Chapter 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?

Most of the time, therapists grieve their patients' deaths in private. Who could I talk to about Julie's death other than my colleagues in my consultation group or Wendell? And even then, none of them knew her the way I did or the way her family and friends (who get to grieve together) did. The therapist is left to grieve alone.

Even at the funeral, there are confidentiality issues to consider. Our duty to protect our patients' confidentiality doesn't end with death. A wife whose husband has committed suicide, for instance, may call up her husband's therapist to get some answers, but therapists can't breach that code. Those files, those interactions, are protected. Similarly, if I attend a patient's funeral and somebody asks how I knew the deceased, I can't say I was the therapist. These issues come up more in unexpected deaths—suicide, overdose, heart attack, car accident—than in situations like Julie's. After all, as therapists, we discuss things with patients—and Julie and I had discussed her wish that I attend the funeral.

"You promised you'd stay with me to the end," she'd said with a sideways grin about a month before she died. "You can't abandon me at my own funeral, can you?"

In Julie's last weeks, we talked about how she wanted to say goodbye to her family and friends. What do you want to leave with them? What do you want them to leave you with?

I wasn't talking about transformative deathbed conversations—those are mostly fantasies. People may seek peace and clarity, understanding and healing, but deathbeds themselves are often a stew of drugs, fear, confusion, weakness. That's why it's especially important to be the people we want to be now, to become more open and expansive while we're able. A lot will be left dangling if we wait too long. I remember a patient who, after years of indecisiveness, finally reached out to his biological father who had been seeking a relationship, only to be devastated to learn that he was lying unconscious, in a coma, and would die within a week.

We also place undue pressure on those last moments, allowing them to supersede whatever came before. I had a patient whose wife collapsed and died in midconversation, as he was being defensive about not doing his share of the laundry. "She died mad at me, thinking I was a schmuck," he said. In fact, they'd had a strong marriage and loved each other deeply. But because this one argument became enshrined as the final words they exchanged, it took on a significance that it wouldn't otherwise have had.

Near the end, Julie fell asleep more often during our sessions, and if before it seemed like time stopped whenever she came to see me, now it felt like a dress rehearsal for her death; she was "trying on" what it would feel like in the stillness without the terror she had of being alone.

"Almost is always the hardest, isn't it?" she said one afternoon. "Almost getting something. Almost having a baby. Almost getting a clean scan. Almost not having cancer anymore." I thought about how many people avoid trying for things they really want in life because it's more painful to get close to the goal but not achieve it than not to have taken the chance in the first place.

During those luxuriously quiet sessions, Julie said that she wanted to die at home, and for our last few sessions, that's where I saw her. She had surrounded her bed with photos of everyone she loved, and she played Scrabble and watched The Bachelor reruns and listened to her favorite music and received visitors.

Finally, though, even enjoying those pleasures became difficult. Julie told her family, "I want to live, but I don't want to live like this," and they understood this to mean that she would stop eating. She was no longer able to eat most foods anyway. When she decided the life she had left wasn't enough of a life to sustain, her body naturally followed suit, and she was gone within days.

We didn't have a profound "grand finale," as Julie had been calling our final session. Her last words to me were about steak. "God, what I would give for a steak!" she said, her voice weak and barely audible. "They better have steak wherever I'm going." And then she fell asleep. It was an ending not unlike our sessions, where even though "our time is up," the conversation lingers. In the best goodbyes, there's always the feeling that there's something more to say.

I'm astounded—though I shouldn't be—by the turnout at Julie's funeral party. There are hundreds of people here from all parts of her life: her childhood friends, her summer-camp friends, her marathon-training friends, her book-club friends, her college friends, her graduate-school friends, her work friends and colleagues (from both the university and Trader Joe's), her parents, both sets of grandparents, Matt's parents, both of their siblings. I know who they are because people from all of these groups get up and talk about Julie, telling stories of who she was and what she meant to them.

When it's Matt's turn, everyone goes silent, and sitting in the back row, I look down at my iced tea and the napkin in my hand. IT'S MY PARTY AND YOU'LL CRY IF YOU WANT TO! it says. Earlier I'd noticed a big banner that read I STILL CHOOSE NEITHER.

Matt takes some time to settle himself before he speaks. When he does, he shares an anecdote about how Julie had written a book for him to have after she was gone, and she titled it, The Shortest Longest Romance: An Epic Love and Loss Story. He loses it here, then slowly composes himself and keeps going.

