Free Days with George

by Colin Campbell

  Her answer: “I just don’t want to be married anymore.”

  At the end of each session Jane would bolt for the door. At the close of our last session, once Jane had left, the counselor asked me to stay awhile longer.

  “Look,” she said. “This isn’t about you.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Jane obviously has some things she has to deal with on her own. They may not have anything to do with your marriage, but they seem to affect her ability to be in this marriage right now. We’re not making any progress, so I suggest both of you seek individual counseling and deal with your own issues separately.”

  At this point I still believed that Jane would eventually come around, but hearing the counselor’s advice brought the truth home to me. My relationship with Jane was over.

  “I guess you’re right” was all I could say to the counselor. I left her office and for the first time started to give up hope.

  When I wasn’t at work, time went by in a blur. I was able to stay focused at the office, and invested all my energy into my job, which, thankfully, was still going quite well. I stayed at the office late into the evening most days, before coming home, eating whatever took the least effort to prepare and spending the rest of the night alternating between smoking on the back porch and sitting in front of the television. One particularly bad night, I was on the couch in the early hours of the morning when a mental health public service announcement came on the TV. In it, an unshaven actor wearing sloppy clothes was lying on a couch looking borderline catatonic. Whoa, that’s me, I thought. Maybe I should do something about this.

  My father always said that only crazy people go to therapists. In fact, before considering marriage counseling, those words were ringing in my head. His influence caused me to fear therapy and see it as a sign of failure and a source of ridicule. At a certain point, though, I just got sick of being miserable. Spring had arrived. The outside world became more inviting and I felt more and more like rejoining it. I slowly started to reconnect with friends. My old friend Catherine and her husband, John, had been among the first of my friends to reach out to me, and they’d taken me under their wing, inviting me to Sunday dinner and checking in on me frequently.

  Catherine was a successful psychotherapist with a private practice in downtown Toronto. “You should talk to someone,” she said.

  “You mean, like, a therapist?” I asked.

  “Yes. I can recommend a few people.”

  “Am I really that messed up?”

  She smiled. “I think it would be helpful for you to have someone to talk to,” she said.

  With Catherine’s help, my family doctor referred me to a psychiatrist. Dr. Edward Hamer’s office was on the third floor of an old, eight-story, brown-brick medical building on Bloor Street. The entrance was wedged between a family-owned convenience store and a Shoppers Drug Mart. The directory in the lobby listed practitioners of every medical specialty known to humankind: dentistry, podiatry, otolaryngology, orthodontics, urology—and psychiatry, the specialty of the man who was supposed to guide me back to happiness. What the hell was I doing?

  There was only one working elevator up to Dr. Hamer’s floor. The size of a closet, it shuddered ominously as it climbed, and smelled of medicine and body odor. Dr. Hamer’s office was at the end of a dingy hallway. I pressed the buzzer and a short while later I heard the click of the door unlocking. I tentatively opened it and found myself in an empty waiting room.

  The room was poorly lit and smelled like mothballs. I sat down and picked up a well-worn New Yorker magazine and started leafing through it anxiously. I can’t believe I’m doing this, I thought. I considered leaving, but just as I was readying myself to do so, the dark wooden door of Dr. Hamer’s office opened.

  A patient, who had obviously been crying, mumbled a quick thank-you and exited. Dr. Hamer was standing in the threshold of his office. He was a conservative and expressionless man with big glasses and thinning hair. He looked exactly the way I imagined a psychiatrist would. “Colin,” he said, nodding at me in greeting. I got up and followed him into his office.

  He spoke over his shoulder as he made his way to a green armchair near the head of a long leather couch. “As I mentioned on the phone when you made the appointment, before I agree to treat you, we need to run through an initial assessment. So today I’m just going to ask you a series of questions to get a sense of our best course of action and the type of help I may be able to provide.” He stopped in front of the chair and motioned at the couch. “If that’s agreeable to you, please lie down and we’ll begin.”

