April 14, 2023 • 27 mins
Poets have been writing about the madness of love for thousands of years. We love to be in it; we hate to be without it. But what if this wasn’t just hyperbole, and there is something indeed bigger happening to a brain in love? Where does love and madness meet? And, perhaps, where does one end, and another begin?
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Richard Renaissent returned home from a funeral only to find
no less than eight anxious young couples waiting to see him.
Many had ventured the short mile over a newly constructed
toll road between England and Scotland, gunning for the tiny
town of Gretna Green as their final destination. They had
all heard about him. In fact, Richard was somewhat famous,
(00:26):
a gregarious tall tale teller and yarn spinner who had
been at his post for decades. He moved here to
do an important job, and a pretty infamous one at that.
Richard came to Gretna Green, Scotland in nineteen thirty six
after hearing about a very special job vacancy. A saddler
by trade, he took up a post as the town's
residence Annville Priest, a title and distinction entirely specific to
(00:50):
this small slice of the world. All of these young
couples were here to get married, and Richard was going
to be the one to officiate. They had traveled over
the border to see him, many of them in secrets,
and many quickly. This was often the nature of his work.
To many, he was a hero. To others, he and
those who came before him were a walking, talking loophole
(01:11):
that defied the sanctity of marriage and was a thorn
in the Church of England's side. The Marriage Duty Act
sixteen ninety five put a stop to the marriages of
small parish churches that were conducted by local clergy without
the proper marriage licensing. A legal loophole was found, though,
and the clergy are those who said they were clergy
realized they couldn't be prosecuted for shotgun weddings should they
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take place on the grounds of Fleet Prison, and over
the years these amounted to the thousands. A whole cottage
industry popped up, and the Church became horrified at the
potential erosion of personal morals and the country's social fabric.
These marriages often were without licenses or public announcements, performed
under the radar on the sly and on the Chief.
(01:57):
So in seventeen fifty three passed a law popularly known
as Lord Hardwick's Marriage Act, or by its longer legal name,
an Act for the Better Prevention of clandestine marriages. With
the Act, Lord Chancellor Hardwick declared that marriages within the
walls of the Anglican Church would now be marriage's only
legal form in England and Wales. Essentially, to be legally
(02:21):
recognized as wed, unless you were Quaker or Jewish, that is,
a couple had to do so before the eyes of
an Anglican clergyman. Scotland, though, was not included on this list.
In fact, for all of England's recent stringency, Scotland had
very lax laws around these things. Girls had to be
older than twelve and boys older than fourteen, but no
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parental blessing was necessary. Enter Richard. Because the village blacksmith
was historically one of the respected trades in the community,
it made sense that these young couples would seek him
out as their stand in priest. A tradition was born,
and he was number four. Richard met with young lovers
who came by and night to carry out and consummate
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their affairs of the heart. All he needed from them
was to be of age and have two witnesses to
their union. His ceremonies were simple, quick, a few words
exchanged and the bang of a hammer clinging loudly to
make it all official. He would then pronounce them man
and wife before sending them on their way. By the
time the laws changed. In nineteen forty, he had conducted
over five thousand marriages. That's an average of three hundred
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and fifty seven marriages per year. But as evidenced on
his arrival home from his friend's funeral that day, some
seasons were busier than others. All in all, tens of
thousands of couples have been married here and continue to
flock to Gretna Green for the same reason. Today. We
do a lot of things in the name of love.
We put ourselves out there. We take chances and were
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asked to endure great tests of faith and courage, and
hopefully it's worth it. What's also true, though, is that
love has a dark side, because where there's light, there's
always shadow. Across the ages or as long as we've
loved and lost, we've had to sit with the darkness
that love can bring. And for as long as we
have been trying to figure out how to cure what
(04:08):
ails us and cure what's within us, we have been
trying to understand what love does not just do for us,
but to us. Yes, love can heal, but it can
also be deadly. I'm Aaron Manky, and welcome to bedside Manners.
(04:31):
Every species has the biological imperative to procreate. Humans have
been working on that project for a very long time,
but we don't necessarily have a sound biological reason for
why we fall in love. Now, some researchers believe that
it's just a trick of our nervous system. The flooding
of our brains with feel good chemicals might indeed urge
us toward mixing up our genetic material with someoneman creating
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an offspring. But the flip side of this assumption is
that we also know that not every pairing that ex
experiences love has the ability to create new life. So
if it's not something distinctly biological, what is love and
where does it come from? Great minds across the ages
have been asking this very question. We find authors pining
after love in ancient Sumerian proverbs and the pain of
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love mentioned in the Bible. Sappho, the famous mysterious poet
from the seventh century, left remnants of some of the
earliest musings on heartache. It seems that we have always
loved what we couldn't have for one reason or another.
These writings speak of pain that is talked about in emotional, physical,
and spiritual ways all along the way. Over the course
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of this cultural evolution of thousands of years, one thing
hasn't changed, the idea that love and love sickness are afflictions.
The direct correlation between passionate love and deep personal disturbance
has been noted for thousands of years. Our friend Galen
left behind the story of a woman who was tossing
and turning and losing sleep with each passing night. When
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Galen visited her, she was reticent. She told him that
she was ill, but was reluctant to go into many details.
After spending some time with her, he decided that she
was suffering from a standard class of melancholy. When a
friend came to visit and mentioned that they had just
seen a performance by a particular dancer, the woman came alive.
At this point, Galen took her wrist between his fingers
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to feel her pulse. It had become irregular and she
had become flushed. But though these are very physical symptoms,
he was led to believe that the root of her
issues weren't just physical, but emotional. Her mind was disturbed.
