Therapy

In January it will be two years that I have had a standing appointment on Monday afternoons with a therapist for grief counseling. I initially thought I’d go one or two times so that I could say to everyone who suggested I needed help, “See, I went and now I’m fine so you can quit nagging me.” I found this woman through a friend who works in the psychology department at the med center. Her boss knew Mark and gave me a couple of names. The first person I called said he wasn’t taking any new patients but that his partner was and she was very good. I called her and we set up an appointment. Her office was located in the shopping and entertainment district and I came directly from work an hour early. As I wandered around wasting time, I passed someone on the sidewalk. He said he loved my shirt, I said thank you, and as he walked by he turned around and said, “All of it, the shirt, the hair, even the sunglasses. You’re looking good today.” I sometimes think he was sent on a mission from beyond because more than anything I wanted to get in my car, drive home, and forget this whole therapy idea. But that very brief encounter gave me the shot of confidence I needed to walk into a therapist’s office, tell my story between sobs, and look into the eyes of this woman I just met to see them tearing up at the heartache of it all. In the midst of this sad retelling of that September day, and because my life is an ongoing comical shit show, on the sidewalk below were a group of Hare Krishnas chanting and banging on drums. I wanted to open the window of her office and scream at them to shut the fuck up but was afraid she’d think I had raging anger issues which I did but was hoping to keep on the down low. The following appointment had a lot to do with my mother who was not the problem so I left thinking that this therapy thing was worthless and not going to fix anything. I was smart enough, though, to know that if I quit with her that I would never seek out anyone else and I’d be in trouble.

I kept showing up, making my copayments, pouring my heart out on her loveseat every Monday afternoon. When everything was so dark, when I prayed every night to not wake up in the morning, she looked at me and promised me things would get better. When I cried over the loss of so many connections that we had as a couple that just vanished, she told me there would be new connections. When I said there was nothing in my future but utter and terrifying blankness, she told me I would carve out my own future. These weekly appointments and the work of grief have been hard, incredibly hard. There are times that it feels like a weight lifted, but more often I cannot speak to anyone for hours afterwards.

At the end of a recent session, I told her how Mark saved everything. It made me crazy. He had stacks of paper everywhere. He’d print articles to read and make notes in the margins, he kept every business card he ever got, he saved spirals from college with every page filled with notes, he saved scientific journals from thirty years ago. If he got a free notebook at a conference it was filled with equations and scribbling. His office was even worse. Besides saving all of those same things, he saved everything from every class he ever taught, every book he ever used. When cleaning it out with help from his boss and a friend, we found attendance sheets and notes on lectures, who participated and what they had to offer, a drawer of thank you notes from students. There was a CV from a colleague when he was applying for a position. Noted in the corner Mark wrote “my favorite.” Joe got hired and did end up being Mark’s favorite, so much so that I asked him to speak at the funeral.

I told her how I saved Mark’s love letters to me the first year he was in graduate school. It was 1982 and there were no cell phones, no texting, it was how we communicated between the times when we would see each other when I drove to Champaign, Illinois to his studio apartment for the weekend. Those letters have been such a gift to me since he died. To read his words feels like he’s talking to me, to see how out of his league he felt early on and then to watch the arc of his career as it rose. Those early days of love and uncertainty seem ancient and like yesterday.

In all the stacks of paper I have gone through, I have found a couple of cards to him from me but not a single letter I wrote from that year we were apart. I know I wrote a lot because I had two hours on a train every day going back and forth to work. So where were they? Why was everything related to his career saved but not the letters I wrote where I told him how much I missed him? How I loved him and couldn’t wait to start our married life?

My therapist explained that those things he saved from his career were proof of his worth, what he did for his job that he felt like he earned. And he did earn them, he worked hard for all of that. So why didn’t he save the things that were from me? Did he think my love for him wasn’t deserved? The emotional weight of those letters may have been too much for Mark to hold on to, as if he would never be able to hold up his end and wasn’t worthy of any of it, and that possibility knocked me off my feet for days afterward.

The minute I sat at that table at Denny’s on our first date and looked into those eyes of his it was enough. When he laughed at my jokes it was enough. When he got up in the middle of the night and changed the diapers of all of our babies and brought them to me to nurse it was enough. When he sat next to me in the bleachers of a track meet or a darkened auditorium to watch a dance recital, loaded the car with sleeping bags and tents for a campout, or lugged boxes into dorm rooms it was enough. When he walked in the door from work, from biking, from mowing the lawn it was enough.

For him to leave this earth not knowing he deserved love or his life is a heartache I will always struggle to carry. The swiftness with which everything emotionally tanked for Mark still shocks and scares me, and those eyes I miss so much, that danced with humor and joy and passion, went blank and lifeless by demons that kept their claws dug in so deeply that they kicked a lifetime of love out of the way. So I keep going to therapy every Monday afternoon to make sure I stay one step ahead of the voices that tell me I’m guilty, that it was my job to save him and I failed, and at the end of every session I wonder the same thing.

For all that is holy, Mark, how could you ever believe that you weren’t enough for me?

***for Eileen***