“No, your fight with death,” Wendell says.
For a second I’m confused, but then I flash to my dream about running into Boyfriend at the mall. Him: Did you ever write your book? Me: What book? Him: The book about your death.
Oh. My. God.
Typically therapists are several steps ahead of our patients—not because we’re smarter or wiser but because we have the vantage point of being outside their lives. I’ll say to a patient who has bought the ring but can’t seem to find the right time to propose to his girlfriend, “I don’t think you’re sure you want to marry her,” and he’ll say, “What? Of course I am! I’m doing it this weekend!” And then he goes home and doesn’t propose, because the weather was bad and he wanted to do it at the beach. We’ll have the same dialogue for weeks, until one day he’ll come back and say, “Maybe I don’t want to marry her.” Many people who say, “No, that’s not me,” find themselves a week or a month or a year later saying, “Yeah, actually, that’s me.”
I have a feeling that Wendell has been storing up this question, waiting for just the right moment to float it out there. Therapists are always weighing the balance between forming a trusting alliance and getting to the real work so the patient doesn’t have to continue suffering. From the outset, we move both slowly and quickly, slowing the content down, speeding up the relationship, planting seeds strategically along the way. As in nature, if you plant the seeds too early, they won’t sprout. If you plant too late, they might make progress, but you’ve missed the most fertile ground. If you plant at just the right time, though, they’ll soak up the nutrients and grow. Our work is an intricate dance between support and confrontation.
Wendell asks about my fight with death at exactly the right moment—but for more reasons than he could possibly know.
23
Trader Joe’s
It’s a busy Saturday morning at Trader Joe’s, and I’m scanning the lines to see which is shortest while my son darts off to look at the display of chocolate bars. Despite the chaos, the cashiers seem unfazed. A young guy whose arms are covered in tattoos rings a bell, and a bagger in leggings dances over and packs up a customer’s groceries, jiving to the canned music. In the next aisle a hipster with a Mohawk calls for a price check, and at the end of the row, a pretty blond cashier juggles some oranges to amuse a toddler having a meltdown in her stroller.
It takes me a minute before I realize that the juggling cashier is my patient Julie. I haven’t seen her new blond wig yet, though she had mentioned it in therapy.
“Too crazy?” she’d asked about the idea of being a blonde, holding me to my promise to tell her if she was going overboard. She’d asked the same thing about answering an ad for a singer in a local band, going on a game show, and signing up for a Buddhist retreat that required a full week of no talking. This was all before the miracle drug had worked its miracle on her tumors.
I’d enjoyed watching her stretch from the risk-averse stance she’d embraced all her life. She had always thought that achieving tenure would give her freedom, but now she was tasting a completely unexpected kind of freedom.
“Is this too off-the-wall?” she’d sometimes say before presenting a new idea to me. She was eager to veer from her mapped-out course, but not so far that she’d get lost. Yet nothing she proposed surprised me.
Then, finally, Julie had an idea that caught me off guard. She told me that at one point during those weeks when she believed she was about to die, she was waiting in line at Trader Joe’s and found herself mesmerized by the cashiers. They seemed so themselves in the ways they interacted with their customers and one another, making conversation about the small daily things that are really the big things in people’s lives—food, traffic, the weather. How different she imagined this job from her own, which she loved but which also came with a constant pressure to produce and publish, to position herself for advancement. With a shortened future, she imagined doing work where she could see tangible results in the moment—you pack groceries, you cheer up customers, you stock items. At the end of the day, you’ve done something concrete and useful.
Julie decided that if she had only, say, a year to live, she’d apply to be a weekend cashier at Trader Joe’s. She knew she was idealizing the job. But she still wanted to experience that sense of purpose and community, of being a small part of lots of different people’s lives—even if just for the time it took to ring up their groceries.
“Maybe Trader Joe’s can be part of my Holland,” she mused.
I could feel myself push against the idea, and I sat for a minute, trying to understand why. It might have had something to do with a dilemma I’d been facing in treating Julie. If Julie hadn’t had cancer, I’d try to help her look at the part of her that had felt inhibited for so long. She seemed to be opening the lid on aspects of herself that hadn’t had space to breathe.
But with someone who’s dying, did it make sense to do therapy or simply offer support? Should I treat Julie like a healthy patient in terms of more ambitious goals, or should I just offer comfort and not upset the apple cart? I wondered if Julie would ever have asked herself the questions about risk and safety and identity that had been hiding beneath her awareness had she not faced the terror of imminent death. And now that she had, how far should we delve into them?
These are questions we all deal with in a quieter way: How much do we want to know? How much is too much? And how much is too much when you’re dying?
The Trader Joe’s fantasy seemed to represent an escape of some sort—like a child saying, “I’m running away to Disneyland!”—and I wondered how this fantasy related to Julie’s pre-cancer self. But mostly, I wondered if she could handle the job physically. The experimental treatment had added to her fatigue. She needed rest.
Her husband, she told me, thought she was insane.
“You have a limited time to live, and your dream is to work at Trader Joe’s?” he’d asked.
“Why, what would you do if you only had a year or so to live?” Julie countered.
“I’d work less,” he said, “not more.”
As Julie told me about Matt’s reaction, it occurred to me that he and I both seemed unsupportive, even though we wanted Julie to experience joy. Sure, there were some practical concerns, but could our hesitation also be that we were both, in a strange way, envious of Julie and her conviction to follow her dream, no matter how odd it sounded? Therapists tell their patients: Follow your envy—it shows you what you want. Did watching Julie’s blossoming highlight the fact that we were too afraid to act on our own equivalents of working at Trader Joe’s—and that we wanted Julie to remain like us, dreaming without doing, constrained by nothing more than the open bars on our prison cells?
Or maybe that was just me.
“Besides,” Matt had said in his conversation with Julie, “don’t you want to spend that time together?”
Julie said that of course she did. But she also wanted to work at Trader Joe’s, and it became a kind of obsession. So she applied for a job there, and on the day that she learned she was tumor-free, she was offered a Saturday-morning shift.