Galen concluded that this woman was melancholic, not just because
her humors were out of balance, but due to the
affliction of affection. The real origin of her illness, he believed,
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was an offset of melancholy, called specifically love melancholy. Melancholia
and love sickness both originated from excessive black bile, Galen believed,
but love sickness was its own kind of psychological disturbance,
then already required the correct treatment protocol. Others saw it
as its own illness. The various texts on the subject
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describe an array of symptoms sadness, insomnia, hollow eyes, disturbances
in the pulse, mental anxiety, dejection, despondency, and physical debility.
But they all wonder how does one treat a love
sick patient. Over the years, physicians would go on to
prescribe everything from blood letting, foreskin clamping, burning a woman's
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thighs with acid inhaling the burned feces of a beloved,
and therapeutic intercourse. Of course, the terminology and treatments for
love sickness have evolved across time and place. Today, the
contemporary field of psychopathology, the study of abnormal cognition, behavior
and experiences, has broken apart the symptoms of ancients and
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focused on behavior combinations particular to someone in the throes
of what we might call love sickness, obsession, infatuation, emotional instability,
and emotional dependency. The idea that love is madness with
big air quotes there has never been shaken from our
collective consciousness. In fact, love sickness was a valid diagnosis
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by medical practitioners for almost two thousand years. In recent times,
as the field of psychiatry has gained momentum, researchers have
been trying to parse apart where love ends and madness begins.
Researchers want to know what is normal and abnormal in love,
if love chemically makes our brain do abnormal things, and
how do we know when the scales have tipped too far.
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The story we have for you today will leave you
thinking about all of these things. It's a story that's
been told for almost a century as a love story,
but as you'll see, it's something much deeper, much darker,
and much more sinister. Yes, it's true that perhaps love
did live here within this narrative frame, but so too
did obsession, destruction, and death. First of all, I want
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you to remember Elena Miagre Dahias for who she was
in life. She was a vibrant young woman who was
part of a tight knit Cuban American clan, with her parents, sisters, aunties,
all living in Key West, Florida. It was said that
Elena had a lovely singing voice, enjoyed dancing with her girlfriends,
going to school, praying at church, keeping a diary, and
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occupying herself with the concerns of the average teenage girl.
When she and her friends began courting, it was only
fitting that she dreamt of finding a lasting love, and
at sixteen, she thought she found one in the person
who would become her husband, a local boy named Louise.
They got married and moved in with his family, but
she was love sick. She became pregnant and then she
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began to cough. She wished for someone to care for her,
but Louise wasn't up to the task. When she lost
the baby, he left her. Elena was always described as
exceptionally beautiful, all raven hair and dark eyes, but there
was nothing about her life that ever made her feel
that she was exceptional or destined for fame, and indeed,
the stories we tell about Elena most often start not
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with the contours of her life but with her corpse.
And it's here that I implore you not to remember
her as a specter, or as storytellers would later call her,
an it, but as a very real, very animated woman
whose body and story have been taken from her in death.
Our story today opens in a hospital with Elena very
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much alive. In April of nineteen thirty, twenty one year
old Elena went to the local marine hospital for X
rays and blood samples. Her cough had only been worsening
in recent days, and it was time that she was
seen by a specialist. Many of us don't recognize important
life moments for what they are. Elena was no different.
But the man on the other side of the X
ray machine knew that upon seeing Elena, his prayers had
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come to pass and his life would never be the same.
Count Karl von Kosel, the assumed name of Karl Tansler,
had been chasing his visions for almost five decades. As
a teenager, he claimed to have been visited by his
dead aunt, who revealed to him the face of his
future wife. This charted a course that would take him
across countries and continents, acquiring fake medical degrees and licenses,
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and growing delusions. As he sought the fulfillment of this
ghostly promise, he looked for her everywhere. Carl claimed to
have seen a vision of his future wife for a
second time at a graveyard in Spain. The third time
he saw the face of this woman, he later said,
was when Elena walked into his exam room. Their worlds
had collided, Elena and Carl's, and there was no turning back.
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Though he was a Charlatan and a confabulist, he was
undeniably brilliant. Carl was something of a mad scientist, harboring
a long obsession with matters of electricity, radio waves, and
other feats of engineering, including the repair of a wingless
airplane that he kept on the hospital grounds. He was
as dapper as he was eccentric, a true Key West
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character that had become known on the island for his
strange ways, and he seemed harmless enough ignosed to Lena
with a case of tuberculosis, a sickness that had wiped
out a quarter of Europe's population in the prior century.
It's one of the world's oldest known illnesses and continued
to kill more people than any other disease in industrialized
countries through the early twentieth century, it remained extremely fatal,
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something that Elena, her family, and Carl were well aware of.
He committed himself then and there to saving this young woman.
But beyond this being an act of benevolence or dutiful
adherence to a hippocratic oath that he had never taken,
because remember, he was no real doctor, this commitment was
the first moment in an instant in long lasting obsession. Elena,
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for her part, naturally wanted to live. Medicine is supposed
to help us stave off death, and if she had
to hang around a strange, bespeckled man three decades her
senior to have a good shot at it, she was
going to do it. He seemed grandfatherly to her, a
concerned scholar, even if he did give her the creeps.
So he tried everything electricity cures and gold cures, tonics
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and radiation. He saw her at the hospital, but he
also started to visit her at her family's home. Desperate
for answers, they let this man come knocking at all hours.
