I guess I’m saying that I’m not ready to talk or try to have any kind of relationship right now, or maybe ever, but I wanted you to know that I remembered you at your best, which wasn’t nearly enough, but it was something. For what it’s worth, all of us were shocked by your letter. We all talked about it and agreed that even if we never have a relationship with you, we need to get our lives together because, like I said, if you can, so can we. My therapist said that maybe I don’t want to get my life together because then you would win. I didn’t know what she meant, but I think now I do. Or I’m starting to.
Anyway, happy birthday.
From,
Robin
P.S. Nice website.
Rita looks up from the email. She’s not sure what to make of it. She wishes her sons had also replied, because she worries deeply about all of her kids. About Robin, who still hasn’t left Roger. The boys—one still struggling with addiction issues, one divorced for the second time from a “nasty, critical woman who tricked him into marriage with a fake pregnancy,” and the little one, who left college because of a learning disability, and has jumped from job to job ever since. Rita says she’s tried to help, but they won’t talk to her, and besides, what could she do for them now anyway? She’s given financial help when asked, but that’s all the contact they want.
“I worry about them,” she says. “I worry all the time.”
“Maybe,” I say, “instead of worrying about them, you can love them. All you can do is find a way to love them that’s about what they need from you and not what you need from them right now.”
I think about what it must have been like for her kids to receive her letter. Rita had wanted to tell them about her relationship with the hello-family kids, to show them that she’s changed, to let them see her loving maternal side that she’d like to offer them too. But I suggested that she leave that out for now. I imagined that they’d feel resentful, like the patient who told me about his father who left the family and married a younger woman and had kids with her. His father had been cranky and emotionally absent, but the kids in family number two got the Dad of the Year—he coached their soccer teams, attended their piano recitals, volunteered in their schools, took them on vacations, knew the names of their friends. My patient felt like an outsider, an unwanted visitor in family number two, and he was, like many people with similar stories, deeply hurt at seeing his dad become the father he wanted—but to different children.
“It’s an opening,” I say of the letter.
Eventually, two of the boys reach out to Rita and meet Myron. For the first time in the boys’ lives, they start to form a relationship with a reliable, loving father figure. The youngest, though, remains hobbled by his anger. All of her children are distant and furious, but that’s okay—at least this time, Rita is able to hear them without shielding herself with defensiveness or tears. Robin moved into a studio apartment and got an administrative job at a mental-health clinic. Rita had encouraged her to move west to be close to her and Myron, to provide some community as she rebuilds her life after Roger, but Robin doesn’t want to leave her therapist (or, Rita suspects, Roger)—not yet.
It’s not an ideal family, or even a functional one, but it’s family. Rita revels in it but also reckons with the pain of all that she cannot fix.
And though Rita’s days are finally full, she does have time to add a few more products to her website. One is a welcome sign that can be hung in people’s entryways. It consists of two large words surrounded by various stick figures who all look unhinged in their own ways. The sign reads HELLO, FAMILY!
The second is a print she created for Myron’s daughter, a teacher, who saw this message on a Post-it above Rita’s desk and asked if she’d make an artistic version for her classroom to teach kids resilience. It reads FAILURE IS PART OF BEING HUMAN.
“I must have read that somewhere,” she told me, “but I couldn’t find an attribution.” In fact, it was something I had said to her in session once, but I don’t mind that she doesn’t remember. Irvin Yalom, the psychiatrist, wrote that it was “far better that [a patient make progress but] forget what we talked about than the opposite possibility (a more popular choice for patients)—to remember precisely what was talked about but to remain unchanged.”
Rita’s third addition is a small print featuring two abstract gray-haired people, their bodies entwined and in motion, surrounded by cartoon-like exclamations: Ouch . . . my back! Slow down . . . my heart! In elegant calligraphy above the bodies, she wrote, OLD PEOPLE STILL FUCK.
It’s her best-selling piece to date.
55
It’s My Party and You’ll Cry if You Want To
The email arrives and my fingers freeze on the keyboard. The subject line reads It’s a party . . . wear black! The sender is Matt, Julie’s husband, and I decide to let the email sit there until I’m finished with patients for the day. I don’t want to open Julie’s funeral invitation just before going into session.
I think again about the hierarchy of pain. When I first started seeing Julie, I imagined that it would be hard going from hearing about her CT scans and tumors to listening to “So, I think the babysitter is stealing from me” and “Why do I always have to initiate sex?”
You think you have problems? I worried I’d say in my head.
But it turned out that being with Julie made me more compassionate. Other patients’ problems mattered too: their betrayal by the person who’d been trusted to watch their child; their feelings of shame and emptiness when rejected by their spouses. Underneath these details were the same essential questions Julie had been forced to face: How do I feel safe in a world of uncertainty? How do I connect? Seeing Julie called forth in me an even greater sense of responsibility to my other patients. Every hour counts for all of us, and I want to be fully present in the therapy hour I spend with each one.
After my last patient leaves, I slowly write my chart notes, procrastinating before finally opening the email. The invitation includes a note from Julie explaining that she wants people to come to a “cry-your-eyes-out goodbye party” and that she hopes her single friends might take advantage of the gathering “because if you meet at a funeral you’ll always remember how important love and life are, and to let the small stuff go.” It also contains a link to the obituary that Julie had crafted in my office.
I send my condolences to Matt, and a minute later, I get another email that he indicates Julie left for me. Because I’m dead, I’ll cut to the chase, it says. You said you’d come to my goodbye party. I’ll know if you’re not there. Remember to be my sister’s buffer for Aunt Aileen, the one who always . . . well, you know the story. You know all my stories.
There’s a P.S. from Matt: Please be there with us.
Of course I want to be there, and I’d considered the potential complications before I made my promise to Julie. Not every therapist would make the same choice. Some worry that this might be crossing a line—being overly invested, as it were. And while in some instances that might be true, it seems odd that in a profession dedicated to the human condition, therapists are expected to compartmentalize their humanity when it comes to their patients’ deaths. This doesn’t apply to other professionals in the person’s life: Julie’s attorney, chiropractor, oncologist. Nobody blinks if they attend the funeral. Therapists, though, are expected to keep their distance. But what if their being there would comfort their patients’ families? And what if it would comfort the therapists themselves?