He explains that in the book, he was surprised to find that near the end of the story—their story—Julie had included a chapter on how she hoped Matt would always have love in his life. She encouraged him to be honest and kind to what she called his "grief girlfriends"—the rebound girlfriends, the women he'll date as he heals. Don't mislead them, she wrote. Maybe you can get something from each other. She followed this with a charming and hilarious dating profile that Matt could use to find his grief girlfriends, and then she got more serious. She wrote the most achingly beautiful love letter in the form of another dating profile that Matt could use to find the person he'd end up with for good. She talked about his quirks, his devotion, their steamy sex life, the incredible family she inherited (and that, presumably, this new woman would inherit), and what an amazing father he'd be. She knew this, she wrote, because they got to be parents together—though in utero and for only a matter of months.

The people in the crowd are simultaneously crying and laughing by the time Matt finishes reading. Everyone should have at least one epic love story in their lives, Julie concluded. Ours was that for me. If we're lucky, we might get two. I wish you another epic love story.

We all think it ends there, but then Matt says that he feels it's only fair that Julie have love wherever she is too. So in that spirit, he says, he's written her a dating profile for heaven.

There are a few chuckles, although they're hesitant at first. Is this too morbid? But no, it's exactly what Julie would have wanted, I think. It's out-there and uncomfortable and funny and sad, and soon everyone is laugh-sobbing with abandon. She hates mushrooms, Matt has written to her heavenly beau, don't serve her anything with mushrooms. And If there's a Trader Joe's, and she says that she wants to work there, be supportive. You'll also get great discounts.

He goes on to talk about how Julie rebelled against death in many ways, but primarily by what Matt liked to call "doing kindnesses" for others, leaving the world a better place than she found it. He doesn't enumerate them, but I know what they are—and the recipients of her kindnesses all speak about them anyway.

I'm glad I came, glad that I got to fulfill my promise to Julie and also see a side of her that I can never know about any of my patients—what their lives look like outside of the therapy office. One on one, therapists get depth but not breadth, words without illustrations. Despite being the ultimate insider in terms of Julie's thoughts and feelings, I'm an outsider here among all these people I don't know but who knew Julie. We're told, as therapists, that if we do attend a patient's funeral, we should stay off to the side, avoid interacting. I do this, but just as I'm about to leave, a friendly couple starts talking to me. They say that Julie is responsible for their marriage—she set them up on a blind date five years ago. I smile at their story, then try to excuse myself, but before I can, the woman in the couple asks, "And how did you know Julie?"

"She was a friend," I say reflexively, mindful of confidentiality, but the moment I say it, I realize it also feels true.

"Will you think about me?" Julie used to ask me before she went in for her various surgeries, and I always told her I would. The assurance soothed her, helped her stay centered in the midst of her anxiety about going under the knife.

Later, though, when it became clear that Julie would die, that question took on another meaning: Will a part of me remain alive in you?

Julie had recently told Matt that she felt horrible for dying on him, and the next day he sent her a note with a lyric from the musical The Secret Garden. In it, the ghost of a beloved wife asks her grieving husband if he could forgive her, if he could hold her in his heart and "‘find some new way to love me/Now that we're apart.'" Matt had written, Yes. He added that he didn't believe that people disappeared but that something in us was eternal and survived.

Walking to my car that day, I hear Julie's question: Will you think about me?

All these years later, I still do.

I remember her most in the silences.

Chapter 56 Happiness Is Sometimes

"Honestly, don't hold back. Do you think I'm an asshole?" John asks as he sets down the bag with our lunches. He's brought his dog Rosie to session today—her "danny" was ill and Margo's out of town—and she's on John's lap, sniffing the takeout containers. Now John's eyes are on me, as are Rosie's beady ones, as if they're both awaiting my response.

I'm caught off guard by his question. If I say yes, I might hurt John, and the last thing I want to do is hurt him. If I say no, I might be condoning some of his more asshole-like behaviors instead of creating awareness around them. The second-to-last thing I want to do is to be John's yes-man. I could turn the question around on him: Do you think you're an asshole? But I'm more interested in something else: Why is he asking—and why now?