That is, of course, until he crossed the line. He
began proposing marriage to Elena, who initially laughed it off,
but he kept trying, and her admonishments became stronger. But
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he wouldn't take no for an answer. He begged, he pleaded,
and Elena still refused. Although her husband had long run off,
there was no way that she could marry this man,
and as the records show, Carl was still married too,
but he had no scruples where matters of the heart
were concerned. Carl's behavior earned him the ire of the family,
but they were torn for they, or at least some
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of them, believed that with his undivided attention, he could
save their beloved Elena. His diaries, which he later published,
paint the portrait of a man obsessed with possession. He
lived in a strange alternate reality, entirely of his own
design and imitation version of the real world, where lines
of fact and fiction are blurred. It's hard to know
what he believed to be true and what he wished
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to be true. Elena became sicker and sicker, though her
family became angry with and scared of, Carl, eventually moving
houses and not leaving a note for him, But he
still managed to find them through a loose lip neighbor
and Sensing that the family was emotionally and spiritually exhausted,
he made his move. He installed himself at Elena's bedside,
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just like a leech that promised to cure but instead
bled its host to death. The disease finally took Elena
in October of nineteen thirty one. It said that she
died tired and angry, refusing to let her family call
for their doctor. She had had enough of him and
his lecherous advances. If death is an end, our story
would stop there. But Elena's demise was just the beginning
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of a much longer, far stranger, and more twisted chapter
than she had ever experienced in life. Elena's death couldn't
dissuade Carl van Kozel. In fact, it only encouraged him.
When word arrived at his lab via her brother in law,
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Carl sprang to action. When he finally made it to
her family's home, he immediately tried to electrocute her back
to life. He wrote in his memoir that this was
what many, perhaps most people, would call the end, but
a strange kind of new life now began for me.
Even though she was gone and her family was deep
in mourning, Carl conned his way into their home. He
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offered to pay rent. They relented, so he moved into
Elena's room and into her now cold bed. Our phony
Counts also talked her family into allowing him to construct
a beautiful stone moss soleum for their daughter, something much
grander than they could ever have afforded themselves. They agreed,
and were justly horrified when it was revealed that he
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had engraved both her name and his name on it.
He visited her every night at sunset, a long and
limber shadow, skulking through the graveyard. He would unlock the
three locks he had installed on the door, go inside,
and sit with her. He spoke of undoing the locks
of the heavy casket and listening to Elena speak with
him from her inner coffin. He wrote of hearing Elena
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singing for him, and one night she finally asked him
to take her home. Carl, who once claimed to have
died and come back himself, believed death was truly only
a state of suspended animation. So it's here that we
now find him, supposedly under the direction of Elena, carting
her body out of the graveyard in a child's wagon.
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He later claimed that this moment was nothing short of
their great divine wedding March. That night, he brought Elena's
corpse to his cottage and began to work on engineering
her resurrection. Over time, he tried all different things. He
soaked her body in tubs of chemicals, hoping her cells
would saturate and she would waken. He waited her, apped her,
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He injected her with vitamins, and he took cultures from
her body for his microscope. And when her skin began
to fall off, he replaced it with silk. When her
eyes putrified, he replaced those two. He sealed her leaking
orifices with wax. He excavated larva and sprayed her with perfume.
He dressed her in a wedding gown and brought her
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to bed. Karl thought that he was working in secrets,
but rumors spread. People saw him frequently hauling chemical solvents, deodorizers,
reams of silk, and gauze to his home. He was
a scientist and inventored, though, so who could say what
he was up to. It was later rumored that late
at night, neighbors would hear organ music wafting from the
windows with two bodies seeing joined in dance, and this
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went on for seven long years. One of Elena's sisters, Nana,
had heard the rumors. She didn't want them to be true,
but after a rash of break ins at the graveyard,
she insisted that Karl opened a Lena's coffin and show
her that her sister was all right. Carl refused, but
he did offer her something else. Carl brought Nana back
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to his cottage. He opened the door and led her inside.
He had dressed Elena and Jules and brought Nana over
to see her. According to his later writings, he was
proud to show how well he had taken care of
his beloved. Nana, though was horrified. She couldn't believe her eyes.
She thought that this had to be a doll. It
couldn't be true. Carl's account of what transpired in their
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bedside conversation is inconceivable at best. Nana, he claims, just
walked out and told him to put Elena back where
he found her. She has been under my care all
of these years, he said, to have shot back, I
have paid all of her expenses. You forgot that I
own the tomb and everything inside. He was subsequently arrested
on the charge of desecrating a grave and spent a
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night in jail. But since the statute of limitations had expired,
it had now been years since he had kidnapped Elena's body,
and because the court determined that he was saying and
mentally competent, he was free to go. As for Elena's corpse,
she was taken from the cottage. She was given a
second funeral, which amounted to an entirely different kind of spectacle.
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Almost seven thousand people lined up to take a look
at what was left of her. Then her body was
taken to a secret location and reburied, And for those
of you who are wondering, even to this day, that
location is still a mystery. But the Count refused to
go quietly. If he was going to get charged with
desecrating a grave, he might as well do it. The
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night he left town, Elena's mausoleum was blown up with
a time bomb. Today, the cracked edifice can still be
seen in Key West. Although she and the Count are
both long gone, whispers of his love and her loathing
are all that remain. The story of Elena and Count
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van Kozol has gone down over the years framed as
a macab love story, when in fact it is nothing
more than a nightmare. Elena was vehemently opposed to Van
Kozel's advances, and he took her silence by means of
her death as consent, and recently it's possible that an
even more sinister epilogue has been uncovered. The folks in
Key West claimed to have made a discovery in an
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old pulp detective magazine in which a journalist was able
to recover police records from the case. It was claimed
that during renovations of von Kozel's home, bottles of potions
and a confession note were uncovered, and in that note,
the writer appears to be confessing to murder. Putting two
and two together, one is left to wonder if the
count realized that if he couldn't cure and possess her
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in life, a fatal poisoning would help him secure her
in death. Of course, one should be skeptical of these
kinds of magazines. They look and tend to read like
a tabloid, and those police records that could have corroborated
any of these claims, it seems, have since been destroyed.
