It’s a busy Saturday morning at Trader Joe’s, and I’m scanning the lines to see which is shortest while my son darts off to look at the display of chocolate bars. Despite the chaos, the cashiers seem unfazed. A young guy whose arms are covered in tattoos rings a bell, and a bagger in leggings dances over and packs up a customer’s groceries, jiving to the canned music. In the next aisle a hipster with a Mohawk calls for a price check, and at the end of the row, a pretty blond cashier juggles some oranges to amuse a toddler having a meltdown in her stroller.
It takes me a minute before I realize that the juggling cashier is my patient Julie. I haven’t seen her new blond wig yet, though she had mentioned it in therapy.
“Too crazy?” she’d asked about the idea of being a blonde, holding me to my promise to tell her if she was going overboard. She’d asked the same thing about answering an ad for a singer in a local band, going on a game show, and signing up for a Buddhist retreat that required a full week of no talking. This was all before the miracle drug had worked its miracle on her tumors.
I’d enjoyed watching her stretch from the risk-averse stance she’d embraced all her life. She had always thought that achieving tenure would give her freedom, but now she was tasting a completely unexpected kind of freedom.
“Is this too off-the-wall?” she’d sometimes say before presenting a new idea to me. She was eager to veer from her mapped-out course, but not so far that she’d get lost. Yet nothing she proposed surprised me.
Then, finally, Julie had an idea that caught me off guard. She told me that at one point during those weeks when she believed she was about to die, she was waiting in line at Trader Joe’s and found herself mesmerized by the cashiers. They seemed so themselves in the ways they interacted with their customers and one another, making conversation about the small daily things that are really the big things in people’s lives—food, traffic, the weather. How different she imagined this job from her own, which she loved but which also came with a constant pressure to produce and publish, to position herself for advancement. With a shortened future, she imagined doing work where she could see tangible results in the moment—you pack groceries, you cheer up customers, you stock items. At the end of the day, you’ve done something concrete and useful.
Julie decided that if she had only, say, a year to live, she’d apply to be a weekend cashier at Trader Joe’s. She knew she was idealizing the job. But she still wanted to experience that sense of purpose and community, of being a small part of lots of different people’s lives—even if just for the time it took to ring up their groceries.
“Maybe Trader Joe’s can be part of my Holland,” she mused.
I could feel myself push against the idea, and I sat for a minute, trying to understand why. It might have had something to do with a dilemma I’d been facing in treating Julie. If Julie hadn’t had cancer, I’d try to help her look at the part of her that had felt inhibited for so long. She seemed to be opening the lid on aspects of herself that hadn’t had space to breathe.
But with someone who’s dying, did it make sense to do therapy or simply offer support? Should I treat Julie like a healthy patient in terms of more ambitious goals, or should I just offer comfort and not upset the apple cart? I wondered if Julie would ever have asked herself the questions about risk and safety and identity that had been hiding beneath her awareness had she not faced the terror of imminent death. And now that she had, how far should we delve into them?
These are questions we all deal with in a quieter way: How much do we want to know? How much is too much? And how much is too much when you’re dying?
The Trader Joe’s fantasy seemed to represent an escape of some sort—like a child saying, “I’m running away to Disneyland!”—and I wondered how this fantasy related to Julie’s pre-cancer self. But mostly, I wondered if she could handle the job physically. The experimental treatment had added to her fatigue. She needed rest.
Her husband, she told me, thought she was insane.
“You have a limited time to live, and your dream is to work at Trader Joe’s?” he’d asked.
“Why, what would you do if you only had a year or so to live?” Julie countered.
“I’d work less,” he said, “not more.”
As Julie told me about Matt’s reaction, it occurred to me that he and I both seemed unsupportive, even though we wanted Julie to experience joy. Sure, there were some practical concerns, but could our hesitation also be that we were both, in a strange way, envious of Julie and her conviction to follow her dream, no matter how odd it sounded? Therapists tell their patients: Follow your envy—it shows you what you want. Did watching Julie’s blossoming highlight the fact that we were too afraid to act on our own equivalents of working at Trader Joe’s—and that we wanted Julie to remain like us, dreaming without doing, constrained by nothing more than the open bars on our prison cells?
Or maybe that was just me.
“Besides,” Matt had said in his conversation with Julie, “don’t you want to spend that time together?”
Julie said that of course she did. But she also wanted to work at Trader Joe’s, and it became a kind of obsession. So she applied for a job there, and on the day that she learned she was tumor-free, she was offered a Saturday-morning shift.
In my office, Julie got out her cell phone and played both phone messages for me: one from her oncologist, one from a manager at Trader Joe’s. She was grinning as if she’d won not just any lottery, but the Powerball of all Powerballs.
“I told them yes,” she said after the Trader Joe’s message ended. She explained that nobody knew if the tumors would come back, and she didn’t want to just add things to her bucket list; she wanted to cross things off too.
“You have to pare it down,” she said, “or else it’s just a useless exercise in what could have been.”
So here I am, standing in the market, and I’m not sure which checkout line to choose. I knew, of course, that Julie had started working at Trader Joe’s, but I had no idea it was this Trader Joe’s.
She hasn’t seen me yet, and I can’t help but watch her from afar. She rings the bell for a bagger, gets a child some stickers, laughs with a customer over something I can’t hear. She’s like the Queen of Cashiers, the party everyone wants to be at. People seem to know her and, not surprisingly, she’s incredibly efficient, moving the line along quickly. I feel my eyes get wet and the next thing I know my son calls out, “Mom, over here!” and I see that he has negotiated his way into Julie’s line.
I hesitate. After all, Julie might feel awkward ringing up her therapist. And, truth be told, I might feel awkward too. She knows so little about me that even displaying the contents of my shopping cart feels somehow too revealing. But mostly, I’m thinking about how Julie talks about the sadness she experiences whenever she sees her friends’ kids while she and her husband are trying to find a way to become parents themselves. What will it be like for her to see me with my son?
“Over here!” I reply, gesturing for Zach to move to a different line.
“But this one’s shorter!” he yells back, and of course it is, because Julie’s so goddamned efficient, and that’s when Julie looks over at my son and then follows his gaze to me.
Busted.
I smile. She smiles. I start to head to the other line, but Julie says, “Hey, lady, listen to the boy. This line’s shorter!” I join Zach in Julie’s line.
I try not to stare as we wait our turn, but I can’t help it. I’m watching the real-life version of the vision she described in her therapy session—her dream literally come true. When Zach and I get to the register, Julie banters with us as she does with her other customers.
“Joe’s O’s,” she says to my son. “A good breakfast.”
“They’re for my mom,” he answers. “No offense, but I like Cheerios better.”
Julie looks around to make sure nobody’s in earshot, gives him a sly wink, and whispers, “Don’t tell anyone, but me too.”
They spend the rest of the time discussing the merits of the various chocolate bars my son selected. When we’re all bagged up and rolling our cart away, Zach examines the stickers from Julie.
“I like that lady,” he says.
“I do too,” I say.
It isn’t until half an hour later, as I’m unpacking the bags in my kitchen, that I see something scrawled on my credit card receipt.
I’m pregnant! it says.