John flicks off his slip-on sneakers, but instead of arranging himself cross-legged on the couch, he leans forward, elbows on knees. Rosie jumps down, positions herself on the floor, and looks up at John. He hands her a treat. "Here you go, my little princess," he croons.

"You're not going to believe this," he says, looking back at me, "but I made a, uh, unfortunate comment to Margo a few nights ago. She said that her therapist recommended a couples therapist for us, and I said that I wanted to get a referral from you because I don't necessarily trust her idiot therapist's suggestion. I knew the second it came out of my mouth that I should have filtered, but it was too late, and Margo just tore into me. ‘My idiot therapist?' she said. ‘Mine?' She said that if my therapist can't see what an asshole I am, then I'm going to the idiot therapist. I apologized for calling her therapist an idiot and she apologized for calling me an asshole, and then we both started laughing, and I can't remember the last time we laughed like that together. We couldn't stop, and the girls heard us and they came in and looked at us like we were a couple of crazy people. ‘What's so funny?' they kept asking but we couldn't explain it. I don't think we even knew what was so funny.

"Then the girls started laughing and we were all laughing about the fact that we couldn't stop laughing. Ruby got on the floor and started rolling around, and then so did Gracie, and then Margo and I looked at each other and we got on the floor and all four of us were rolling around on our bedroom floor and laughing. And then Rosie runs over to see what all the commotion's about, and when she sees us rolling around the floor, she freezes, right there in the doorway. She just stands there shaking her head, like, You humans are too much. And then she runs away. And then we laughed at Rosie, and as I was rolling around on the floor with my wife and my kids and the dog is barking at us from the other room, I watched the scene, almost from above, like I was observing it and living it at the same time, and I thought, I love my fucking family."

He basks in the thought for a second before continuing.

"I felt the happiest I've been in a long time," he says. "And you know what? Margo and I actually had a really nice night together after that. So much of the tension that's normally between us was gone." John smiles at the memory. "But then," John continues, "I don't know what happened. I've been sleeping much better, but that night I was up for hours thinking about what Margo said about my being an asshole. I couldn't get it out of my head. Because I know you don't think I'm an asshole. I mean, you obviously like me. So then I thought, Wait, what if Margo's right? What if I'm an asshole but you can't see it? Then you really are an idiot therapist. So which is it—am I an asshole, or are you an idiot?"

What a trap, I think. Either I say he's an asshole or I claim I'm an idiot. I think of Julie and the phrase that her friends wrote in her high-school yearbook: I choose neither.

"Maybe there's a third possibility," I suggest.

"I want the truth," he says adamantly. A mentor once remarked that often in therapy, change happens "gradually, then suddenly," and that might be true for John too. I imagine that as John tossed and turned in bed, unable to sleep, the house of cards he'd built for himself about how everyone else was an idiot came crashing down, and now he's left with the wreckage: I'm an asshole. I'm not better than everyone else—special. My mom was wrong.

But that's not the truth either. It's simply the collapse of the narcissistic defense in the form of an overcorrection. John started out with the belief that "I'm good and you're bad," and now it's being turned upside down—"You're good and I'm bad." Neither is right.

"The truth as I see it," I say honestly, "is not that I'm an idiot or you're an asshole but that sometimes in order to protect yourself, you act like one."

I watch John for his reaction. He takes a breath and seems like he's about to say something flip but then decides not to. He's quiet for a minute, gazing at Rosie, who has fallen asleep.

"Yeah," he says. "I do act like an asshole." Then he smiles and adds, "Sometimes."

Recently John and I talked about the beauty of the word sometimes, how sometimes evens us out, keeps us in the comfortable middle rather than dangling on one end of the spectrum or the other, hanging on for dear life. It helps us escape from the tyranny of black-or-white thinking. John said that when he was struggling with the pressure of his marriage and his career, he used to think that there'd be a point when he'd be happy again, and then when Gabe died, he thought he'd never be happy again. Now, he says, he's come to feel it's not either/or, yes or no, always or never.

"Maybe happiness is sometimes," he says, leaning back on the sofa. It's an idea that brings him relief. "I guess it couldn't hurt to try that couples therapist," John adds, referring to the one Wendell apparently suggested. Margo and John had gone to couples therapy for a few sessions after Gabe died, but they were both so furious and ashamed—alternately blaming each other and themselves—that even when the therapist brought up the police report on the drunk driver as a contributing factor in the accident, John had no interest in what he called the "pointless postmortem." If Margo wanted therapy, he was all for it, but he saw no reason to prolong his own torture for an hour each week.

