A few days after her seventieth birthday, Rita comes in for her regular session. Instead of marking the occasion with her suicide, she’s brought me a present.
“It’s my birthday gift to you,” she says.
Rita’s gift is beautifully wrapped, and she asks me to open it in front of her. The box is heavy, and I try to figure out what it is. Bottles of my favorite tea that she had seen and commented on in my office? A large book? A set of the darkly comic mugs that she’s begun selling on her website? (I’m hoping for these.)
I dig through the tissue paper and feel something ceramic (the mugs!), but as I lift the object out, I look at Rita and smile. It’s a tissue-box cover painted with the words RITA SAYS—DON’T BLOW IT. The design is at once bold and unassuming, like Rita herself. I turn the box over and notice her logo with her business’s name: It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over, Inc.
I begin to thank her but she interrupts me.
“It was inspired by our conversations about my not taking the tissues,” Rita says, as if I might not get the reference. “I used to think, What is with this therapist, harping on which tissues I use? I never understood it until one of the girls”—she means one of the hello-family girls—“saw me take a tissue from my purse and said, ‘Ewwww! Our mom says you should never use dirty tissues!’ And I thought, So does my therapist. Everybody needs a fresh box of tissues. And why not add a classy cover?” She says the word classy with a wink in her voice.
Rita’s being here today doesn’t signal the end of her therapy, nor do I measure the therapy’s success by the fact that she’s alive. After all, what if Rita had chosen not to kill herself on her seventieth birthday but was still severely depressed? What we’re celebrating today isn’t her continued physical presence so much as her still-in-progress emotional revival—the risks she’s taken to begin to move from a position of ossification to one of openness, from self-flagellation to something closer to self-acceptance.
Though we have a lot to celebrate today, Rita’s therapy will continue because old habits die hard. Because pain abates but doesn’t vanish. Because broken relationships (with herself, with her children) require sensitive and intentional rapprochement, and new ones need support and self-awareness to flourish. If Rita is going to be with Myron, she’ll have to better acquaint herself with her projections, her fears, her envy, her pain and past crimes, so that this next marriage, her fourth, becomes her last and first great love story.
Myron, it turns out, didn’t respond to Rita’s letter for a full week. She had handwritten her missive and stuffed it through a slit on the side of the communal bank of metal boxes into his, and at first Rita agonized about what might have happened. Her eyesight wasn’t as good as it used to be, and her arthritis made it difficult to push the letter through the slightly rusted opening. Had she accidentally slipped it into the adjacent box, the one that belonged to the hello-family? How mortifying that would be! She obsessed about this possibility all week, tormenting herself in a spiral I call catastrophizing, until a text arrived from Myron.
In my office, Rita had read me the text: “‘Rita, thank you for sharing yourself with me. I want to talk with you, but there’s a lot to absorb, and I need a bit more time. Back in touch soon, M.’
“A lot to absorb!” Rita exclaimed. “I know what he’s absorbing—what a monster I am and how grateful he is to have spared himself! Now that he knows the truth, he’s absorbing how he can retract everything he said when he mauled me in the parking lot!”
I noted how assaulted she felt by Myron’s perceived abandonment, how quickly a romantic kiss had turned into a mauling.
“That’s one explanation,” I said. “But another is that you’ve hidden yourself from him so deliberately and for so long that he needs some time to take in this new part of the picture. He kissed you in the parking lot, poured his heart out to you, and you’ve avoided him ever since. And now he gets this letter. That is a lot to absorb.”
Rita shook her head. “You see,” she went on as if she hadn’t heard a word I said, “this is exactly why it’s better to keep my distance.”
I told Rita what I tell everyone who’s afraid of getting hurt in relationships—which is to say, everyone with a heartbeat. I explained to her that even in the best possible relationship, you’re going to get hurt sometimes, and no matter how much you love somebody, you will at times hurt that person, not because you want to, but because you’re human. You will inevitably hurt your partner, your parents, your children, your closest friend—and they will hurt you—because if you sign up for intimacy, getting hurt is part of the deal.
But, I went on, what was so great about a loving intimacy was that there was room for repair. Therapists call this process rupture and repair, and if you had parents who acknowledged their mistakes and took responsibility for them and taught you as a child to acknowledge your mistakes and learn from them too, then ruptures won’t feel so cataclysmic in your adult relationships. If, however, your childhood ruptures didn’t come with loving repairs, it will take some practice for you to tolerate the ruptures, to stop believing that every rupture signals the end, and to trust that even if a relationship doesn’t work out, you will survive that rupture too. You will heal and self-repair and sign up for another relationship full of its own ruptures and repairs. It’s not ideal, opening yourself up like this, putting your shield down, but if you want the rewards of an intimate relationship, there’s no way around it.
Still, Rita called me every day to let me know that Myron hadn’t responded. “Radio silence,” she’d say into my voicemail, then add sarcastically, “He must still be absorbing.”
I urged her to stay connected to all the good in her life despite her anxiety around Myron, to not withdraw into hopelessness because something was painful, not to be like the person on a diet who messes up once and says, “Forget it! I’ll never lose weight,” and then binges for the rest of the week, making herself feel ten times worse. I told her to report to me on my voicemail what she was doing each day, and, dutifully, Rita would tell me that she had dinner with the hello-family, created the syllabus for her college class, took “the grandkids”—her honorary granddaughters—to the museum for an art lesson, filled orders from her website. But without fail, she’d end with a caustic crack about Myron.
Secretly, of course, I too was hoping that Myron would rise to the occasion and that he’d do so sooner rather than later. Rita had gone out on a limb by revealing herself to him, and I didn’t want the experience to confirm her deeply held belief that she was unlovable. As the days wore on, Rita got more antsy to hear from Myron—but so did I.
At our next session, I was relieved to hear that Rita and Myron had talked. And, indeed, he’d been taken aback by all that Rita had shared—and by the fact that she’d concealed so much. Who was this woman to whom he was drawn so strongly? Was this kind and caring person the same one who’d fled in fear while her husband hurt their children? Could this woman who doted on the hello-family kids be the same one who neglected her own? Was this funny, artistic, and whip-smart woman the same one who’d wiled away her days in a haze of depression? And if so, what did this mean? What effect might it have not just on Myron, but on his children and grandchildren? After all, he reasoned, whomever he dated would be woven into the fabric of his close-knit family.