needn’t have listened, but he did listen; other existences tugged at him with their awful never-dismissable, never-disposable of possibility, probability even. Sometimes Jim forced him out. William was cinema-shy, he resisted the cinema till a man with important-looking initials mentioned it in a weekly review as an ‘art-form’; then he went there with Jim and saw Mabelle. ‘I can’t think,’ Jim had said, that first evening, impatiently gathering up his change at the box-office, ‘how a lot of this girl’s stuff ever gets past the censor.’ William expected Mabelle’s appeal to be erotic and went in armoured with intellectuality, but it was not erotic – that he could see.

The film had begun; with a startled feeling he had walked down the tilted gangway towards Mabelle’s face and the dark-and-light glittering leaves behind. A caption: ‘Can’t you believe me?’ then a close-up: Mabelle’s face jumped forward at him, he stepped back on to Jim’s toe and stared at a moon-shaped white light in an eye, expecting to see himself reflected. He stood for a moment, feeling embraced in her vision. ‘Confound you!’ said Jim and pushed him sharp to the left. They waded through to their places; William sat down, shaken, and put up a hand to his eyes. ‘It’s beastly jumpy,’ he said, ‘I always heard they were jumpy.’

‘You get used to them – Gosh, what a lovely girl, isn’t she? – Look at that, old man, look at that for a figure!’

It had been all very abstract, he recognized in it some hinterland of his brain. He understood that passion and purity, courage, deception and lust were being depicted and sat there without curiosity, watching Mabelle. That was some five months ago, before her death; she had long been known to the connoisseur, but her real vogue was only then beginning. She had an unusual way with her, qualities overlapped strangely; in that black-and-white world of abstractions she alone moved in a blur. Each movement, in unexpected relation to movements preceding it, outraged a preconception. William sat with an angry, disordered feeling as though she were a rising flood and his mind bulrushes. She had a slow, almost diffident precision of movement; she got up, sat down, put out a hand, smiled, with a sparklingly mournful air of finality, as though she were committing herself, and every time William wanted to rise in his seat and say ‘Don’t, don’t – not before all these people!’ Her under lids were straight, she would lean back her head and look over them. Her upper lids arched to a point, she had three-cornered eyes; when her face went into repose the lids came down slowly, hiding her eyes for moments together. When she looked up again that dark, dancing, direct look came out as it were from hiding, taking one unawares. It was as though she leaned forward and touched one.

William, who suffered throughout from a feeling of being detained where he had no business, was glad when the film was over. He said on the way home, ‘She’s awfully different from what I expected, I must say.’ Jim Bartlett responded ‘Aha?’ He kept saying ‘Aha!’ with an infinite archness and refusing to volunteer much about Mabelle himself. ‘She’s got temperament,’ was the most William got out of him. ‘You know what I mean; temperament. Jolly rare thing. She ought to play Irish Storm in The Green Hat.’ That night it was William who wanted to bring Jim in and keep him talking. Not that Jim’s ineptitudes were any more tolerable, but he had a feeling of someone at home in him, in possession, very assured in the darkness, mutely and sardonically waiting till he was alone.

A week or so later he saw in the local paper that The Fall, featuring Mabelle, was showing at Belton, ten miles off. Eluding Jim, he bicycled that same evening over to Belton. He pedalled furiously, mounting the steep sleek high-road over the ridge, his brain a cold clamour of self-curiosity. Enlightened shamefully, burning, he bicycled home in the teeth of an icy wind. Next morning, cornered by Jim’s too pressing inquiries, he lied as to where he had been. It had been Jim’s fault, he shouldn’t have asked him.

Thought, as he understood thought, became pale and meaningless, reading scarcely more than a titillation of the eye-balls. Lapses appeared in his work. He was submerged by uneasiness, alternately, as it were, straining after a foot-fall and slamming a door.

There was this thing about Mabelle: the way she made love. She was tired, oh fearfully tired. Her forehead dropped down on the man’s shoulder, her body went slack; there seemed no more hope for her than for a tree in a hurricane. When her head fell back in despair, while the man devoured her face horribly, one watched her forgotten arm hang down over his shoulder: the tips of the fingers twitched. What was she thinking about, what did women think about – then?

One night Jim Bartlett, routing about among William’s possessions, pulled out the Picturegoer from between some books and the wall. On the cover Mabelle, full length, stood looking sideways, surprised and ironical, elegantly choked by a hunting-stock, hair ruffled up as though she had just pulled a hat off, hand holding bunched-up gauntlets propped on a hip. Jim, shocked into impassivity, stared at the photograph. His pipe sticking out at an angle from his expressionless face reminded William of a pipe stuck into a snowman.