But now, he explains, he's agreeing to couples therapy because he's lost so much—his mom, his son, maybe even himself—and he wants to fight to keep Margo before it's too late.

In that spirit, recently he and Margo have begun—tentatively, delicately—to talk about Gabe, but also about many other things. They're learning who they are at this point in their lives and what that means going forward. And whatever the outcome, maybe, John reasons, a couples therapist can help.

"But if the guy's an idiot—" John starts, and I stop him.

"If you begin to feel that way," I say, "I'm going to encourage you to hang in there until you have more information. If the therapist is any good, the process might make you uncomfortable, and we can talk about that discomfort in here. Let's understand it together before you make a determination." I think about when I doubted Wendell, when I projected my discomfort onto him. I remember wondering what he was smoking when he first talked about my grief. I remember finding him corny at times and being skeptical of his competence at others.

Maybe we all need to doubt, rail against, and question before we can really let go.

John tells me that when he was having trouble falling asleep the other night, he started thinking about his childhood. Ever since he was a boy, he says, he wanted to be a doctor, but his family didn't have enough money to send him to medical school.

"I had no idea," I say. "What kind of doctor?"

John looks at me like the answer is evident. "Psychiatrist," he says.

John, a psychiatrist! I try to picture John seeing patients: Your mother-in-law said that? What an idiot!

"Why a psychiatrist?"

John rolls his eyes. "Because I was a kid whose mother died, obviously, and I want to save her or myself or something." He pauses. "That and I was too lazy to be a surgeon."

I'm fascinated by his self-awareness, even if he still covers his vulnerability with a joke.

Anyway, he continues, he had applied to medical school with the hope of substantial financial aid. He knew he would graduate with tremendous debt, but he figured that on a doctor's salary, he'd be able to pay it off. He did well in college, majoring in biology, but because he had to work twenty hours a week for his tuition, his grades weren't as good as they might have been. Certainly not as good as those of his fellow premed students, the gunners who pulled all-nighters and competed for top scores.

Still, he got interviews at several schools. Inevitably, though, the interviewer would make some "backhanded crack" about how great his application essays were and then try to manage his expectations, given his good-but-not-exceptional GPA. "You should be a writer!" more than one interviewer said, kidding but not. John was furious. Couldn't they see from his application that he had been working a job while doing a premed curriculum? Didn't that show his dedication? His work ethic? His ability to power through? Couldn't they see that a handful of Bs and that fucking C minus weren't indicators of his aptitude but of the fact that he never had time to study, much less stay after class if the labs went long?

In the end, John got into one medical school, but he wasn't given enough financial aid to live on. And since he knew he couldn't work his way through medical school the way he'd worked his way through college, he declined the offer and planted himself in front of the television set, despairing about his future. His father, a teacher like his late mother, suggested that John become a science teacher, but John kept thinking about the famous saying "Those who can't do, teach." John could do—he knew he could do the science classes in medical school—he just needed the money. And then, as he sat in front of the TV and cursed his dismal predicament, an idea came to him.

He thought, Hey, I can write this crap.

In short order, John bought a book on scriptwriting, cranked out an episode, sent it to an agent whose name he got from a directory, and was hired as a staff writer on a show. The show, he says, was "absolute garbage," but his plan was to write for three years, make some real money, then reapply to medical school. A year later, though, he was hired on a much better show, and the following year, he was hired on a hit show. By the time he'd saved up the money to get himself through medical school, John had an Emmy award on the mantel in his studio apartment. He decided not to reapply. What if he got into zero schools this time? Besides, he wanted to make money—the crazy money he could make in Hollywood—so his future kids wouldn't have to face those kinds of choices. Now, he says, he has so much money, his daughters could go to medical school many times over.

John stretches his arms, rearranges his legs. Rosie opens her eyes, sighs, closes them again. He goes on to say that he remembers standing on the awards stage with the show's staff and thinking, Ha! Take this, you morons! You can take your rejection letters and shove them up your asses! I've got a fucking Emmy!

Every year, as his show garnered more awards, John would feel a perverse sense of satisfaction. He'd remember all those people who hadn't believed he was good enough, but now here he was, with an office full of Emmys, a bank account full of cash, a portfolio full of retirement funds, and he'd think, They can't take any of this away from me.

