He goes on to talk about how Julie rebelled against death in many ways, but primarily by what Matt liked to call “doing kindnesses” for others, leaving the world a better place than she found it. He doesn’t enumerate them, but I know what they are—and the recipients of her kindnesses all speak about them anyway.
I’m glad I came, glad that I got to fulfill my promise to Julie and also see a side of her that I can never know about any of my patients—what their lives look like outside of the therapy office. One on one, therapists get depth but not breadth, words without illustrations. Despite being the ultimate insider in terms of Julie’s thoughts and feelings, I’m an outsider here among all these people I don’t know but who knew Julie. We’re told, as therapists, that if we do attend a patient’s funeral, we should stay off to the side, avoid interacting. I do this, but just as I’m about to leave, a friendly couple starts talking to me. They say that Julie is responsible for their marriage—she set them up on a blind date five years ago. I smile at their story, then try to excuse myself, but before I can, the woman in the couple asks, “And how did you know Julie?”
“She was a friend,” I say reflexively, mindful of confidentiality, but the moment I say it, I realize it also feels true.
“Will you think about me?” Julie used to ask me before she went in for her various surgeries, and I always told her I would. The assurance soothed her, helped her stay centered in the midst of her anxiety about going under the knife.
Later, though, when it became clear that Julie would die, that question took on another meaning: Will a part of me remain alive in you?
Julie had recently told Matt that she felt horrible for dying on him, and the next day he sent her a note with a lyric from the musical The Secret Garden. In it, the ghost of a beloved wife asks her grieving husband if he could forgive her, if he could hold her in his heart and “‘find some new way to love me/Now that we’re apart.’” Matt had written, Yes. He added that he didn’t believe that people disappeared but that something in us was eternal and survived.
Walking to my car that day, I hear Julie’s question: Will you think about me?
All these years later, I still do.
I remember her most in the silences.
56
Happiness Is Sometimes
“Honestly, don’t hold back. Do you think I’m an asshole?” John asks as he sets down the bag with our lunches. He’s brought his dog Rosie to session today—her “danny” was ill and Margo’s out of town—and she’s on John’s lap, sniffing the takeout containers. Now John’s eyes are on me, as are Rosie’s beady ones, as if they’re both awaiting my response.
I’m caught off guard by his question. If I say yes, I might hurt John, and the last thing I want to do is hurt him. If I say no, I might be condoning some of his more asshole-like behaviors instead of creating awareness around them. The second-to-last thing I want to do is to be John’s yes-man. I could turn the question around on him: Do you think you’re an asshole? But I’m more interested in something else: Why is he asking—and why now?
John flicks off his slip-on sneakers, but instead of arranging himself cross-legged on the couch, he leans forward, elbows on knees. Rosie jumps down, positions herself on the floor, and looks up at John. He hands her a treat. “Here you go, my little princess,” he croons.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he says, looking back at me, “but I made a, uh, unfortunate comment to Margo a few nights ago. She said that her therapist recommended a couples therapist for us, and I said that I wanted to get a referral from you because I don’t necessarily trust her idiot therapist’s suggestion. I knew the second it came out of my mouth that I should have filtered, but it was too late, and Margo just tore into me. ‘My idiot therapist?’ she said. ‘Mine?’ She said that if my therapist can’t see what an asshole I am, then I’m going to the idiot therapist. I apologized for calling her therapist an idiot and she apologized for calling me an asshole, and then we both started laughing, and I can’t remember the last time we laughed like that together. We couldn’t stop, and the girls heard us and they came in and looked at us like we were a couple of crazy people. ‘What’s so funny?’ they kept asking but we couldn’t explain it. I don’t think we even knew what was so funny.
“Then the girls started laughing and we were all laughing about the fact that we couldn’t stop laughing. Ruby got on the floor and started rolling around, and then so did Gracie, and then Margo and I looked at each other and we got on the floor and all four of us were rolling around on our bedroom floor and laughing. And then Rosie runs over to see what all the commotion’s about, and when she sees us rolling around the floor, she freezes, right there in the doorway. She just stands there shaking her head, like, You humans are too much. And then she runs away. And then we laughed at Rosie, and as I was rolling around on the floor with my wife and my kids and the dog is barking at us from the other room, I watched the scene, almost from above, like I was observing it and living it at the same time, and I thought, I love my fucking family.”
He basks in the thought for a second before continuing.
“I felt the happiest I’ve been in a long time,” he says. “And you know what? Margo and I actually had a really nice night together after that. So much of the tension that’s normally between us was gone.” John smiles at the memory. “But then,” John continues, “I don’t know what happened. I’ve been sleeping much better, but that night I was up for hours thinking about what Margo said about my being an asshole. I couldn’t get it out of my head. Because I know you don’t think I’m an asshole. I mean, you obviously like me. So then I thought, Wait, what if Margo’s right? What if I’m an asshole but you can’t see it? Then you really are an idiot therapist. So which is it—am I an asshole, or are you an idiot?”
What a trap, I think. Either I say he’s an asshole or I claim I’m an idiot. I think of Julie and the phrase that her friends wrote in her high-school yearbook: I choose neither.
“Maybe there’s a third possibility,” I suggest.
“I want the truth,” he says adamantly. A mentor once remarked that often in therapy, change happens “gradually, then suddenly,” and that might be true for John too. I imagine that as John tossed and turned in bed, unable to sleep, the house of cards he’d built for himself about how everyone else was an idiot came crashing down, and now he’s left with the wreckage: I’m an asshole. I’m not better than everyone else—special. My mom was wrong.
But that’s not the truth either. It’s simply the collapse of the narcissistic defense in the form of an overcorrection. John started out with the belief that “I’m good and you’re bad,” and now it’s being turned upside down—“You’re good and I’m bad.” Neither is right.
“The truth as I see it,” I say honestly, “is not that I’m an idiot or you’re an asshole but that sometimes in order to protect yourself, you act like one.”
I watch John for his reaction. He takes a breath and seems like he’s about to say something flip but then decides not to. He’s quiet for a minute, gazing at Rosie, who has fallen asleep.