Historians believe the missing records might be due to the
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lack of predigital age storage space. If a case was
considered closed, well, no sense in keeping it around, right,
and the article it's been reported otherwise got all of
the facts right. The journalist who wrote it is long dead,
so there hasn't been a way forward to report on
the reporting. Regardless, the story continues to fascinate us. It
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is a very extreme example of what could be understood
as a deadly love sickness, love that has turned into
something far darker. The media talks about crimes of passion
and the lengths that people will go to in the
name of love, and now scientists have been able to
identify some really interesting and also alarming things that folks
have been alluding to for thousands of years. It seems
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that love takes a very physical toll on our bodies.
The shorthand term for aid to Katsubo cardiomyopathy is broken
heart syndrome. It presents similar to a heart attack, though
those who suffer from it tend to make complete and
full recoveries, and we're also able to see the effects
of love on neuroimaging of our brains. Scans light up
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much differently when looking at all the different kinds of love,
romantic love lighting up in the region that suggests personal
apprehension and social judgment might also be compromised. Scientists have
also suggested that they may have found an overlap between
obsessive compulsive disorder and romantic attraction. The term limerins was
coined to describe a set of all consuming psychological symptoms
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characterized by obsessive, intrusive thoughts about an object of affection.
We now know that this state isn't just psychologically based,
but neurologically as well, and it leaves us to wonder
if this is what we call love, Is it all
simply another affliction to be treated? How do we tease
apart what is harmful and keep the stuff that benefits us?
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And even more challenging than all of that, when those
things live together in the same cognitive stew how do
we tell them apart when we're deep in it? And
how can we save our solves? Love, of course, isn't
just something that happens to us. It's something that we
as humans do, and love doesn't have to be in
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grand gestures, As count Van Kozo believed, love comes in
small moments every day. If you stick around through this
brief sponsor break, my teammates Robin Miniter will tell you
a story about a love that was lost and then
found once more. The woman in the window was a
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mystery to so many. She largely kept to herself, a
specter and white, illuminated by the oil lamp's warm halo.
For years, Emily was her only company in her bedroom
on Main Street and Amherst, Massachusetts. Sequestered above and away
from the outside, she created rich landscapes of her own
inner world, and with ink she'd penned these internal geographies.
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She was a prolific writer, authoring hundreds of letters and
poems on bits and shreads and pieces of paper. Emily
was a dreamer, and she was a lover her word,
so accurately conveying what her heart was saying, but who
her heart and she, in turn was saying These things too,
has long been a source of controversy. Emily Dickinson only
published ten poems in her lifetime, and when she died
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in eighteen eighty six, she left behind a massive body
of deeply personal work, almost eighteen hundred poems and hundreds
of letters to be come through by her family, and
what they found was astounding for the sheer volume of
words left behind, but also for the contents of the pages.
It's believed that whoever took it upon themselves to handle
her work didn't want the world to see what she
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had written, or at least some of its key parts,
so began the crossing out of names and the extraction
of entire lines with a sharp blade. Whoever did this
thought it would make her work more palatable and more
saleable to the general public. After all, it would be
scandalous should the world know that Emily had carried on
a lifelong relationship with another woman, a woman who was
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not just her neighbor but her brother's wife. Some historians
believe that Emily's love was unjustly censored and sanitized in
the wake of her death, But in recent years, with
some good old fashioned detective work in the benefit of
modern technology, historians have been working to restore the larger
story of Emily and Susan's love and cement their story
in the larger cultural mythos around Emily Dickinson. In the
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nineteen nineties, scholar Martha Nell Smith got to work combing
over Emily's original work. She carefully studied the impressions on
the backs of the delicate aging pieces of paper, and
for the harder cases, she employed infrared technology to detect
any alterations made to the documents. Using computer, textures and
tones could be manipulated pixel by pixel restoring attempts at obliteration.
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Think of these tech detectives as restoration specialists, working painstakingly
to uncover what others have long thought to be lost
to our eyes. And it's in these letters that we
find Emily's love and longing for Susan written over the
arc of four decades. They lived somewhat parallel lives, side
by side in two separate, stately homes. Their relationships stretched
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back into their early twenties, and whether the intervening years
and everything they brought it since speculated that Emily had
other entanglements, but the affection shared between these two women
burned bright and lifelong. The exact shape of Emily and
Susan's love may never be known to the world, but
today we have a best guess at what it meant
to them. In a world where they could never be
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married nor recognize as domestic partners, they found a way,
Albeit it secretly to love and to be loved at
a time when marriage was less about affection and more
about social strategizing. For all of the heartache and the
obstacles that the years presented, Emily and Susan continued to
find their way back to each other, separated only by society,
scripts and a stone's throw. Grim and Mild Presents Bedside
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Manners was executive produced by Aaron Manky and narrated by
Aaron Mankie and Robin Miniter. Writing for this season was
provided by Robin Miniter, with research by Sam Alberty, Taylor
Haggerdorn and Robin Miniter. Production an assistance was provided by
Josh Thine, Jesse Funk, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. You
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can learn more about this show, the Grim and Mild team,
and all the other podcasts that we make over at
Grimm Mild dot com and, as always, thanks for listening.
Richard Renaissent returned home from a funeral only to find
no less than eight anxious young couples waiting to see him.
