32
Emergency Session
“You sound like Goldilocks,” I said to Rita a month after her suicide ultimatum. Despite her tumultuous past, I’d been focusing on Rita’s present. It’s important to disrupt the depressive state with action, to create social connections and find a daily purpose, a compelling reason to get out of bed in the morning. Mindful of Rita’s goals, I tried to help her find ways to live better now, but nearly every suggestion I came up with was a bust.
The first thing Rita did was reject the wonderful psychiatrist I suggested that she see for a medication consultation. She looked him up, noticed that he was in his seventies, and pronounced him “too old to know the latest medications.” (Never mind that he teaches psychopharmacology to today’s medical students.) So I referred her to a younger psychiatrist, but she, Rita felt, was “too young to understand.” Then I referred her to a middle-aged psychiatrist, and although she had no objections (“He’s a very attractive fellow,” Rita noted), once she started the medication, it made her too sleepy. The psychiatrist changed her medication, but this one made her anxious and worsened her insomnia. She decided she was done with medication.
Meanwhile, Rita told me that a board position had opened up in her apartment building, and I encouraged her to join so that she could get to know her neighbors better. (“No, thank you,” she said. “The interesting tenants are too busy to join.”)
I’d brainstormed with her about volunteering, perhaps getting involved in the art world or at a museum, since her passions were painting and art history, but she came up with reasons to dismiss these suggestions as well. I talked with her about how she might make contact with her adult children, who had, to this point, shut her out of their lives, but she felt she couldn’t handle another failed attempt. (“I’m already deeply depressed.”) And I’d suggested the dating apps, which resulted in what she called “the octogenarian brigade.”
All this time, what I found more urgent than her birthday-suicide fantasy was the acute level of pain she lived with and had been living with for so long. Part of it was due to circumstances. She’d had a lonely childhood, an abusive husband, and a difficult midlife, and she had certain relational patterns that got in her way. But part of it, I felt as I got to know Rita better, might be something else, and I wanted to confront her about it. I’d come to the conclusion that even if Rita could relieve some of her pain, she wouldn’t allow herself to be happy. Something was holding her back.
And then she called me for an emergency session.
Rita, it turned out, also had a secret. Recently, there had been a man in her life—and now she was in crisis.
Myron, Rita tells me when she arrives for her emergency session, agitated and uncharacteristically disheveled, is “a former friend.” At the time of their friendship, she explains, which ended six months ago, he was her only friend. Yes, there were women she’d say hello to in passing at the Y, but they were younger and not interested in befriending “an old lady.” She felt, as she had for much of her life, excluded. Invisible.
Myron, though, took notice of Rita. At the beginning of last year, when he was sixty-five, he had relocated from the East Coast and moved into Rita’s apartment complex. Three years before, his wife of forty years had died, and his grown children, who lived in Los Angeles, had encouraged him to move west.
They’d met at the mailboxes in the common area of their building. He was leafing through flyers advertising local events—junk mail that Rita always tossed straight into the trash—when he told Rita he was new to town and wondered if any of the listings were nearby. She peered at the flyer. The farmers’ market was close, she said, just a few blocks away.
Great, Myron said, will you go with me so I don’t get lost?
I’m not dating, Rita said.
I’m not asking you on a date, he said.
Rita thought she might die of embarrassment. Of course, she thought. Myron couldn’t possibly be attracted to her, standing there in her baggy sweatpants and T-shirt with the hole in it. Her hair was greasy, the unwashed hair of a depressed person, her face sagging with sadness. If he was attracted to anything, she assumed it was her mail: a brochure from the modern art museum, a copy of The New Yorker, a magazine about bridge. They apparently had similar interests. Myron was struggling to adjust to the city, and Rita seemed to be about his age. Perhaps, he said, Rita knew people to introduce him to, to get his social life going. (Little did he know that Rita was a friendless hermit.)
At the farmers’ market, they talked about old movies, Rita’s paintings, Myron’s family, and bridge. In the following months, Myron and Rita did things together—took walks, visited museums, went to a few lectures, tried some new restaurants. But mostly, they cooked dinner and watched movies on Myron’s couch, both of them chattering throughout. When Myron needed a new outfit for his grandchild’s baby-naming ceremony, they went to the mall, and Rita, with her keen artistic eye, found the perfect one. Sometimes if she was at the mall she would pick up a shirt for Myron just because she knew it would look good on him. She also helped furnish his apartment. In return, Myron hung Rita’s artwork on her walls with earthquake-proof hardware, and he served as her on-call tech support whenever her computer crashed or she couldn’t get a WiFi signal.
They weren’t dating, but they spent much of their time together. And while Rita at first found Myron merely “decent-looking” (she had trouble finding men over fifty attractive), one day, as he was showing Rita photos of his grandchildren, something in her stirred. At first she thought it was envy of his close relationship with his family, but she couldn’t deny that she was also feeling something else. It surfaced more and more, though she tried not to think about it. After all, she knew from their first mortifying encounter by the mailboxes that her relationship with Myron was a platonic one.