I think about how "they" had taken away his mother.

"Who's ‘they'?" I ask John.

"The fucking med-school interviewers," he says. It's clear that his success was driven as much by revenge as passion. And I wonder who "they" are for him now. Most of us have a "they" in the audience, even though nobody's really watching, at least not how we think they are. The people who are watching us—the people who really see us—don't care about the false self, about the show we're putting on. Who are those people for John?

"Oh, come on," he says. "Everyone cares about the show we put on."

"You think I do?"

John sighs. "You're my therapist."

I shrug. So?

John relaxes into the couch.

"When I was rolling on the floor with my family," he says, "I had the strangest thought. I was thinking that I wished you could see us. I wanted you to see me in that moment because I felt so much like a person you don't really know. Because in here, you know, it's all doom and gloom. But driving over here today, I thought, Maybe she does know. Maybe you do have, like, some kind of therapist's sixth sense about people. Because—and I'm not sure if it's all of your annoying questions or the sadistic silences you put me through—but I feel like you get me, you know? And I don't want your head to get too big or anything, but I thought, you have a more complete picture of my total humanity than anyone else in my life."

I'm so moved I can't speak. I want to tell John how touched I am, not just by how he feels, but by his willingness to tell me. I want to tell him that I don't think I'll ever forget this moment, but before my voice returns John exclaims, "Oh, for Christ's sake, don't fucking cry on me again."

I chuckle, and so does John. And then I tell him what I was too choked up to say a minute ago. Now John is tearing up. I remember an earlier session when John said that Margo always cries, and I'd floated the idea that Margo was doing double duty, crying for both of them. Maybe you can let Margo cry, I'd suggested, and maybe you can let yourself cry too. John hasn't been ready to let Margo see him cry. Not yet. But given that he'll let me see it, I feel hopeful about their couples therapy.

John points to his tears. "See?" he says. "My fucking humanity."

"It's magnificent," I say.

We never open the takeout bag. We don't need the food between us anymore.

A few weeks later, I'm on the couch at home, bawling like a baby. I'm watching John's show, and the sociopathic character who's become softer around the edges is talking to his brother—a person we hadn't known existed until a couple of episodes ago. The sociopathic character and his brother had apparently been estranged, and the audience is learning in a flashback what the estrangement has been about: the brother blames the sociopathic character for his son's death.

It's a wrenching scene, and I think about John's childhood dream of becoming a psychiatrist and how his grasp of exquisite pain is what makes him such a powerful writer. Was this a gift left by the pain of his mother's death and, later, by Gabe's? Or was it the legacy of the relationships he shared with them while they were alive?

Gain and loss. Loss and gain. Which comes first?

In our next session, John will tell me that he watched this episode with Margo and that they talked about it with their couples therapist, who, so far, seems "not particularly idiotic." He'll tell me that as the episode began, he and Margo sat in their den on opposite ends of their couch, but when the flashback sequence began, he didn't know why, it was instinct or love or both, but something propelled him to get up and move right next to her so that their legs touched, and he wrapped his legs around hers as they both sobbed through the scene. As he tells me this, I'll think about how far away I sat from Wendell on that very first day and how long it was until I finally felt comfortable enough to move closer. John will say in this session that I was right—that it was, in fact, okay to cry with Margo, and that instead of drowning them both in a flood of tears, it brought them safely onto land.

When he says this, I'll imagine myself, John and Margo, and millions of viewers around the world lying on our couches, cracked open by his words—and I'll think how, for all of us, John made it okay to cry.

Chapter 57 Wendell

"I've been calling you Wendell," I tell my therapist, whose real name, I must confess, isn't actually Wendell.

I've just made an announcement in our session: I started writing again, a book of sorts, and he—my therapist, now called "Wendell"—plays a prominent role.

I hadn't planned to do this, I explain. A week ago, pulled to my desk by what felt like a gravitational force, I fired up my laptop, opened a blank document, and wrote for hours, as if a dam had broken. I felt like myself again, but different—more free, more relaxed, more alive—and I was experiencing what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow." It wasn't until I began yawning that I stepped away, noticed the time, and climbed into bed. I was tired, but in an energized way, ready for rest after having been awakened.