  Lie down? Like, on a couch? “The assessment sounds okay,” I said, taking a seat on the edge of the couch. “I’m fine to just sit like this and talk to you.”

  His expression remained neutral, but something in his voice changed. “If you don’t lie down, I can’t help you,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “We can’t have a face-to-face conversation?”

  He shook his head slowly. “That’s not how this works,” he said. “If you want my help, you’ll have to do as I ask and lie down.”

  I sighed and rolled my eyes … and then did as he’d requested.

  I had expected him to ask me why I’d come, ask about Jane and my marriage and everything that had made me sad and broken enough to need psychotherapy. But when his questions began—then continued one after another—there didn’t seem to be any clear theme or connection to my current crisis.

  “Do you like your mother?” he inquired. “Do you like your father? Are you okay with heights? Confined spaces? Do you have any phobias at all? Are you an organized person? Are you punctual? Do you get along with others easily?”

  I didn’t tell the truth. Instead I gave Dr. Hamer the answers I thought he wanted to hear—the ones I thought were right. Sitting up on the couch to make eye contact with him pretty regularly, I painted an idyllic childhood, a family free from dysfunction. I made myself out to be a perfectly stable, well-adjusted person with no irrational fears and anxieties. He didn’t comment on any of my answers, just made notes on a large pad of paper that rested in his lap. Lying on my back like Charlie Brown at a therapy session with Lucy, I felt every bit as self-conscious and ridiculous as I’d expected. Dr. Hamer just kept firing away: “Do you see people who aren’t really there? Do you hear voices in your head?”

  “Well,” I answered, “not loud ones.” I was hoping for a laugh, but all I got was the sound of his pen scratching. “I was just joking.”

  Silence.

  He started writing again.

  “You don’t have to write that down,” I said.

  He kept writing. “You’re going to write down everything, aren’t you?” I queried. He wrote that down, too.

  The questions continued for more than half an hour. At the end of the session Dr. Hamer rendered his verdict: “You can come once a week, tell me how you feel and share your problems,” he said. “It could help your immediate feelings. However, it won’t be a long-term fix for you.” He paused to let that settle in. “If you really want to get to the root of your issues, I recommend that you come four times a week.”

  Four times a week! Was I that crazy? Dr. Hamer continued before I could say anything. “I want you to know that the frequency isn’t a commentary on you or the severity of your depression. Only certain patients can benefit from this kind of approach. Based on today’s assessment, I think you’re a candidate.”

  I was devastated; I must really be in trouble if I needed to see him that often.

  “I don’t know if I can handle four times a week,” I told him. “At the very least, I’ll have to see what I can do with my work schedule.”

  “You’re free to think about it and get a second opinion,” he answered. “But I’ll need to know what you want to do within a few days.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said. “I’ll consider it.”

  I got in touch with Catherine, who enthusiastically and passionately recommen
ded moving forward with the therapy, calling it a real opportunity for emotional growth and telling me I’d feel much better if I did it. So, not feeling that I had a better option, I rejigged my work schedule, and started to see Dr. Hamer at the recommended frequency. It took some getting used to. Some days I’d spout like I’d had a few too many cups of coffee. Other days it would be too difficult to share my emotions, and I would walk into Dr. Hamer’s office and, before I’d even made the couch, tell him, “I’m not talking to you today.” We’d sit in silence for forty-five minutes and when the time was up, I’d leave. Whichever version of me showed up, Dr. Hamer would sit as expressive as a Buckingham Palace guard and methodically question and record every thought, impulse and life experience.

  On one occasion, as I came into the room I mentioned it was a nice day out—just making small talk. “Really?” he asked. “Why is it nice?”

  “The sun’s out. It’s warm … I was just being polite.”

  “What makes you think you need to be polite?”

  “I don’t know!” Everything with him, even the most innocuous small talk, turned into an inquisition. One time I got so frustrated with his incessant questioning I muttered “Idiot” under my breath.