But still. After six months of this, they certainly acted like they were dating. So much so that she considered bringing this up with Myron. She was going to have to, she told herself, because she couldn’t sit a foot away from him on the sofa, wineglass in hand, movie flickering in the darkness, and act cool as a cucumber when he accidentally brushed her knee while placing his glass on the coffee table. (Was it accidental? she asked herself.) Besides, she thought, it was she who’d said she wasn’t dating when Myron first approached her. Maybe he’d said he wasn’t asking her out only to save face?
She hated the fact that she was almost seventy and still analyzing interactions with men with the same obsessiveness she had in college. She hated feeling like a girl with a crush, foolish and helpless and confused. She hated trying on outfits one after the other, discarding this one, replacing it with that one, her bed littered with evidence of her insecurity and overinvestment. She wanted to will away her feelings, to just enjoy the friendship, but she was worried that she might not be able to handle the tension building up inside her—that she might just plant a wet one on Myron’s face if this went on much longer. She’d have to get up the nerve to say something.
Soon. Very soon.
But then Myron met somebody. On Tinder, of all places! (“Revolting!”) The woman was, to Rita’s disgust, quite a bit younger—in her fifties! Mandy or Brandy or Sandy or Candy or some vapid name like that, some name ending in a y sound that, Rita guessed, the bimbo would spell with an ie. Mandie. Brandie. Sandie. Rita could never remember. All she knew was that Myron had disappeared and left a crater in Rita’s life.
That’s when Rita made the decision to see a therapist and end it all if nothing improved by her seventieth birthday.
Rita looks up at me as if her story is over. I find it interesting that though Myron was the real impetus for her coming to therapy, she has never mentioned him before. I wonder why she’s telling me now and what today’s emergency is about.
Rita lets out a long sigh. “Wait,” she says glumly. “There’s more.”
She goes on to explain that while Myron was off dating what’s-her-name, Rita still saw him at the Y, where he swa
m while she took aerobics—but they didn’t drive over together anymore, because now he slept at Mandie’s/Brandie’s/Sandie’s. They still saw each other at the mailboxes in the afternoon, where Myron would try to make small talk and Rita would give him the cold shoulder. It was Myron who had asked Rita to join the board at their apartment complex, and it was Myron whose invitation she’d brusquely declined. Once, as she was leaving the building for therapy and found herself in the elevator with Myron, he complimented her on her appearance (she always “put herself together” for our therapy sessions, her one outing each week).
“You look lovely today,” he’d said. To which Rita replied, curtly, “Thank you,” then stared straight ahead the rest of the ride down. In the evening, she never left her unit, not even to take out the foul-smelling trash on fish night, for fear that she might run into Mandie/Brandie/Sandie with Myron, as she had done a few times, the two of them arm in arm, laughing or, worse, kissing (“Revolting!”).
Love is pain, Rita had said after she told me about her failed marriages and again after her encounter with the eighty-year-old. Why bother?
But that was also before Myron had ended things with Mandie/Brandie/Sandie; before he had cornered Rita in the parking lot at the Y after she’d spent weeks letting his calls go to voicemail and not answering his texts. (Can we talk? to which Rita clicked Delete.) It was before Myron—who, she noted when face-to-face with him in the sunlit parking lot yesterday, “looked like he’d aged a bit”—told her the things he had wanted to tell her for a long time, things he didn’t realize, he explained, until three months into his relationship with Randie. (So that was her name!)
Here’s what Myron realized: He missed Rita. Deeply. He wanted to tell her things—all the time, every day—the way he had wanted to tell his wife Myrna things throughout their marriage. Rita made him laugh and think, and when photos of his grandchildren popped up on his phone, he wanted to show them to Rita. He didn’t want to do any of this with Randie in the same way. He loved Rita’s sharp intellect and sharper wit, her creativity, her kindness. How she picked up his favorite cheese if she was at the grocery store.
He liked Rita’s worldliness and wry observations and wise counsel whenever he asked her advice. He adored her throaty laugh and her eyes that were green in the sunlight and brown indoors and her bright red hair and her values. He loved that if they started a conversation on one topic, it would segue into two or three others before it would loop back around or that sometimes they’d get so immersed in their tangents that they’d forget what they’d been talking about in the first place. Her paintings and sculptures made his heart thrill. He was curious about her, wanted to know more about her kids, her family, her life, her. He wanted her to feel comfortable telling him and wondered why she had been like a cipher, revealing so little of her past.
Oh, and he thought she was beautiful. Absolutely stunning. But would she please stop wearing T-shirts that looked like rags?
Myron and Rita stood there in the parking lot of the Y, Myron catching his breath after pouring his heart out and Rita feeling dizzy, unsteady—and angry.
“I’m not interested in staving off your loneliness,” she said. “Just because you broke up with gold-digger-what’s-her-name. Just because you miss your wife and can’t stand to be alone.”
“Is that what you think is going on?” Myron asked.
“Obviously,” Rita said imperiously. “Yes.”
And then he kissed her. An intense, soft, urgent, movie-worthy kiss, a kiss that seemed to go on forever. It finally ended with Rita slapping Myron on the cheek and running to her car, then calling me for an emergency session.