‘Pretty photograph, isn’t it?’ said William aggressively, to shatter the bulging silence.

Jim removed his pipe thoughtfully. ‘Upon my word,’ he began, ‘upon my word! You really are you know. I mean really, old man —’

‘I got it for you, as a matter of fact. If you hadn’t gone messing about I’d have —’

‘Oo-hoo,’ said Jim, ‘we don’t think. No, don’t think —’

‘Then don’t think. And damn you, get out!’

They were always very polite to each other at the Bank; there was little coarse talk or swearing. Jim Bartlett was very much shocked and went home. Next morning William apologized. ‘Say nothing more about it, old man,’ said Jim nicely. ‘I quite understand. Beg yours, I’m sure. If I’d had any idea you were going to take it like that —’ Good-feeling made him perfectly goggle-eyed. He came round punctually that same evening to hear all about it. William was out; he remained out till half-past eleven. He did this three evenings successively, avoiding Jim at the Bank, and after that Jim didn’t come any more.

If William had been open and manly about the business, as pal to pal, Jim Bartlett would have been discretion itself. As it was, in the course of events, he told all the other fellows. They told the Manager’s nieces, who told the Manager: the Manager soon had occasion to speak to William seriously about work and excessive cinema-going. This concentration of interest upon him, of derision, hardened him outwardly, heightened his sensibility. He avoided the ‘Bijou’ at Pamsleigh, the ‘Electra’ at Belton, but took excursion tickets to London and saw Mabelle there. Expeditions to the remoter suburbs were often necessary, he would sup or take tea dazedly in gas-lit pastry-cooks’ and wander between showings of the film through anonymous vacant streets. Life all these months rushed by him while he stood still.

William never looked at his newspaper before lunchtime; others did. One morning, coming to the Bank he was aware of a tension, of a scared shy greediness in the others’ faces, of being glanced at and glanced across. Jim Bartlett came up once or twice, looked strangely, flinched off, cleared his throat and kept on beginning – ‘I say …’

‘What’s up?’ snapped out William, exasperated by what seemed a new form of persecution.

‘Nothing much – seen the paper?’

‘No.’

Jim Bartlett, driven and urgent, fidgeted round in a semi-circle under the blank and intense glare of William’s glasses. ‘There’s something – look, come home to dinner.’

‘Oh, thanks, I don’t think so,’ said William in the consequential sleek little voice he’d assumed. Jim tugged at the lobe of a crimson ear helplessly, shrugged a ‘So be it, then’, and went off.

In his sitting-room, the Daily Mail was propped against William’s water-jug. Mabelle’s name blazed put over the centre column, with ‘Fearful Death’. With a sudden stillness, with a feeling of awful, extended leisure, William put out his hand for the paper. While he read he kept putting his hand up and touching his throat. Each time he did this he started as thought he had touched someone else, or someone else had touched him. He read carefully down to the end of the column, looked over the top of the paper and saw his chop slowly congealing behind it. He ran from the room and was violently sick. When this was over he took up the paper again, but he couldn’t read well, the lines bulged and dipped. He waited a little to see if he was going to be sick any more, then went out and bought all the other papers. Coming out of the newsagent’s he met the wind tearing down the street. He stood on the kerbstone, not knowing which way to go; the wind got into the papers and rattled and sang in them; they gave out an inconceivable volume of sound to which he believed the whole town must turn round and listen. He looked this way and that, then pressing the papers against him ran across the street and went into the church. Here he read all the other versions. Physical detail abounded. He sat for a long time crushed up to a wall in the gloom of a pew, then went back to the Bank.

Five weeks later, The White Rider featuring Mabelle Pacey came to Pamsleigh. ‘Going?’ said Jim to William, who seemed to have ‘got over things’ wonderfully well. ‘Oh, I dunno,’ said William, ‘I’ve some work on at home’ (he was doing one of those correspondence courses), ‘I don’t know that I’ve got time.’

On Monday and Tuesday he did not go to the Picturedrome; he disappeared utterly, no one knew where he had gone. The last day of Mabelle was Wednesday; Wednesday came.