  “I heard you say that,” he said. “Why do you think I’m an idiot?” And it began all over again.

  It took three or four months, deep into the summer, but eventually I started to notice small progress in myself. Rather than helping me focus on Jane, Dr. Hamer had gone back to some of my earliest memories: the formative experiences behind quirks, fears and issues I often didn’t even know I had. Some sessions would end with me shattered and crying, afraid to go back out into normal life, but occasionally, on breakthrough days, I started to make sense of things that had escaped me my entire life. I still had trouble sleeping. I still missed Jane. I still over-worked and smoked and left the house a pigsty. But something in me was moving, changing.

  I was getting better.

  FOUR

  I was almost back on my feet by the end of the summer, but I was also, in Dr. Hamer’s words, “still pretty wobbly.” Though I had managed to pull myself from my emotional rock bottom, I still hadn’t managed to put all that much distance between Jane and me yet. There was a sense that any progress I’d made could unravel with one good pull, and as the summer slipped into fall—bringing back the cold and darkness that had been such bitter constants in the months when I was at my worst—I started to feel the first tugs on an invisible thread pulling me back down. I began to feel more and more anxious about being alone.

  One suggestion for alleviating that anxiety came from a conversation with my friend Matt. Matt worked for a digital company that shared office space with MKTG. I liked Matt. He had recently graduated from university, worked hard, had a passion for hockey and had a dry sense of humor that always made me laugh—something I certainly hadn’t been doing enough of. One day he dropped by my office and asked if I wanted to grab some lunch. Matt didn’t know all the background about Jane and me, so I caught him up over our meal.

  “That’s a bummer,” he said, before pausing to swallow his food. “But that might not be the worst thing in the world.”

  “Well, of course it’s not the ‘worst thing in the world,’ ” I said a bit sarcastically.

  “Sorry. All I meant was that it’s probably better not to rush into a relationship where someone’s going to be expecting things from you. You’ve got to give yourself some time.”

  He was right. In fact, he was an echo. During my smoking binges out on the back porch, my grandfather continued to visit me, and one of the things he kept saying, in my head, was “Wait a bit, wait a bit. There’s no need to rush things.” Over and over again in that quiet, calm voice he used with me when I was a kid.

  “I think it’s just been bugging me because I feel a bit lonely in the house by myself,” I now told Matt. “I’ve never felt lonely before. It’s weird. The house is a lot of space for one person.”

  “You know what you should do?” Matt said, waiting a beat for effect. “You should get a dog.” He was grinning as though he’d just solved global hunger.

  “That’s it, eh? That’s the big solution?”

  “That’s it,” he answered with total sincerity. He took a huge bite of his sandwich. “Think about it. Dogs are loyal—they aren’t going to pack their stuff up and leave for no reason. As kids we always had dogs. My family helped train guide dogs for the blind. They’re great! You’ll get out and walk around a lot, meet people … maybe meet a hot girl. It’ll be amazing. It will change your life.”

  “It will change my life,” I said, imitating him.

  “It will. And you have a big, empty house right across from a park.”

  We finished eating and walked back to work without any more dog talk, but over the next few weeks, once a day or so when we passed in the office, he’d ask me, “So, you get that dog yet?”

  “Still thinking about it.”

  A few hours later he’d poke his head into my office. “So, you know who man’s best friend is?”

  “Not Matt,” I’d reply.

  It went on and on like this, day after day. I pretended I wasn’t listening, but in truth I gave the idea of getting a dog some thought.

  By mid December, I got an email from Matt. Its subject line: “Get that dog yet?”

  The email went something like this:

  Hey Colin,

  No pressure, but I thought I’d send you this link for a great dog website, Petfinder.com. It’s like a dating site, but instead of pretty girls who will probably see your picture and never write you back (ha-ha), this one is full of dogs that don’t care what you look like but want your house and the park across the street. Beats a cage any day.

  Take a look. You can give a dog a good home and get some company in return. And I might stop nagging you. And you would be saving a life.