Many had ventured the short mile over a newly constructed
toll road between England and Scotland, gunning for the tiny
town of Gretna Green as their final destination. They had
all heard about him. In fact, Richard was somewhat famous,
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a gregarious tall tale teller and yarn spinner who had
been at his post for decades. He moved here to
do an important job, and a pretty infamous one at that.
Richard came to Gretna Green, Scotland in nineteen thirty six
after hearing about a very special job vacancy. A saddler
by trade, he took up a post as the town's
residence Annville Priest, a title and distinction entirely specific to
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this small slice of the world. All of these young
couples were here to get married, and Richard was going
to be the one to officiate. They had traveled over
the border to see him, many of them in secrets,
and many quickly. This was often the nature of his work.
To many, he was a hero. To others, he and
those who came before him were a walking, talking loophole
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that defied the sanctity of marriage and was a thorn
in the Church of England's side. The Marriage Duty Act
sixteen ninety five put a stop to the marriages of
small parish churches that were conducted by local clergy without
the proper marriage licensing. A legal loophole was found, though,
and the clergy are those who said they were clergy
realized they couldn't be prosecuted for shotgun weddings should they
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take place on the grounds of Fleet Prison, and over
the years these amounted to the thousands. A whole cottage
industry popped up, and the Church became horrified at the
potential erosion of personal morals and the country's social fabric.
These marriages often were without licenses or public announcements, performed
under the radar on the sly and on the Chief.
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So in seventeen fifty three passed a law popularly known
as Lord Hardwick's Marriage Act, or by its longer legal name,
an Act for the Better Prevention of clandestine marriages. With
the Act, Lord Chancellor Hardwick declared that marriages within the
walls of the Anglican Church would now be marriage's only
legal form in England and Wales. Essentially, to be legally
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recognized as wed, unless you were Quaker or Jewish, that is,
a couple had to do so before the eyes of
an Anglican clergyman. Scotland, though, was not included on this list.
In fact, for all of England's recent stringency, Scotland had
very lax laws around these things. Girls had to be
older than twelve and boys older than fourteen, but no
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parental blessing was necessary. Enter Richard. Because the village blacksmith
was historically one of the respected trades in the community,
it made sense that these young couples would seek him
out as their stand in priest. A tradition was born,
and he was number four. Richard met with young lovers
who came by and night to carry out and consummate
(03:02):
their affairs of the heart. All he needed from them
was to be of age and have two witnesses to
their union. His ceremonies were simple, quick, a few words
exchanged and the bang of a hammer clinging loudly to
make it all official. He would then pronounce them man
and wife before sending them on their way. By the
time the laws changed. In nineteen forty, he had conducted
over five thousand marriages. That's an average of three hundred
(03:25):
and fifty seven marriages per year. But as evidenced on
his arrival home from his friend's funeral that day, some
seasons were busier than others. All in all, tens of
thousands of couples have been married here and continue to
flock to Gretna Green for the same reason. Today. We
do a lot of things in the name of love.
We put ourselves out there. We take chances and were
(03:47):
asked to endure great tests of faith and courage, and
hopefully it's worth it. What's also true, though, is that
love has a dark side, because where there's light, there's
always shadow. Across the ages or as long as we've
loved and lost, we've had to sit with the darkness
that love can bring. And for as long as we
have been trying to figure out how to cure what
(04:08):
ails us and cure what's within us, we have been
trying to understand what love does not just do for us,
but to us. Yes, love can heal, but it can
also be deadly. I'm Aaron Manky, and welcome to bedside Manners.
(04:31):
Every species has the biological imperative to procreate. Humans have
been working on that project for a very long time,
but we don't necessarily have a sound biological reason for
why we fall in love. Now, some researchers believe that
it's just a trick of our nervous system. The flooding
of our brains with feel good chemicals might indeed urge
us toward mixing up our genetic material with someoneman creating
(04:55):
an offspring. But the flip side of this assumption is
that we also know that not every pairing that ex
experiences love has the ability to create new life. So
if it's not something distinctly biological, what is love and
where does it come from? Great minds across the ages
have been asking this very question. We find authors pining
after love in ancient Sumerian proverbs and the pain of
(05:17):
love mentioned in the Bible. Sappho, the famous mysterious poet
from the seventh century, left remnants of some of the
earliest musings on heartache. It seems that we have always
loved what we couldn't have for one reason or another.
These writings speak of pain that is talked about in emotional, physical,
and spiritual ways all along the way. Over the course
(05:38):
of this cultural evolution of thousands of years, one thing
hasn't changed, the idea that love and love sickness are afflictions.
The direct correlation between passionate love and deep personal disturbance
has been noted for thousands of years. Our friend Galen
left behind the story of a woman who was tossing
and turning and losing sleep with each passing night. When
(06:00):
Galen visited her, she was reticent. She told him that
she was ill, but was reluctant to go into many details.
After spending some time with her, he decided that she
was suffering from a standard class of melancholy. When a
friend came to visit and mentioned that they had just
seen a performance by a particular dancer, the woman came alive.
At this point, Galen took her wrist between his fingers
(06:21):
to feel her pulse. It had become irregular and she
had become flushed. But though these are very physical symptoms,
he was led to believe that the root of her
issues weren't just physical, but emotional. Her mind was disturbed.
Galen concluded that this woman was melancholic, not just because
her humors were out of balance, but due to the
affliction of affection. The real origin of her illness, he believed,
(06:45):
was an offset of melancholy, called specifically love melancholy. Melancholia
and love sickness both originated from excessive black bile, Galen believed,
but love sickness was its own kind of psychological disturbance,
then already required the correct treatment protocol. Others saw it
as its own illness. The various texts on the subject
(07:06):
describe an array of symptoms sadness, insomnia, hollow eyes, disturbances
in the pulse, mental anxiety, dejection, despondency, and physical debility.