The afternoon at the Bank went by, then, distractedly. Rain fell past the tall windows blurring the outlook, the trickle and stutter of drops racked the nerves. With dread, William looked up at the clock again and again, uneager as never before for release, half hoping by some resolution, some obduracy, to staunch the bleeding-away of the minutes. The door to the back passage was open for some minutes; William kept looking away from it, and while he was looking away Mabelle stood there, leaning a shoulder against the lintel, smiling and swinging a gauntlet. She was confident he would be there tonight. He faced round to the empty doorway. Mightn’t she as well be there who wasn’t anywhere? Who was not. She was incapable now of confidence, of a smile, of pressure against a lintel. He had faced for these last weeks her absolute dissolution. At that reiteration, in his mind and the doorway, of emptiness, he must have made some movement or sound, for the others looked up from their ledgers. William coughed and showed himself as in some agony of calculation; the faces dropped. The afternoon dwindled out, the office shrank in the dusk and began to be crowded with shadows. Somebody climbed on a chair with a taper; the gas coughed alight and the rain sliding and streaming down the window-panes scintillated against the thickening night. Woven securely into the room’s industrious pattern William rested, but now the pattern was torn up violently into shreds of clamour and movement. They all went home. William lingered over his ledger a long time, but was finally drawn out after them.

At ten past eight he was pushing against the ‘Bijou’s’ interior curtain. Its voluminousness, a world of plush, for some moments quenched and smothered him; a prickly contact to hands and face, exhaling a warm dankness. The attendant fought him out of it, taking away his ticket. ‘Standing room only! —’ he grudged her her little triumph, he had been told that outside. He chose a place along the transverse gangway and gripped with hands still pricking from the plush a cold brass rail behind the expensive seats.

He looked down a long perspective, a flickering arcade of shadow. For twenty seconds or so there was no one – the trees’ fretful movements, the dazzlingly white breaking-through of the sky. The orchestra wound off their tune with a flourish and sharply, more noticeably, were silent down in their red-lighted pit. The flutter and click of machinery streamed out across the theatre, like the terrified wings of a bird imprisoned between two window-panes – it gave him the same stretched sensation of horror and helplessness. A foreign whiteness, a figure, more than a figure, appeared; a white-coated girl on a white horse drawn sideways across the distant end of the drive. She listened, all tense, to that same urgent flutter and clicking, then wheeled the horse round and dashed forward into the audience, shadows streaming over her. William recoiled from the horse’s great hammer-head, the hoofs dangerous as bells, the flick of the eyeballs. He looked up with a wrench at his being; advancing enormously, grinning a little at the moment’s intensity, Mabelle looked down. They encountered. Visibly thundering, horse and rider darkened the screen.

Gripping the bar tight, William leaned back to look up at the bright, broadening shaft from the engine-room directed forward above him. Along this, fluid with her personality, Mabelle (who was now nothing) streamed out from reel to screen, thence rebounded to his perception. It was all, her intense aliveness, some quivering motes which a hand put out with intention would be able to intercept. The picture changed focus, receded; Mabelle, in better perspective, slipped from her horse and stood panting and listening; the horse turned its head, listened too. Their sympathy, their physical fineness, sent a quiver across the audience. In protest, a burst of assertion, the music began again. ‘Tum – tirumti tum – turum ti too, rum ti too —’ Mabelle tied her horse to a tree and turned off cautiously into the forest.

The man was there, in a glade, that man she generally acted with, whom one had a dozen times watched her make herself over to, her recurring lover. He stood with his back to a tree, with a grin as of certainty, waiting for her. However much he might repel at the outset, however craven, false or overtly lustful he might show himself, he had her ultimately, he had to have her, every film. She liked her men fallible (evidently); unsympathetic to audiences, subject to untimely spasms of passion. It brought out all her coolness, her lovely desperation, her debonair fatedness. Her producer kept this well in mind. With unavailing wariness she now came stepping with her white-breeched legs, the light glancing off her riding-boots, high over the fallen trees, low under the overhanging branches. Shadow struck off her head again and again. The man smiled, threw his cigarette away, stepped round his tree and closed with her … A poignant leap-back, one was shown the white horse standing, tormented by intuition, tossing its head uneasily, twitching its ears.

William had come late, the end was sooner than he expected. Mabelle in a black straight dress, in meekness and solitude, stood by a high stone mantel looking into a fire. The preceding caption was red, the light now tinged with a realistic redness. Flames, in leisurely anticipation of their triumph, spurted and leapt at her feet; the firelight fingered its way up her, crept round her arms’ fine moulding, her throat, her chin, with curbed greed, assurance, affection almost. She stood there – to the eyes of that four-years later audience – dedicated. It was as though the fire knew … A log crashed in, she started, looked with appalled eyes away from the fire. She was waiting.

