It was a good time to have a baby too. Julie had just gotten tenure at her university, and after years of hard work, she could finally take a breath. Now there would be more time for her passions: running marathons and climbing mountains and baking silly cakes for her nephew. There would also be time for marriage and parenthood.
When Julie got back from her honeymoon, she peed on a stick and showed it to Matt, who picked her up and danced around the room with her. They decided that the song that happened to be on the radio—“Walking on Sunshine”—would be their baby’s theme song. Excited, they went to the obstetrician for their first prenatal appointment, and when her doctor felt the “gland” that Julie had noticed on her honeymoon, his smile faded slightly.
“It’s probably nothing,” he said, “but let’s get it checked out.”
It wasn’t nothing. Young, newly married, and pregnant, with no family history of breast cancer, Julie had been struck by the randomness of the universe. Then, while grappling with how to handle the cancer treatment and the pregnancy, she had a miscarriage.
This was when Julie landed in my office.
It was an odd referral, given that I wasn’t a therapist who specialized in treating people with cancer. But my lack of expertise was exactly why Julie wanted to see me. She had told her physician that she didn’t want a therapist from “the cancer team.” She wanted to feel normal, to be part of the living. And since her doctors seemed confident that she’d be fine after surgery and chemo, she wanted to focus on both getting through the treatment and being newly married. (What should she say in her wedding-gift thank-you notes? Thanks so much for the lovely bowl . . . I keep it by my bed to vomit in?)
The treatment was brutal but Julie got better. The day after her doctors declared her “tumor-free,” she and Matt went on a hot-air balloon ride with their closest friends and family. It was the first week of summer, and as they joined arms and watched the sunset from a thousand feet above the earth, Julie no longer felt cheated, as she had during the treatment, but lucky. Yes, she’d gone through hell. But it was behind her, and her future lay ahead. In six months, she would get a final scan, a sign-off, to clear her for pregnancy. That night, she dreamed that she was in her sixties and holding her first grandchild.
Julie was in good spirits. Our work was done.
I didn’t see Julie between the hot-air balloon ride and the scan. But I did start getting calls from other cancer patients who’d been referred by Julie’s oncologist. There’s nothing like illness to take away a sense of control, even if we often have less of it than we imagine. What people don’t like to think about is that you can do everything right—in life or in a treatment protocol—and still get the short end of the stick. And when that happens, the only control you have is how you deal with that stick—your way, not the way others say you should. I’d let Julie do it her way—I was so inexperienced that I didn’t have a strong sense of what a “way” should look like—and it seemed to help.
“Whatever you did with her,” Julie’s oncologist said, “she seemed pleased with the outcome.”
I knew that I hadn’t done anything brilliant with Julie. Mostly, I worked hard not to flinch from her rawness. But that rawness went only so far because we weren’t even thinking about death then. Instead, we discussed wigs versus scarves, sex and postsurgery body image. And I helped her think through how to manage her marriage, parents, and work, much the way I might with any patient.
Then one day I checked my messages and heard Julie’s voice. She wanted to see me right away.
She came in the next morning, ashen. The scan that was supposed to show nothing had instead found a rare form of cancer, different from the original. In all likelihood, this cancer was going to kill her. It might take a year or five or, if things went very well, ten. Of course, they would explore experimental treatments, but they were just that—experimental.
“Will you stay with me until I die?” Julie asked, and though my instinct was to do what people tend to do whenever somebody brings up death, which is to deny death completely (Oh, hey, let’s not go there yet. Those experimental treatments might work), I had to remember that I was there to help Julie, not comfort myself.
Still, at the moment she asked, I was stunned, still absorbing the news. I wasn’t sure I was the best person for this. What if I said or did the wrong thing? Would I offend her if my feelings—discomfort, fear, sadness—came across in my facial expressions or body language? She was going to get only one chance at doing this the way she wanted. What if I let her down?
She must have seen my hesitation.
“Please,” she said. “I know it’s not a picnic, but I can’t go to those cancer people. It’s like a cult. They call everyone ‘brave,’ but what choice do we have, and besides, I’m terrified and still cringe at the sight of the needles like I did as a kid getting my shots. I’m not brave and I’m not a warrior fighting a battle. I’m just an ordinary college professor.” She leaned forward on the couch. “They have affirmations on their walls. So, please?”
Looking at Julie, I couldn’t say no. More important, now I didn’t want to.
And right then, the nature of our work together changed: I was going to help her come to terms with her death.
This time, my inexperience might matter.
6
Finding Wendell
“Maybe you should talk to someone,” Jen suggests two weeks after the breakup. She has just called to check on me at work. “You need to find a place where you’re not being a therapist,” she adds. “You need to go where you can completely fall apart.”
I look at myself in the mirror that hangs by the door in my office, the one I use to make sure I don’t have lipstick on my teeth when I’m about to retrieve a patient from the waiting room after a quick snack between sessions. I appear normal, but I feel dizzy and disoriented. I’m fine with patients—seeing patients is a relief, a full fifty minutes of respite from my own life—but outside of sessions, I’m losing it. In fact, as each day goes by, I seem worse, not better.
I can’t sleep. I can’t concentrate. Since the breakup, I’ve left my credit card at Target, driven out of the gas station with my tank’s cap hanging off, and fallen off a step in my garage, badly bruising my knee. My chest hurts as if my heart has been crushed, though I know it hasn’t been, because if anything, my heart is working harder, beating rapidly 24/7—a sign of anxiety. I obsess about Boyfriend’s state of mind, which I imagine is calm and unconflicted, while I lie on my bedroom floor at night and miss him. Then I obsess about whether I really miss him—did I even know him? Do I miss him, or do I miss the idea of him?
So when Jen says I should see a therapist, I know she’s right. I need someone to help me through this crisis.
But who?
Finding a therapist is a tricky thing. It’s not like looking for, say, a good internist or dentist because pretty much everyone needs an internist or dentist. A therapist, though? Consider:
If you ask somebody for a therapist recommendation and that person isn’t seeing a therapist, he or she might be offended that you’d made that assumption. Similarly, if you ask somebody for a therapist recommendation and that person is seeing a therapist, he or she might be upset that it was so apparent to you. Of all the people she knows, this person might wonder, why did she think to ask me?