“That’s exciting!” I say when Rita finishes telling me the story. I hadn’t expected this twist at all, and I’m genuinely thrilled for her. But Rita just makes a snorting sound, and I realize she’s missed the forest for the trees.
“What he said was beautiful,” I say. “And that kiss—” I see the beginning of a smile before she suppresses it and her expression turns hard, cold.
“Well, that’s all fine and good,” she says, “but I’m never speaking to Myron again.” She unzips her purse, pulls out a wadded-up tissue, and adds resolutely, “I’m completely done with love.”
I remember Rita’s earlier proclamation: Love is pain. The Myron situation has upended her so because when her heart that had been in a decades-long deep freeze finally began to thaw with Myron in her life, she had tasted hope and then lost it. It occurs to me now that when Rita first came to see me, she was desperate not just because she would be turning seventy in a year, as she reported then, but because Myron’s disappearance had made her wonder the same thing I was wondering when I first saw Wendell: Had the man who’d just left been the “end of the line,” as I’d put it—the last chance at love? Rita, too, has been grieving something bigger.
But now the kiss has presented another crisis for Rita—possibility. And that may feel even more intolerable to her than her pain.
33
Karma
Charlotte is late for today’s appointment because somebody hit her car as she was pulling out of the parking lot at work. She’s fine, she says, it was a minor fender-bender, but it caused the steaming coffee in her cup holder to spill onto her laptop on which she’d composed her presentation for tomorrow and which she hadn’t backed up.
“Do you think I should tell them what happened or just pull an all-nighter?” she asks. “I want it to be good, but I don’t want to seem flaky.”
The prior week, at the gym, she’d accidentally dropped a weight on her toe. The bruise had gotten worse, and she was still in pain. “Do you think I should get it x-rayed?” she asked.
Before that, her favorite college professor had died in a camping accident (“Do you think I should fly to the funeral, even though my boss will be mad?”), and before that, her wallet had been stolen and she’d spent days combating identity theft (“Should I keep my driver’s license locked in the glove compartment of the car from now on?”).
Charlotte believes she’s been hit with a wave of “bad karma.” It seems as if, every other week, there’s another crisis—a traffic violation, an incident with her sublet—and while at first I felt bad for her and tried to help her cope, gradually I noticed that we’d stopped doing any therapy at all. And how could we? By focusing on one external calamity after another, Charlotte has been distracting herself from the real crises in her life—the internal ones. Sometimes “drama,” no matter how unpleasant, can be a form of self-medication, a way to calm ourselves down by avoiding the crises brewing inside.
She’s waiting for me to advise her on what to do about her presentation, but she knows by now that I don’t tend to give prescriptive advice. One of the things that surprised me as a therapist was how often people wanted to be told what to do, as if I had the right answer or as if right and wrong answers existed for the bulk of choices people make in their daily lives. Taped up next to my files is the word ultracrepidarianism, which means “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence.” It’s a reminder to myself that as a therapist, I can come to understand people and help them sort out what they want to do, but I can’t make their life choices for them.
When I first started out, though, occasionally I’d feel pressure to give advice of the benign (or so I believed) sort. But then I realized that people resent being told what to do. Yes, they may have asked to be told—repeatedly, relentlessly—but after you comply, their initial relief is replaced by resentment. This happens even if things go swimmingly, because ultimately humans want to have agency over their lives, which is why children spend their childhoods begging to make their own decisions. (Then they grow up and plead with me to take that freedom away.)
Sometimes patients assume that therapists have the answers and we simply aren’t telling them—that we’re being withholding. But we aren’t out to torture people. We hesitate to give answers not only because patients don’t really w
ant to hear them, but also because they often misconstrue what they hear (leaving us thinking, for instance, I never suggested you say that to your mother! ). Most important, we want to support their independence.
But when I’m in Wendell’s office, I forget all this, along with everything else I’ve learned about advice-giving over the years: that the information the patient presents to you is distorted through a particular lens; that the presentation of the information will change over time as it becomes less distorted; that the dilemma may even be about something entirely different that has yet to be uncovered; that the patient is sometimes gunning for you to support a particular choice and this will become more clear as your relationship develops; and that the patient wants others to make decisions so that she doesn’t have to take responsibility if things don’t work out.
Here are some questions I’ve asked Wendell: “Is it normal for a fridge to break after ten years? Should I keep this one longer or pay to repair it?” (Wendell: “Are you really here to ask me something you can ask Siri?”) “Should I choose this school for my son, or the other one?” (Wendell: “I think you’ll benefit more from understanding why this decision is so hard for you.”) Once he said, “I only know what I would do. I don’t know what you should do,” and instead of absorbing his meaning, I replied, “Okay, then, just tell me—what would you do?”
Behind my questions lies the assumption that Wendell is a more competent human being than I am. Sometimes I wonder, Who am I to make the important decisions in my own life? Am I really qualified for this?
Everyone wages this internal battle to some degree: Child or adult? Safety or freedom? But no matter where people fall on those continuums, every decision they make is based on two things: fear and love. Therapy strives to teach you how to tell the two apart.
Charlotte once told me about a commercial she saw on television that made her cry.
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