But they all wonder how does one treat a love
sick patient. Over the years, physicians would go on to
prescribe everything from blood letting, foreskin clamping, burning a woman's
(07:28):
thighs with acid inhaling the burned feces of a beloved,
and therapeutic intercourse. Of course, the terminology and treatments for
love sickness have evolved across time and place. Today, the
contemporary field of psychopathology, the study of abnormal cognition, behavior
and experiences, has broken apart the symptoms of ancients and
(07:48):
focused on behavior combinations particular to someone in the throes
of what we might call love sickness, obsession, infatuation, emotional instability,
and emotional dependency. The idea that love is madness with
big air quotes there has never been shaken from our
collective consciousness. In fact, love sickness was a valid diagnosis
(08:09):
by medical practitioners for almost two thousand years. In recent times,
as the field of psychiatry has gained momentum, researchers have
been trying to parse apart where love ends and madness begins.
Researchers want to know what is normal and abnormal in love,
if love chemically makes our brain do abnormal things, and
how do we know when the scales have tipped too far.
(08:31):
The story we have for you today will leave you
thinking about all of these things. It's a story that's
been told for almost a century as a love story,
but as you'll see, it's something much deeper, much darker,
and much more sinister. Yes, it's true that perhaps love
did live here within this narrative frame, but so too
did obsession, destruction, and death. First of all, I want
(09:00):
you to remember Elena Miagre Dahias for who she was
in life. She was a vibrant young woman who was
part of a tight knit Cuban American clan, with her parents, sisters, aunties,
all living in Key West, Florida. It was said that
Elena had a lovely singing voice, enjoyed dancing with her girlfriends,
going to school, praying at church, keeping a diary, and
(09:21):
occupying herself with the concerns of the average teenage girl.
When she and her friends began courting, it was only
fitting that she dreamt of finding a lasting love, and
at sixteen, she thought she found one in the person
who would become her husband, a local boy named Louise.
They got married and moved in with his family, but
she was love sick. She became pregnant and then she
(09:43):
began to cough. She wished for someone to care for her,
but Louise wasn't up to the task. When she lost
the baby, he left her. Elena was always described as
exceptionally beautiful, all raven hair and dark eyes, but there
was nothing about her life that ever made her feel
that she was exceptional or destined for fame, and indeed,
the stories we tell about Elena most often start not
(10:05):
with the contours of her life but with her corpse.
And it's here that I implore you not to remember
her as a specter, or as storytellers would later call her,
an it, but as a very real, very animated woman
whose body and story have been taken from her in death.
Our story today opens in a hospital with Elena very
(10:25):
much alive. In April of nineteen thirty, twenty one year
old Elena went to the local marine hospital for X
rays and blood samples. Her cough had only been worsening
in recent days, and it was time that she was
seen by a specialist. Many of us don't recognize important
life moments for what they are. Elena was no different.
But the man on the other side of the X
ray machine knew that upon seeing Elena, his prayers had
(10:48):
come to pass and his life would never be the same.
Count Karl von Kosel, the assumed name of Karl Tansler,
had been chasing his visions for almost five decades. As
a teenager, he claimed to have been visited by his
dead aunt, who revealed to him the face of his
future wife. This charted a course that would take him
across countries and continents, acquiring fake medical degrees and licenses,
(11:11):
and growing delusions. As he sought the fulfillment of this
ghostly promise, he looked for her everywhere. Carl claimed to
have seen a vision of his future wife for a
second time at a graveyard in Spain. The third time
he saw the face of this woman, he later said,
was when Elena walked into his exam room. Their worlds
had collided, Elena and Carl's, and there was no turning back.
(11:33):
Though he was a Charlatan and a confabulist, he was
undeniably brilliant. Carl was something of a mad scientist, harboring
a long obsession with matters of electricity, radio waves, and
other feats of engineering, including the repair of a wingless
airplane that he kept on the hospital grounds. He was
as dapper as he was eccentric, a true Key West
(11:54):
character that had become known on the island for his
strange ways, and he seemed harmless enough ignosed to Lena
with a case of tuberculosis, a sickness that had wiped
out a quarter of Europe's population in the prior century.
It's one of the world's oldest known illnesses and continued
to kill more people than any other disease in industrialized
countries through the early twentieth century, it remained extremely fatal,
(12:17):
something that Elena, her family, and Carl were well aware of.
He committed himself then and there to saving this young woman.
But beyond this being an act of benevolence or dutiful
adherence to a hippocratic oath that he had never taken,
because remember, he was no real doctor, this commitment was
the first moment in an instant in long lasting obsession. Elena,
(12:39):
for her part, naturally wanted to live. Medicine is supposed
to help us stave off death, and if she had
to hang around a strange, bespeckled man three decades her
senior to have a good shot at it, she was
going to do it. He seemed grandfatherly to her, a
concerned scholar, even if he did give her the creeps.
So he tried everything electricity cures and gold cures, tonics
(13:02):
and radiation. He saw her at the hospital, but he
also started to visit her at her family's home. Desperate
for answers, they let this man come knocking at all hours.
