“Have you told him?” I ask.
“All the time,” Julie says. “Every time he holds my hand, I say, ‘I’m going to miss your hands.’ Or when he’s whistling around the house—he’s an amazing whistler—I’ll tell him how much I’m going to miss that sound. And he always used to say, ‘Jules, you’re still here. You can hold my hands and hear me whistle.’ But now—” Julie’s voice cracks. “Now he says, ‘I’m going to miss you just as much.’ I think he’s starting to accept the fact that I’m really dying this time.”
Julie wipes her upper lip.
“You want to hear something?” she continues. “I’m also going to miss myself. All those insecurities I’d spent my life wanting to change? I was just getting to a place where I really like myself. I like me. I’m going to miss Matt, and my family, and my friends, but I’m also going to miss me.”
She goes on to name all the things she wishes she’d appreciated more before she got sick: Her breasts, which she used to think weren’t perky enough until she had to give them up; her strong legs, which she often thought were too thick, even though they served her well in marathons; her quiet way of listening, which she feared some might find boring. She’s going to miss her distinctive laugh that a boy in fifth grade called “a squawk,” a comment that somehow stuck like a burr inside her for years until that laugh made Matt glance her way in a crowded room and then make a beeline for her to introduce himself.
“I’m going to miss my freaking colon!” she says, laughing now. “I didn’t appreciate it enough before. I’m going to miss sitting on a toilet and shitting. Who thinks they’ll miss shitting?” Then come the tears—angry ones.
Every day is another loss of something she took for granted until it was gone, like what happens to the couples I see who take each other for granted and then miss each other when the marriage seems to be dying. Many women, too, have told me that they loathed getting their menstrual periods but grieved the loss of them when they reached menopause. They missed bleeding the way Julie will miss shitting.
Then, in almost a whisper, Julie adds, “I’m going to miss life.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” she says, starting soft and getting louder, surprising herself with her volume. She looks at me, embarrassed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay,” I say. “I agree. It fucking sucks.”
Julie laughs. “And now I got my therapist to say fuck! I never used to swear like this. I don’t want my obituary to read, ‘She swore like a sailor.’”
I wonder what she does want her obituary to say, but time is almost up and I make a mental note to come back to this next time.
“Oh, who cares, that felt good. Let’s do it again,” Julie says. “Will you do it with me? We’ve got a minute left, right?”
At first I don’t know what she’s talking about—do what? But she has that mischievous look again, and then it clicks.
“You want us to—”
Julie nods. The rule-follower is asking me to yell obscenities with her. Recently in my consultation group, Andrea had said that while we need to hold hope for our patients, we have to hope for the right thing. If I can no longer hold hope for Julie’s longevity, Andrea said, I have to hold hope for something else. “I can’t help her in the way that she wants,” I’d said. But sitting here now, I see that maybe I can, at least for today.
“Okay,” I say. “Ready?”
We both yell, “FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!” When we’re done, we catch our breath, exhilarated.
Then I walk her to the door, where, as usual, she hugs me goodbye.
In the hallway, other patients are leaving their sessions, doors opening at ten to the hour like clockwork. My colleagues look at me questioningly as Julie leaves. Our voices must have carried into the corridor. I shrug, close my door, and start laughing. That was a first, I think.
Then I feel the tears well up. Laughter to tears—grief. I’m going to miss Julie and I’m having a hard time with this myself.
Sometimes the only thing to do is yell, “Fuck!”
36
The Speed of Want
After completing my traineeship year, I began my internship at a nonprofit clinic located in the basement of a sleek office building. Upstairs, the light-filled suites had views of Los Angeles’s mountains to one side and beaches to the other, but downstairs was another story. In cramped, cave-like, windowless consultation rooms furnished with decades-old chairs, broken lamps, and torn sofas, we interns thrived on patient volume. When a new case came in, we all vied for it, because the more people we saw, the more we learned and the closer we came to finishing our hours. Between back-to-back sessions, clinical supervision, and mounds of paperwork, we didn’t pay much attention to the fact that we were living underground.
Sitting in the break room (aroma: microwaved popcorn and ant spray), we would scarf down some food (lunch was always eaten “al desco”) and commiserate about our lack of time. But despite our gripes, our initiation as therapists felt exhilarating—partly because of the steep learning curve and our wise supervisors (who gave us advice like “If you’re talking that much, you can’t be listening” and its variant “You have two ears and one mouth; there’s a reason for that ratio”), and partly because we knew this phase was blessedly temporary.
The light at the end of the years-long tunnel was licensure, when we imagined we could improve people’s lives by doing the work we loved but with reasonable hours and a less frenetic pace. As we hunkered down in that basement, doing our charts by hand and searching for reception on our phones, we didn’t realize that upstairs, a revolution was under way, one of speed, ease, and immediate gratification. And that what we were being trained to offer—gradual but lasting results that required some hard work—was becoming increasingly obsolete.
I’d seen hints of these developments in my patients at the clinic but, focused on my own harried existence, I failed to see the bigger picture. I thought: Of course these people have trouble slowing down or paying attention or being present. That’s why they’re in therapy.
My life wasn’t much different, of course, at least during this phase. The faster I finished my work, the sooner I’d get to spend time with my son, and then the quicker we could do the bedtime routine, the quicker I could get to bed so that I could wake up the next day and hurry all over again. And the quicker I moved, the less I saw, because everything became a blur.
But this would end soon, I reminded myself. Once I finished my internship, my real life would begin.
One day I was in the break room with some fellow interns, and we once again started counting our required number of hours and calculating how old we’d be when we finally got licensed. The higher the number, the worse we felt. A supervisor in her sixties walked by and overheard the conversation.
“You’ll turn thirty or forty or fifty anyway, whether your hours are finished or not,” she said. “What does it matter what age you are when that happens? Either way, you won’t get today back.”