  Let me know if you need any help.

  Matt

  Matt wasn’t too far off on his dating-site comparison. Petfinder aggregates information about rescue animals available for adoption all over North America. Each dog gets its own profile page with information about its breed and background. There were thousands of lonely dogs looking for their “forever homes.” But as I scrolled down the pages, one of the pictures stopped me in my tracks.

  This dog was a Landseer Newfoundland, unlike any dog I’d seen before. Striking, with the typically Newfoundland pitch-black head perched atop a vast white body. There was nothing in the picture to measure him against, but something about the way he held himself, head up and chest out, gave an aura of immensity. He had a long, shaggy coat, floppy ears and a soft muzzle with a dusting of white above his nose, but what leaped out at me most were his eyes. They were a dark brown that seemed light against the black sea of his face. Sparkling with intelligence, they also looked weighed down by experience, with lower lids that drooped to expose a pair of pink half-moons. They were the eyes of an old soul. He was just over a year old and they listed his name as Kong.

  Then reality set in. What in the world was I doing? The last thing I needed in my state was to adopt a dog that no doubt had his own problems. Did I not have enough problems myself? Who did I think I was that I wanted to save the world, when I couldn’t even get myself on an even keel? Yet, looking into those eyes, I was compelled to do something. How could anyone abandon such an incredibly beautiful dog? Could I really handle a dog this big? But before I knew what I was doing, my fingers were on the keyboard, tapping out a response to Matt:

  Matt,

  Thank you for hounding me (pun intended). This is a great site. I saw one dog in particular that’s making me seriously think about your advice.

  I’ll let you know how it goes.

  Colin

  Over the next few days I did some research into the Newfoundland breed. Despite being among the largest dogs, with some males tipping the scales at over two hundred pounds, Newfoundlands are considered the gentlest of all breeds and are re
vered for their nurturing and gentle nature with children. (Nana, the nursemaid dog in Peter Pan, was a Newfoundland.) Newfs have webbed paws and are expert swimmers. They were specifically bred in Atlantic Canada to haul nets and to save fishermen from drowning by towing them to safety. They are noted for their bravery and loyalty, with many of them having served for Allied troops in both world wars.

  I thought back to my grandfather and his service during World War II, when his troop carrier struck a mine and sank 150 yards from shore and my grandfather took it upon himself to rescue his injured comrades. He wrapped their arms around his neck and, one by one, towed them to shore. He was decorated for his bravery.

  When I was done researching Newfoundland dogs, I researched shelter dogs a bit more and learned that in 2012, in the United States alone, over 2.7 million abandoned dogs were put to death. That’s 6,267 a day. I also learned that younger, smaller dogs tend to get adopted sooner; older dogs and big dogs are not so lucky. Finally, I learned what a big, red URGENT banner means when it appears beside a dog’s profile. It means that animal is nearing its expiry date. At overcrowded municipal shelters a dog is usually kept for only seventy-two hours, after which, if it isn’t claimed or adopted, it will be euthanized. Then the dog’s profile is quietly removed from the website.

  I looked at Kong’s picture over and over. He had been abandoned. I felt I had to do something, for him as much as for myself. That Newfoundlands are bred as ocean rescue dogs certainly sealed my interest. I love the water. Always have. My happiest memories of being a kid were at my grandfather’s cottage in Nova Scotia, where we spent hours swimming in the ocean each summer. There were days when the only time my brother and I came out of the water was when we were called out to eat. In university I worked as a lifeguard and taught myself how to surf. My friend Mike and I were among the first people in Nova Scotia to pick up the sport, which has since grown popular there. I also worked with the Canadian Coast Guard, doing inshore search and rescue as a summer student. Getting a dog that loved the water appealed to me. I imagined the dog and me walking along the shore of Lake Ontario. I imagined the joy of having a companion, of not having to walk alone. A few days after Matt first sent me the link, I called the contact number.