That is, of course, until he crossed the line. He
began proposing marriage to Elena, who initially laughed it off,
but he kept trying, and her admonishments became stronger. But
(13:22):
he wouldn't take no for an answer. He begged, he pleaded,
and Elena still refused. Although her husband had long run off,
there was no way that she could marry this man,
and as the records show, Carl was still married too,
but he had no scruples where matters of the heart
were concerned. Carl's behavior earned him the ire of the family,
but they were torn for they, or at least some
(13:44):
of them, believed that with his undivided attention, he could
save their beloved Elena. His diaries, which he later published,
paint the portrait of a man obsessed with possession. He
lived in a strange alternate reality, entirely of his own
design and imitation version of the real world, where lines
of fact and fiction are blurred. It's hard to know
what he believed to be true and what he wished
(14:07):
to be true. Elena became sicker and sicker, though her
family became angry with and scared of, Carl, eventually moving
houses and not leaving a note for him, But he
still managed to find them through a loose lip neighbor
and Sensing that the family was emotionally and spiritually exhausted,
he made his move. He installed himself at Elena's bedside,
(14:28):
just like a leech that promised to cure but instead
bled its host to death. The disease finally took Elena
in October of nineteen thirty one. It said that she
died tired and angry, refusing to let her family call
for their doctor. She had had enough of him and
his lecherous advances. If death is an end, our story
would stop there. But Elena's demise was just the beginning
(14:50):
of a much longer, far stranger, and more twisted chapter
than she had ever experienced in life. Elena's death couldn't
dissuade Carl van Kozel. In fact, it only encouraged him.
When word arrived at his lab via her brother in law,
(15:13):
Carl sprang to action. When he finally made it to
her family's home, he immediately tried to electrocute her back
to life. He wrote in his memoir that this was
what many, perhaps most people, would call the end, but
a strange kind of new life now began for me.
Even though she was gone and her family was deep
in mourning, Carl conned his way into their home. He
(15:35):
offered to pay rent. They relented, so he moved into
Elena's room and into her now cold bed. Our phony
Counts also talked her family into allowing him to construct
a beautiful stone moss soleum for their daughter, something much
grander than they could ever have afforded themselves. They agreed,
and were justly horrified when it was revealed that he
(15:55):
had engraved both her name and his name on it.
He visited her every night at sunset, a long and
limber shadow, skulking through the graveyard. He would unlock the
three locks he had installed on the door, go inside,
and sit with her. He spoke of undoing the locks
of the heavy casket and listening to Elena speak with
him from her inner coffin. He wrote of hearing Elena
(16:18):
singing for him, and one night she finally asked him
to take her home. Carl, who once claimed to have
died and come back himself, believed death was truly only
a state of suspended animation. So it's here that we
now find him, supposedly under the direction of Elena, carting
her body out of the graveyard in a child's wagon.
(16:39):
He later claimed that this moment was nothing short of
their great divine wedding March. That night, he brought Elena's
corpse to his cottage and began to work on engineering
her resurrection. Over time, he tried all different things. He
soaked her body in tubs of chemicals, hoping her cells
would saturate and she would waken. He waited her, apped her,
(17:00):
He injected her with vitamins, and he took cultures from
her body for his microscope. And when her skin began
to fall off, he replaced it with silk. When her
eyes putrified, he replaced those two. He sealed her leaking
orifices with wax. He excavated larva and sprayed her with perfume.
He dressed her in a wedding gown and brought her
(17:21):
to bed. Karl thought that he was working in secrets,
but rumors spread. People saw him frequently hauling chemical solvents, deodorizers,
reams of silk, and gauze to his home. He was
a scientist and inventored, though, so who could say what
he was up to. It was later rumored that late
at night, neighbors would hear organ music wafting from the
windows with two bodies seeing joined in dance, and this
(17:45):
went on for seven long years. One of Elena's sisters, Nana,
had heard the rumors. She didn't want them to be true,
but after a rash of break ins at the graveyard,
she insisted that Karl opened a Lena's coffin and show
her that her sister was all right. Carl refused, but
he did offer her something else. Carl brought Nana back
(18:06):
to his cottage. He opened the door and led her inside.
He had dressed Elena and Jules and brought Nana over
to see her. According to his later writings, he was
proud to show how well he had taken care of
his beloved. Nana, though was horrified. She couldn't believe her eyes.
She thought that this had to be a doll. It
couldn't be true. Carl's account of what transpired in their
(18:28):
bedside conversation is inconceivable at best. Nana, he claims, just
walked out and told him to put Elena back where
he found her. She has been under my care all
of these years, he said, to have shot back, I
have paid all of her expenses. You forgot that I
own the tomb and everything inside. He was subsequently arrested
on the charge of desecrating a grave and spent a
(18:50):
night in jail. But since the statute of limitations had expired,
it had now been years since he had kidnapped Elena's body,
and because the court determined that he was saying and
mentally competent, he was free to go. As for Elena's corpse,
she was taken from the cottage. She was given a
second funeral, which amounted to an entirely different kind of spectacle.
(19:11):
Almost seven thousand people lined up to take a look
at what was left of her. Then her body was
taken to a secret location and reburied, And for those
of you who are wondering, even to this day, that
location is still a mystery. But the Count refused to
go quietly. If he was going to get charged with
desecrating a grave, he might as well do it. The
(19:32):
night he left town, Elena's mausoleum was blown up with
a time bomb. Today, the cracked edifice can still be
seen in Key West. Although she and the Count are
both long gone, whispers of his love and her loathing
are all that remain. The story of Elena and Count
(19:57):
van Kozol has gone down over the years framed as
a macab love story, when in fact it is nothing
more than a nightmare. Elena was vehemently opposed to Van
Kozel's advances, and he took her silence by means of
her death as consent, and recently it's possible that an
even more sinister epilogue has been uncovered. The folks in
Key West claimed to have made a discovery in an
(20:19):
old pulp detective magazine in which a journalist was able
to recover police records from the case. It was claimed
that during renovations of von Kozel's home, bottles of potions
and a confession note were uncovered, and in that note,
the writer appears to be confessing to murder. Putting two
and two together, one is left to wonder if the
count realized that if he couldn't cure and possess her
(20:42):
in life, a fatal poisoning would help him secure her
in death. Of course, one should be skeptical of these
kinds of magazines. They look and tend to read like
a tabloid, and those police records that could have corroborated
any of these claims, it seems, have since been destroyed.
