But Wendell told me that by diminishing my problems, I was judging myself and everyone else whose problems I had placed lower down on the hierarchy of pain. You can’t get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it. You can’t change what you’re denying or minimizing. And, of course, often what seem like trivial worries are manifestations of deeper ones.
“You still doing Tinder therapy?” I ask Cory.
He rubs some product into my hair. “Hell, yeah,” he says.
48
Psychological Immune System
“Congratulations, you’re not my mistress anymore,” John says dryly as he walks in carrying a bag with our lunches.
I wonder if this is his way of saying goodbye. Has he decided to stop therapy right when we’ve just genuinely begun?
He walks to the couch and makes a show of silencing his cell phone before tossing it onto a chair. Then he opens the takeout bag and hands me my Chinese chicken salad. He reaches in again, pulls out some chopsticks, and holds them up: Want these? I nod: Thanks.
Once we’re settled, he looks at me expectantly, tapping his foot.
“Well,” he says, “don’t you want to know why you’re no longer my mistress?”
I look back at him: I’m not playing this game.
“Okay, fine.” He sighs. “I’ll tell you. You’re not my mistress anymore because I came clean to Margo. She knows that I’m seeing you.” He takes a bite of his salad, chews. “And you know what she did?” he continues.
I shake my head.
“She got mad! Why would you keep this a secret? How long has this been going on? What’s her name? Who else knows? You’d think you and I were fucking or something, right?” John laughs to make sure I know how outlandish he considers that possibility.
“To her, it might feel like that,” I say. “Margo feels left out of your life and now she’s hearing that you’ve been sharing it with somebody else. She craves that closeness with you.”
“Yeah,” John says, and he seems lost in thought for a bit. He takes more bites of his salad, looks at the floor, then rubs his forehead as if whatever’s going on in there is draining him. Finally he looks up.
“We talked about Gabe,” he says quietly. And then he starts crying, a guttural wail, raw and wild, and I recognize it instantly. It’s the sound I heard in the ER back in medical school from the parents of the drowned toddler. It’s a love song to his beloved son.
I have a flash to another ER, on the night when my son was a year old and he had to be rushed by ambulance to the hospital after he spiked a fever of 104 and began seizing. By the time the paramedics arrived at my house, his body was limp, his eyes closed, and he was unresponsive to my voice. As I sit with John, I feel again in my body the terror of seeing my son lifeless, me on the gurney with him on my torso, the EMTs flanking us, the sirens a surreal soundtrack. I hear the sound of him howling for me as they strapped him into the x-ray contraption, forcing him to be still, his eyes open now, terrified, beseeching me to hold him as he squirmed violently to reach me. His screams, in their intensity, sounded much like John’s wail now. Somewhere in the hospital’s hallway, I remember seeing what looked like an unconscious child—or a dead one—being wheeled by. This could be us, I thought at that moment. This could be us by the morning. We could be leaving here like this too.
But it wasn’t us. I got to go home with my beautiful boy.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry,” John is saying through his tears, and I don’t know if he’s apologizing to Gabe or Margo or his mother—or to me, for his outburst.
All of the above, he says. But mostly, he’s sorry that he can’t remember. He wanted to block out the unfathomable—the accident, the hospital, the moment he learned that Gabe had died—but he couldn’t. What he’d give to forget hugging his son’s dead body, Margo’s brother pulling them both away, and John punching him, screaming, “I will not leave my son!” How he’d like to erase the scene of telling his daughter that her brother had died and of the family’s arrival at the cemetery, Margo falling to the ground, unable to walk in—but those memories, unfortunately, remain vividly intact, the stuff of his waking nightmares.
What’s fuzzier, he says, are the happy memories. Gabe in his twin bed in his Batman pajamas (“Snuggle me, Dada”). Rolling around in wrapping paper after opening his birthday presents. The way Gabe strode confidently into his preschool class like a big kid, only to turn around at the door and blow a furtive kiss. The sound of his voice. I love you to the moon and back. The smell of his head when John bent down to kiss him. The music of his giggle. His animated facial expressions. His favorite food or animal or color (Was it blue or “rainbow” before he died?). All of these memories feel, to John, as if they’re fading into the distance—that he’s losing the details of Gabe, much as he wants to hold on to them.
All parents forget these details about their kids as they grow, and they mourn that loss too. The difference is that as the past recedes in their memories, the present is right in front of them. For John, the loss of his memories brings him closer to the loss of Gabe. And so at night, John tells me, while Margo seethes, assuming that he’s working or watching porn, he’s hiding out with his laptop watching videos of Gabe, thinking about how these are the only videos he’ll ever have of his son, just as the memories John has of Gabe are the only memories he’ll ever have. There will be no more memories made. And while the memories might get blurry, the videos won’t. John says that he’s watched these videos hundreds of times and can no longer tell the difference between his actual memories and the videos. He watches obsessively, though, “to keep Gabe alive in my mind.”
“Keeping him alive in your mind is your way of not abandoning him,” I say.
John nods. He says that he pictures Gabe alive all the time—what he would look like, how tall he would be, what interests he’d have. He still sees the neighbor boys who were Gabe’s friends as toddlers and imagines Gabe hanging out with them now in middle school, having crushes on girls, eventually shaving. He also imagines the possibility that Gabe would have gone through a phase of butting up against John, and when John hears other parents complain about their high-schoolers, he thinks about what a luxury it would be to have the chance to nag Gabe about his homework or find weed in his room or catch him doing any of the pain-in-the-ass things that teens tend to do. He’ll never get to meet his son the way other parents meet their kids at different stages along the way, when they’re the same people they’ve always been but both thrillingly and sadly different.
“What did you and Margo talk about?” I ask.
“When Margo was interrogating me about therapy,” he says, “she wanted to know why. Why I was here. Was it about Gabe? Did I talk about Gabe? And I told her that I didn’t come to therapy to talk about Gabe. I was just stressed out. But she wouldn’t let it go. She was incredulous. ‘So you haven’t talked about Gabe at all?’ I told her that what I talked about was private. I mean, can’t I talk about what I want in my own therapy? What is she, the therapy police?”