I got up the next morning refreshed, and that night, the mysterious force drew me again to my laptop. I thought about John's plan to become a psychiatrist. For many people, going into the depths of their thoughts and feelings is like going into a dark alley—they don't want to go there alone. People come to therapy to have somebody to go there with, and people watch John's show for a similar reason: it makes them feel less alone, allows them to see a version of themselves muddling through life on the screen. Maybe in this way, he is a psychiatrist to many—and maybe his bravery in writing about his own loss had inspired me to write about mine.

All week, I wrote about my breakup, my therapist, my mortality, our fear of taking responsibility for our lives and the need to do so in order to heal. I wrote about outdated stories and false narratives and how the past and the future can creep into the present, sometimes eclipsing it entirely. I wrote about holding on and letting go and how hard it is to walk around those prison bars even when freedom isn't just right in front of us but literally inside of us, in our minds. I wrote about how no matter our external circumstances, we have choices about how to live our lives and that, regardless of what has happened, what we've lost, or how old we are, as Rita put it, it ain't over till it's over. I wrote about how sometimes we have the key to a better life but need somebody to show us where we left the damn thing. I wrote about how for me, that person has been Wendell, and how for others, that person is sometimes me.

"Wendell . . ." Wendell says, trying on the name to see if it fits.

"Because I come here on Wednesdays," I say. "You know, Wednesdays with Wendell could be the title. The alliteration sort of sings, doesn't it? But mine's too personal to publish. It's just for me. It feels great to write again."

"It has meaning," he says, referring to our earlier conversations. It's true—I couldn't write the happiness book because I wasn't actually searching for happiness. I was searching for meaning—from which fulfillment and, yes, occasionally happiness ensue. And I couldn't get myself to cancel the book contract for so long because if I did, I'd have to let go of my crutch—the I-should-have-written-the-parenting-book litany that shielded me from examining anything else. Even after I canceled the contract, for weeks I held on to my regret and the fantasy of how much easier my life would have been had I written the original book. Like Rita, I was reluctant to give light and space to the triumph, still spending more time thinking about how I'd failed rather than how I'd freed myself.

But I got a second chance too. Wendell once pointed out that we talk to ourselves more than we'll talk to any other person over the course of our lives but that our words aren't always kind or true or helpful—or even respectful. Most of what we say to ourselves we'd never say to people we love or care about, like our friends or children. In therapy, we learn to pay close attention to those voices in our heads so that we can learn a better way to communicate with ourselves.

So today, when Wendell says, "It has meaning," I know that by "it," he's also referring to us, our time together. People often think they go to therapy for an explanation—say, why Boyfriend left, or why they've become depressed—but what they're really there for is an experience, something unique that's created between two people over time for about an hour each week. It was the meaning of this experience that allowed me to find meaning in other ways.

Months will pass before I'll toy with the idea of turning these late-night laptop sessions into a real book, before I'll decide to use my own experience to help others find meaning in their lives too. And once I get up the courage to expose myself in this way, that's what it will become: the book you are reading right now.

"Wendell," he says again, letting the name sink in. "I like it."

But there's one more story to tell.

"I'm ready to dance," I said to Wendell a few weeks before, surprising not just me, but him. I'd been thinking about the comment Wendell had made months earlier after I told him that I felt betrayed by my body on the dance floor at the wedding, by my foot that had lost its strength. He had offered to dance, to show me that I could both reach out for help and take a risk, and in doing so, I realized later, he had taken a risk. Therapists take risks all the time on behalf of their patients, making split-second decisions on the presumption that these risks will do far more good than harm. Therapy isn't a paint-by-numbers business, and sometimes the only way to move patients beyond their stuckness is by taking a risk in the room, by going out of the therapist's own comfort zone to teach by example.

"I mean, if the offer's still on the table," I added. Wendell paused. I smiled. It felt like a role reversal.

"It is," Wendell said, after the briefest of hesitations. "What would you like to dance to?"

"How about ‘Let It Be'?" I suggested. I'd been playing the Beatles tune on the piano recently and it popped into my head before I realized it wasn't exactly a dance song. I considered changing it to something by Prince or Beyoncé, but Wendell got up and grabbed his iPhone from his desk drawer, and within a minute the room filled with those iconic opening chords. I stood, but immediately got cold feet, stalling with words, telling Wendell that we needed something more clubby and danceable, something like . . .