Historians believe the missing records might be due to the
(21:02):
lack of predigital age storage space. If a case was
considered closed, well, no sense in keeping it around, right,
and the article it's been reported otherwise got all of
the facts right. The journalist who wrote it is long dead,
so there hasn't been a way forward to report on
the reporting. Regardless, the story continues to fascinate us. It
(21:23):
is a very extreme example of what could be understood
as a deadly love sickness, love that has turned into
something far darker. The media talks about crimes of passion
and the lengths that people will go to in the
name of love, and now scientists have been able to
identify some really interesting and also alarming things that folks
have been alluding to for thousands of years. It seems
(21:45):
that love takes a very physical toll on our bodies.
The shorthand term for aid to Katsubo cardiomyopathy is broken
heart syndrome. It presents similar to a heart attack, though
those who suffer from it tend to make complete and
full recoveries, and we're also able to see the effects
of love on neuroimaging of our brains. Scans light up
(22:05):
much differently when looking at all the different kinds of love,
romantic love lighting up in the region that suggests personal
apprehension and social judgment might also be compromised. Scientists have
also suggested that they may have found an overlap between
obsessive compulsive disorder and romantic attraction. The term limerins was
coined to describe a set of all consuming psychological symptoms
(22:28):
characterized by obsessive, intrusive thoughts about an object of affection.
We now know that this state isn't just psychologically based,
but neurologically as well, and it leaves us to wonder
if this is what we call love, Is it all
simply another affliction to be treated? How do we tease
apart what is harmful and keep the stuff that benefits us?
(22:49):
And even more challenging than all of that, when those
things live together in the same cognitive stew how do
we tell them apart when we're deep in it? And
how can we save our solves? Love, of course, isn't
just something that happens to us. It's something that we
as humans do, and love doesn't have to be in
(23:11):
grand gestures, As count Van Kozo believed, love comes in
small moments every day. If you stick around through this
brief sponsor break, my teammates Robin Miniter will tell you
a story about a love that was lost and then
found once more. The woman in the window was a
(23:31):
mystery to so many. She largely kept to herself, a
specter and white, illuminated by the oil lamp's warm halo.
For years, Emily was her only company in her bedroom
on Main Street and Amherst, Massachusetts. Sequestered above and away
from the outside, she created rich landscapes of her own
inner world, and with ink she'd penned these internal geographies.
(23:52):
She was a prolific writer, authoring hundreds of letters and
poems on bits and shreads and pieces of paper. Emily
was a dreamer, and she was a lover her word,
so accurately conveying what her heart was saying, but who
her heart and she, in turn was saying These things too,
has long been a source of controversy. Emily Dickinson only
published ten poems in her lifetime, and when she died
(24:13):
in eighteen eighty six, she left behind a massive body
of deeply personal work, almost eighteen hundred poems and hundreds
of letters to be come through by her family, and
what they found was astounding for the sheer volume of
words left behind, but also for the contents of the pages.
It's believed that whoever took it upon themselves to handle
her work didn't want the world to see what she
(24:34):
had written, or at least some of its key parts,
so began the crossing out of names and the extraction
of entire lines with a sharp blade. Whoever did this
thought it would make her work more palatable and more
saleable to the general public. After all, it would be
scandalous should the world know that Emily had carried on
a lifelong relationship with another woman, a woman who was
(24:55):
not just her neighbor but her brother's wife. Some historians
believe that Emily's love was unjustly censored and sanitized in
the wake of her death, But in recent years, with
some good old fashioned detective work in the benefit of
modern technology, historians have been working to restore the larger
story of Emily and Susan's love and cement their story
in the larger cultural mythos around Emily Dickinson. In the
(25:18):
nineteen nineties, scholar Martha Nell Smith got to work combing
over Emily's original work. She carefully studied the impressions on
the backs of the delicate aging pieces of paper, and
for the harder cases, she employed infrared technology to detect
any alterations made to the documents. Using computer, textures and
tones could be manipulated pixel by pixel restoring attempts at obliteration.
(25:40):
Think of these tech detectives as restoration specialists, working painstakingly
to uncover what others have long thought to be lost
to our eyes. And it's in these letters that we
find Emily's love and longing for Susan written over the
arc of four decades. They lived somewhat parallel lives, side
by side in two separate, stately homes. Their relationships stretched
(26:00):
back into their early twenties, and whether the intervening years
and everything they brought it since speculated that Emily had
other entanglements, but the affection shared between these two women
burned bright and lifelong. The exact shape of Emily and
Susan's love may never be known to the world, but
today we have a best guess at what it meant
to them. In a world where they could never be
(26:21):
married nor recognize as domestic partners, they found a way,
Albeit it secretly to love and to be loved at
a time when marriage was less about affection and more
about social strategizing. For all of the heartache and the
obstacles that the years presented, Emily and Susan continued to
find their way back to each other, separated only by society,
scripts and a stone's throw. Grim and Mild Presents Bedside
(26:45):
Manners was executive produced by Aaron Manky and narrated by
Aaron Mankie and Robin Miniter. Writing for this season was
provided by Robin Miniter, with research by Sam Alberty, Taylor
Haggerdorn and Robin Miniter. Production an assistance was provided by
Josh Thine, Jesse Funk, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. You
(27:06):
can learn more about this show, the Grim and Mild team,
and all the other podcasts that we make over at
Grimm Mild dot com and, as always, thanks for listening.
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