They’ll come into the house, after they leave the hospital, and probably find the kitchen ceiling light on. It was gray and dreary out the morning he got that sharp pain that wouldn’t stop and kept getting worse, and he had turned on the light when he first went into the kitchen. Usually he didn’t have to.
Therapy
What’s he going to tell the therapist? Or “talk about with,” or whatever he’s supposed to do with a therapist? He’s never been to one and he has his first appointment the day after tomorrow. She asked on the phone why does he think, so late in his life, he needs to start therapy? He said the main reason is a very bad one, one he thinks she won’t particularly like: his daughters urged him to go to a therapist, and more to please them than for any other reason, he’s going to try it. It’ll make them feel better. The younger daughter more than the older one, but both. He wants them to feel they have some control over his life — the betterment of it — and that they suggested a good thing. Other reasons are he’s become almost anti-social in his self-imposed isolation and reclusiveness the last few years. And he’s never gotten over — he’s still grieving and suffering — his wife’s death nearly four years ago. And he’s getting old — or is old — and all the fears and anxieties that go with that. “Okay,” she said, “that’s enough. I can fit you in. Let’s start, if the time and day are good for you, this Friday, 10 a.m. Or the following Friday, same time.” “Let’s start right away,” he said. “And not to get it over with. But why should I wait any longer? I’ve decided to go, so let’s do it.” “Okay,” she said. “This Friday, 10 a.m. Let me give you directions how to get here. Where do you live?”
Why’s he going? he asks himself the next day, Thursday. Day before his first session, or whatever it’s called when the therapist and patient meet. He should know. His wife was in therapy before he knew her. And then continued for about twenty of their thirty years together, the last ten years of it or so on the phone because it got too hard on her to get her up the steps in her wheelchair to the psychiatrist’s office. She’d call him every other week at a time they arranged at her last session, he’d call back a short time later, and they’d talk for the next fifty minutes, the door to her study closed. He tried to stay away from the door. Didn’t want her to think he was snooping. Her voice was always muffled. And then she’d open the door after she hung up the phone. He never asked her what she talked about with her psychiatrist and, before that in New York, with her therapist there, or not much. Maybe: “So how’d it go?” and she’d know what he was referring to and say “Good” or “Pretty good.” “I’m not asking what you talked about,” he said a couple of times. “Just wanted to know if it went well.” And a few times in those years of phone therapy in Baltimore: “I guess I came up because of our little dispute since you last spoke to him and what I said” or “what I did,” and she’d say “Yes” or “You did, but not for long. I only get to talk to him twice a month, so I have a lot on my mind.” “I’m glad you have someone else to speak to other than me,” he said once, and she said “I’ve a number of people to speak to, but it’s important for me to also speak to a professional, someone I pay.”
Maybe tomorrow the therapist will start it off by asking him a lot of questions about his life, and later in the session why he thinks it’s necessary to do what his daughters want him to, especially if he might not have wanted to start therapy. If she does ask that he’ll say he doesn’t really know, but he assumes it’s to make them happy, just as he thinks his seeing a therapist will eventually make him happier than he is now. They’ll talk about his wife, of course. She’ll ask questions, he’ll give answers. But how much can they get in in fifty minutes? Well, certainly they’ll get in that. That he isn’t fully recovered — maybe nowhere near so, he’ll say — from his wife’s death. He means he’s still bereaved. Tremendously so. He should have gone to the bereavement counseling the hospice center offered for free for up to a year after his wife died, but he didn’t. He was crying enough. He felt he was crying too much. Any thought or mention of her set it off. He still cries sometimes when he thinks of her. He’ll probably start crying during the first session because he’s thinking and talking about her. Thinks about her many times a day. If he said twenty, thirty, would she believe him? he’d say. Because he’s not exaggerating, he might say. And dreams about her almost every night. Even dreams of her half the times when he takes thirty-minute afternoon naps. He started a spiral notebook, which he calls “My Dream Book,” of dreams just about her. It doesn’t have any dreams in it that don’t have her in them. Started it four days after she died. That was the first time he dreamed of her after she died, and he’s filled up three dream books and is near the end of the fourth. He’s already bought a new spiral notebook. And he doesn’t spend an entire page on a dream. Most times he recounts them in a few lines, and then writes the next dream, with the date he’s dreamt it, right under it. Has he gone back to read any of them? he might say. Very little, and always a few hours after he wrote them down, and never goes back to them again. In other words, he has a dream, wakes up — he always seems to wake up after a dream — writes it down, and reads what he wrote when he gets out of bed in the morning. So what’s he writing them down for, filling up book after book of them, if he’s not using them in some way to benefit him personally — some insight about himself he might get from the dream — or in his writing? Maybe for something later, but what he doesn’t know. Sometimes he dreams about her two and three times a night and she was once in four different dreams of his in one night. And they’re mostly good dreams. He usually feels good after he wakes up from a dream she’s been in. But sometimes she’s angry at him in a dream or she’s started an affair with some much younger guy or she wants a divorce or she just wants to separate from him for a while, and she won’t listen to him pleading for her to stay, and when he wakes up from one of these dreams he doesn’t feel good. Regrets often come back after one of these bad dreams. Why he did this or that to her. He did mostly good things to her — they were never anything but faithful to each other those thirty years, he wants to point out: he certainly was and he can take her word she was too — but so many times he didn’t do such good things. When he got angry at her for spilling something, for instance. Or just dropping a fork or spoon she was holding and he had to pick it up. He remembers saying, he doesn’t know how many times, “Oh, not again.” And the times he had to clean her up. After she made in her pants, he’s saying, or on the floor because he couldn’t get her on the toilet fast enough because she didn’t tell him in time. And the time he slapped her hand. That was probably the worst thing he ever did to her, physically. She’d knocked over a mug of hot tea on him and it hurt like hell for a few seconds, and he reacted instinctively, he could say, and slapped her, but he only did that once. He’s not blaming her. Meaning, for anything she did. Not for her bowel movements on the floor or pissing in her pants and sometimes right after he’d changed her and pissing in the bed lots of times and on the floor. How could he blame her? She was helpless. Or she became such. She had little control over her body functions, is the best way of putting it. He’s blaming himself for every single bad thing he did to her. Not only after she became sick but before that when she was healthy. There wasn’t any malice in her. She was a person without malice, he’s saying. He means that. He’s not trying to make her seem better than she was or himself worse than he was. She did nothing to intentionally hurt him. Never. She never said anything harsh or critical of him that he didn’t deserve or that wasn’t right. He doesn’t like to think of it but occasionally he does and the bad dreams also bring it up. So he’ll probably have to talk about it with the therapist. It’ll come up. He’s almost sure it will. How could it not? And if he cries while he’s talking about it, that’s probably good. No, it is good. It’s good to get those things out.