Oh, Mabelle … She was too real, standing there, while more and more of her came travelling down the air. She seemed perpetual, untouchable. You couldn’t break that stillness by the fire; it could shatter time. You might destroy the film, destroy the screen, destroy her body; this endured. She was beyond the compass of one’s mind; one’s being seemed a fragment and a shadow. Perished, dissolved in an agony too fearful to contemplate (yet he had contemplated it, sucked meaning out till fact had nothing more to give), she returned to this, to this imperishable quietness. Oh, Mabelle …’

Somewhere a door opening, light that lanced the darkness. Movement went through her like the swerve of a flame. She held her arms out, the illusion shattered, she was subject once again to destiny. William sharply turned with tight-shut eyes. He groped his way along the guiding bar, was at fault a moment, collided with the attendant looping back the curtain for the exodus. He went out slowly, into the glaring vestibule, down the three steps into the lit-up, falling rain. Rain brushed his face, drops here and there came through to the roots of his hair. He put his hat on; heard the drops, defeated, pattering on the brim.

The street, unreal as that projected scene, was wide; he hesitated half way across it, then slowly turned to the left. Behind, inside the open doors, he heard as it were a wave break, a crash of freed movement, a rasping sigh. The band played the National Anthem. Feasted with her they all came streaming out, and she, released from their attention, dismissed, dispelled now – where was she?

His way home was at an angle from the High Street, up a by-path. Water in the steep gutters hissed and gurgled. There were spaces of inky darkness, here and there some lamplight dimly caught a patch of humid wall. He looked back, once, towards the town and the Picturedrome. One moment ‘Mabelle’ was blazing emerald over the white façade; the next the lights were out, ‘Mabelle’, the doors beneath, had disappeared. So she went. In another month or so, when her horror faded and her vogue had died, her films would be recalled – boiled down, they said. He had heard old films were used for patent leather; that which was Mabelle would be a shoe, a bag, a belt round some woman’s middle. These sloughed off, what of her? ‘You’re here,’ he said, and put out a hand in the darkness. ‘You know I know you’re here, you proud thing! Standing and looking. Do you see me? … You’re more here than I …’

Going blindly, he passed within inches of a pair of lovers, plastered together speechlessly under the wall. A too urgent pressure had betrayed them by the creak of a mackintosh. Love! His exaltation shuddered at the thought of such a contact. Then for a moment under the blight of that dismal embrace, he had lost her. Mabelle … Mabelle? Ah, here …’

Here, by him, burning into him with her actuality all the time. Burdening him with her realness. He paused again where a bicycle with lighted lamp had been leant up against some palings. The murky dark-yellow light streamed across the rain; some ghostly chrysanthemums drained of their pinks and yellows raised up their heads in a clump in it, petals dishevelled and sodden. As he watched, one stem with its burden detached itself and swayed forward, dipped through the lamplight and vanished. He listened and heard the stem snap. How – why – while the other stems stood up erect and unmoving, sustaining their burden? Who had —?

Oh no, not that! He began to be terrified. ‘Don’t press me too hard, I can’t stand it. I love you too much. Mabelle, look here – don’t!’ He looked beyond the chrysanthemums, left and right, everywhere. She was there, left, right, everywhere, printed on darkness.

William, at home in his sitting-room, walked about in a state of suspension, looking, without connection of thought, at his books and pictures. A clock struck twelve, it was already tomorrow. This morning he’d be at the Bank, back again in the everyday, no one the wiser. Now he could sleep a short time, then life, that abstraction behind the business of living, was due to begin again. He was alive, enclosed in a body, in the needs of the body; tethered to functions. In the gaslight it looked rather shabby, this business of living. Greasy stains on the tablecloth where he’d slopped his dinner over the edge of his plate, greasy rim round the inside of his hat where he’d sweated. This was how one impressed oneself on the material. And on the immaterial? – Nothing. Comfortless, perilous, more perishable than the brains in his skull even, showed his structure of thought. He had no power of being.

Of feeling? Only that life was worth nothing because of Mabelle who was dead. And by death, had he hope that he wouldn’t quench himself utterly while Mabelle, who impinged herself everywhere, brightly burned on?