That's when the song's chorus erupted—Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be—and Wendell started rocking out like a teenager at a heavy-metal concert, exaggerating for comic effect. I watched in amazement. There was buttoned-up Wendell, doing air guitar and all.

The song went on to its quieter, poignant second verse about the brokenhearted people, but Wendell was still rocking the hell out of this, as if to say, Prince or Beyoncé be damned. Life doesn't have to be perfect. I watched his tall, skinny frame jiving across the room, the courtyard a backdrop through the windows behind him, as I tried to get out of my head and just, well, let it be. I thought of my hairstylist Cory. Could I "just be"?

The chorus started up again and suddenly I was jiving across the room, too, laughing self-consciously at first, twirling in circles as Wendell went even crazier. But his dance training was apparent—or maybe it was less about his training and more about his sense of self. He wasn't doing anything fancy; he just seemed wholly at home in his skin. And he was right: despite the problems with my foot, I needed to get out on the dance floor anyway.

Now we were both dancing and singing out loud together—about the light that shines in the cloudy night—belting out the verses at the top of our lungs as if we were at a karaoke bar, dancing exuberantly in the same room in which I'd fallen apart in despair.

There will be an answer, let it be 

The music ended sooner than I'd expected, just as our sessions sometimes did. But rather than feeling like I needed more time, I found something satisfying about our time being up.

Not long before this, I'd told Wendell that I'd begun thinking about what it would be like to stop coming to therapy. So much had changed over the course of the year, and I was feeling not just better equipped to handle life's challenges and uncertainties but also more peaceful inside. Wendell had smiled—it was the smile I'd seen recently that seemed to mean I'm delighted for you—then asked if we should talk about termination.

I wavered. Not yet.

Now, though, as Wendell placed his iPhone back in his drawer and returned to his spot on the couch, the time seemed right. There's a biblical saying that translates roughly as "First you will do, then you will understand." Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and experience something before its meaning becomes apparent. It's one thing to talk about leaving behind a restrictive mindset. It's another to stop being so restrictive. The transfer of words into action, the freedom of it, made me want to carry that action outside the therapy room and into my life.

And with that, I was ready to set a date to leave.

Chapter 58 A Pause in the Conversation

The strangest thing about therapy is that it's structured around an ending. It begins with the knowledge that our time together is finite, and the successful outcome is that patients reach their goals and leave. The goals are different for each person, and therapists talk to their patients about what those goals are. Experiencing less anxiety? Relationships going more smoothly? Being kinder to yourself? The endpoint depends on the patient.

In the best case, the ending feels organic. There might be more to do, but we've done a lot, enough. The patient feels good—more resilient, more flexible, more able to navigate daily life. We've helped them hear the questions they didn't even know they were asking: Who am I? What do I want? What's in my way?

It seems silly, though, to deny that therapy is also about forming deep attachments to people and then saying goodbye.

Sometimes therapists find out what happens afterward, if patients come back at a later point in their lives. Other times we're left to wonder. How are they doing? Is Austin thriving after leaving his wife and coming out as a gay man in his late thirties? Is Janet's husband with Alzheimer's still alive? Did Stephanie stay in her marriage? There are so many stories left unfinished, so many people I think about but will never see again.

"Will you remember me?" Julie had asked, but the question wasn't unique to her situation.

And today I'm saying goodbye to Wendell. We've been talking about this goodbye for weeks, but now that it's here, I don't know how to thank him. As an intern, I was taught that when patients thank us, it helps to remind them that they did the hard work.

It's all you, we tend to say. I was just here to guide you. And in a sense, that's true. The fact that they picked up the phone and decided to come to therapy and then work through things every week is something no one else could do for them.

But we're also taught something else that we can't really understand until we've done thousands of hours of sessions: We grow in connection with others. Everyone needs to hear that other person's voice saying, I believe in you. I can see possibilities that you might not see quite yet. I imagine that something different can happen, in some form or another. In therapy we say, Let's edit your story.

Early on, when I was talking about Boyfriend, in my view an open-and-shut case of I'm-the-innocent-injured-party-here, Wendell said, "You want me to agree with you." I said that I didn't want him to agree with me (though I did!), I just wanted him to be sensitive to the shock I was experiencing, and then I proceeded to tell him exactly how I wanted him to do that. At that point he said that I was trying to "control the therapy" and that my attempts to bend situations to my liking might have played a part in my being blindsided by Boyfriend. Wendell didn't want to do therapy the way I wanted him to. Boyfriend didn't want to live in contented domesticity the way I wanted him to. Boyfriend tried to accommodate me until he couldn't anymore. Wendell wouldn't waste my time that way, he explained; he didn't want to say two years in, like Boyfriend did, Sorry, I can't do this.

