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.
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.
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