The right-hand top drawer of his bureau was empty of what such a drawer should contain: the means to the only fit gesture that he could have offered her. He had jerked the drawer open with an unconscious parade of decision, an imitation, more piteously faithful than he was aware, of something which, witnessed again and again under the spell of that constant effusion from Mabelle, had seemed conclusively splendid. The hand slipped, unfaltering into the back of the drawer, the gesture of pistol to temple, the trail of smoke fugitive over an empty screen …’

He was denied this exit. Under the stare, vaguely mocking, of three-cornered eyes he bent down to study the note-books, the bitten pencil-stump, match-ends, attempt at a sonnet, a tie, crumpled up and forgotten, that littered the drawer.

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Host Commentary

 

 

As I mentioned at the start of this episode, film and film stars were new concepts when Elizabeth Bowen was writing this story. And she certainly did not have the phrase “parasocial relationship” in her lexicon – although this idea is older than you might have thought, more on this in a minute – but she describes the all-consuming obsession William develops for Mabelle, whom he doesn’t know in any sort of real-life way, perfectly.

So while to us, in 2025, this may feel like a rather quiet piece about times gone by, then Bowen was, in a very real sense, writing a piece of horror science fiction – it’s just that the science she was exploring was more psychological and social than shiny spaceships.

I’m fairly sure that I heard the phrase “parasocial relationship” for the first time only a handful of years ago – and I suspect I’m not entirely alone among people who haven’t worked in the field of psychology – but the term was first formally described in relation to media figures in 1956. It became relevant then, of course, as media exposure grew ever greater and new teenagers pulled away from their parents’ more conservative experiences of growing up. But it wasn’t a wholly new idea even in the 1950s, or indeed even in the 1920s when Bowen was writing. Humans have always developed these kinds of unbalanced relationships with rulers, political figures… spirits… gods.

Just… sit with that thought for a moment.

Gods.

Begging the forgiveness of any listener with devout religious beliefs at this point, it’s my opinion that no god created humans.

No, humans create gods. And once upon a time gods were purely phantasmic beings. It didn’t matter what stories we told, what we said they had or hadn’t done, because they weren’t about to turn up to tell us otherwise, they couldn’t be hurt and they certainly couldn’t die. Gods aren’t fallible. They can’t let us down.

The trouble is… then we invented media. And then, social media. And now, I fear that it’s all too easy to, without really thinking about what we’re doing, give regular human beings who just happen to be very good at something – making music, acting, telling stories – god-like status.

And they do let us down. They do leave us. They can’t not. In this story, of course, Mabelle dies. We don’t learn how, and that in itself is an interesting choice on Bowen’s part – I suspect intentional, to preserve the mystery, the distance, between William and the star he’s come to idolise – but these days it’s just as likely to be something less drastic than death. Whatever, the grief of the loss can be very real, and very painful.

Yes, our idols let us down. Because they aren’t gods, they’re human beings. If I’ve learned anything in the last year it’s to remember this, to remember it hard and keep remembering it. That face? That name? There’s a human being behind all that. A flawed one, because all humans are flawed. Hold onto that truth, and perhaps it will be a little less horrifying if, when, those flaws become visible.

And…

This story doesn’t really go into the other side of this – what happens in the mind of the single person projected twenty feet tall – mostly because it’s William’s story, but also because how could Bowen possibly have imagined the way social media would connect fans and stars? No one could foresee that. But I think it would be remiss of me, in this year of 2025, not to mention it.

I fear it’s incredibly hard to keep the idea that there are thousands, millions of people looking up to you reconciled with the idea that every single one of those people is a person. A real person with a life of their own, with a family, a job, dreams. I fear it’s all too easy to start telling yourself those people are replaceable, disposable, not important, not even really real. And if that’s true, it doesn’t matter what you do, does it? It doesn’t matter what lies you tell. How disdainful you are. What harm you cause. Those not-really-real people can’t affect you.

To start thinking of people as “just”. Just fans, just the public, just employees…

It’s very bad in both directions. And we’ve all been warned not to think like this – not to idolise, not to dismiss, not to objectify – and yet I suspect we’re all guilty of sometimes slipping into it in small yet dangerous ways.

The superpower of humans, if only we can remember to use it, is empathy. Everyone is a person, messy, complicated, full of murky greys and, yes, capable of growing and changing. Remind yourself of it often. Hold it in your heart. Cherish it.

Here’s to a peaceful 2025, everyone.

And finally, PseudoPod, and social worker and academic Brené Brown, know….

“You cannot break the connection between human beings.”

Don’t forget. See you soon, folks, take care, stay safe.