I remember how I both loved and hated Wendell for saying that. It's like when somebody finally has the guts to tell you that you have a problem and you feel both defensive and relieved that this person is telling it like it is. That's the delicate work that therapists do. Wendell and I worked on my grief but also my self-imprisonment. And we did it together—it wasn't all me. Therapy can only work if it's a joint endeavor.

Nobody is going to save you, Wendell had said. Wendell didn't save me, but he did help me to save myself.

So when I express my gratitude to Wendell, he doesn't push away the compliment with a trite line of humility.

He says, "It's been my pleasure."

Recently John observed that a good television series leaves viewers feeling like the time between weekly episodes is simply a pause in the story. Similarly, he said, he began to realize that each of our sessions wasn't a discrete conversation but a continuing one and that the time between sessions was just a pause, not a period. I share this with Wendell as the minutes wind down in our final session. "Let's consider this a pause in the conversation," I say. "Like every week, but longer."

I tell him I may come back one day, because it's true; people leave and come back at different times in their lives. And when they do, the therapist is still there, sitting in the same chair, holding all of their shared history.

"We can still consider it a pause," Wendell replies, then adds the part that's hardest to say. "Even if we don't meet again."

I smile, knowing exactly what he means. Relationships in life don't really end, even if you never see the person again. Every person you've been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally)—all of them evoke memories, conscious or not. Often they inform how you relate to yourself and others. Sometimes you have conversations with them in your head; sometimes they speak to you in your sleep.

In the weeks leading up to this session, I've been having dreams about my leaving. In one, I imagine seeing Wendell at a conference. He's standing with somebody I don't know and I'm not sure if he's seen me. I feel a yawning distance between us and all that once lived between us. And then it happens: He looks over. I nod. He nods. There's a hint of a smile that only I can see.

In another dream, I'm visiting a friend at her therapy office—who this friend is isn't clear—and as I exit the elevator on her floor, I see Wendell leaving the suite. I wonder if he's there to meet with colleagues for a consultation group. Or maybe he has just left his own therapy session. I'm fascinated; Wendell's therapist! Is one of these therapists Wendell's? Is my friend Wendell's therapist? Either way, he's not self-conscious about it. "Hi," he says warmly on his way out. "Hi," I say on my way in.

I wonder what these dreams mean. I'm always embarrassed as a therapist when I can't understand my own dreams. I bring them to Wendell. He doesn't know what they mean either. We come up with theories, two therapists analyzing one therapist's dreams. We talk about how I felt during the dreams. We talk about how I feel now—both anxious and excited to move on. We talk about how hard it can be to get attached and say goodbye.

"Okay," I say now in Wendell's office. "A pause."

We have about a minute left, and I try to take in the moment, memorize it. Wendell with his crossed and impossibly long legs, his stylish button-down and khakis, and today's trendy blue lace-ups over socks with patterned squares. His face—curious, compassionate, present. His beard with the flecks of gray. The table with the tissues between us. The armoire, the bookshelf, and the desk that always has his laptop on it and nothing else.

Wendell pats his legs twice and stands but doesn't say his usual "See you next week" at the door.

"Bye," I say.

"Bye," he says and he reaches his hand out to shake mine.

When I release his hand, I turn and walk through the waiting room with the funky chairs and black-and-white photos and humming noise machine, then head down the corridor toward the building's exit. As I approach the main door, a woman enters from the street. She's holding her phone to her ear with one hand, pulling the door open with the other.

"I have to go. Can I call you in an hour?" she says into her phone. I hang back, watching her move down the hall. Sure enough, she opens the door to Wendell's office. I wonder what they'll talk about. I wonder if they'll ever dance.

I think about our conversation, wondering how the pause will hold.

Once outside, I quicken my step as I head to my car. I have patients to see at the office, people like me, all of us trying our best to get out of our own ways. The light on the corner is about to change so I run to catch it, but then I notice the warmth on my skin and I stop at the curb, tilting my face to the sun, soaking it in, lifting my eyes to the world.

Actually, I've got plenty of time.

The End