“Congratulations, you’re not my mistress anymore,” John says dryly as he walks in carrying a bag with our lunches.
I wonder if this is his way of saying goodbye. Has he decided to stop therapy right when we’ve just genuinely begun?
He walks to the couch and makes a show of silencing his cell phone before tossing it onto a chair. Then he opens the takeout bag and hands me my Chinese chicken salad. He reaches in again, pulls out some chopsticks, and holds them up: Want these? I nod: Thanks.
Once we’re settled, he looks at me expectantly, tapping his foot.
“Well,” he says, “don’t you want to know why you’re no longer my mistress?”
I look back at him: I’m not playing this game.
“Okay, fine.” He sighs. “I’ll tell you. You’re not my mistress anymore because I came clean to Margo. She knows that I’m seeing you.” He takes a bite of his salad, chews. “And you know what she did?” he continues.
I shake my head.
“She got mad! Why would you keep this a secret? How long has this been going on? What’s her name? Who else knows? You’d think you and I were fucking or something, right?” John laughs to make sure I know how outlandish he considers that possibility.
“To her, it might feel like that,” I say. “Margo feels left out of your life and now she’s hearing that you’ve been sharing it with somebody else. She craves that closeness with you.”
“Yeah,” John says, and he seems lost in thought for a bit. He takes more bites of his salad, looks at the floor, then rubs his forehead as if whatever’s going on in there is draining him. Finally he looks up.
“We talked about Gabe,” he says quietly. And then he starts crying, a guttural wail, raw and wild, and I recognize it instantly. It’s the sound I heard in the ER back in medical school from the parents of the drowned toddler. It’s a love song to his beloved son.
I have a flash to another ER, on the night when my son was a year old and he had to be rushed by ambulance to the hospital after he spiked a fever of 104 and began seizing. By the time the paramedics arrived at my house, his body was limp, his eyes closed, and he was unresponsive to my voice. As I sit with John, I feel again in my body the terror of seeing my son lifeless, me on the gurney with him on my torso, the EMTs flanking us, the sirens a surreal soundtrack. I hear the sound of him howling for me as they strapped him into the x-ray contraption, forcing him to be still, his eyes open now, terrified, beseeching me to hold him as he squirmed violently to reach me. His screams, in their intensity, sounded much like John’s wail now. Somewhere in the hospital’s hallway, I remember seeing what looked like an unconscious child—or a dead one—being wheeled by. This could be us, I thought at that moment. This could be us by the morning. We could be leaving here like this too.
But it wasn’t us. I got to go home with my beautiful boy.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry,” John is saying through his tears, and I don’t know if he’s apologizing to Gabe or Margo or his mother—or to me, for his outburst.
All of the above, he says. But mostly, he’s sorry that he can’t remember. He wanted to block out the unfathomable—the accident, the hospital, the moment he learned that Gabe had died—but he couldn’t. What he’d give to forget hugging his son’s dead body, Margo’s brother pulling them both away, and John punching him, screaming, “I will not leave my son!” How he’d like to erase the scene of telling his daughter that her brother had died and of the family’s arrival at the cemetery, Margo falling to the ground, unable to walk in—but those memories, unfortunately, remain vividly intact, the stuff of his waking nightmares.
What’s fuzzier, he says, are the happy memories. Gabe in his twin bed in his Batman pajamas (“Snuggle me, Dada”). Rolling around in wrapping paper after opening his birthday presents. The way Gabe strode confidently into his preschool class like a big kid, only to turn around at the door and blow a furtive kiss. The sound of his voice. I love you to the moon and back. The smell of his head when John bent down to kiss him. The music of his giggle. His animated facial expressions. His favorite food or animal or color (Was it blue or “rainbow” before he died?). All of these memories feel, to John, as if they’re fading into the distance—that he’s losing the details of Gabe, much as he wants to hold on to them.
All parents forget these details about their kids as they grow, and they mourn that loss too. The difference is that as the past recedes in their memories, the present is right in front of them. For John, the loss of his memories brings him closer to the loss of Gabe. And so at night, John tells me, while Margo seethes, assuming that he’s working or watching porn, he’s hiding out with his laptop watching videos of Gabe, thinking about how these are the only videos he’ll ever have of his son, just as the memories John has of Gabe are the only memories he’ll ever have. There will be no more memories made. And while the memories might get blurry, the videos won’t. John says that he’s watched these videos hundreds of times and can no longer tell the difference between his actual memories and the videos. He watches obsessively, though, “to keep Gabe alive in my mind.”
“Keeping him alive in your mind is your way of not abandoning him,” I say.
John nods. He says that he pictures Gabe alive all the time—what he would look like, how tall he would be, what interests he’d have. He still sees the neighbor boys who were Gabe’s friends as toddlers and imagines Gabe hanging out with them now in middle school, having crushes on girls, eventually shaving. He also imagines the possibility that Gabe would have gone through a phase of butting up against John, and when John hears other parents complain about their high-schoolers, he thinks about what a luxury it would be to have the chance to nag Gabe about his homework or find weed in his room or catch him doing any of the pain-in-the-ass things that teens tend to do. He’ll never get to meet his son the way other parents meet their kids at different stages along the way, when they’re the same people they’ve always been but both thrillingly and sadly different.
“What did you and Margo talk about?” I ask.
“When Margo was interrogating me about therapy,” he says, “she wanted to know why. Why I was here. Was it about Gabe? Did I talk about Gabe? And I told her that I didn’t come to therapy to talk about Gabe. I was just stressed out. But she wouldn’t let it go. She was incredulous. ‘So you haven’t talked about Gabe at all?’ I told her that what I talked about was private. I mean, can’t I talk about what I want in my own therapy? What is she, the therapy police?”
“Why do you suppose it’s important to her that you talk about Gabe?”
He considers this. “I remember after Gabe died, Margo wanted me to talk about Gabe and I just couldn’t. She didn’t understand how I could go to barbecues and Lakers games and seem like a normal person, but that first year I was in shock. Numb. I told myself, Keep moving, don’t stop. But the next year, when I woke up I’d want to die. I kept my game face on but I was bleeding internally, you know? I wanted to be strong for Margo and Gracie, and I had to keep a roof over our heads, so I couldn’t let anyone see the bleeding.
“Then Margo wanted another baby, and I said, fuck it, okay. I mean, Jesus, I was in no shape to be a new father, but Margo was adamant that she didn’t want Gracie to grow up alone. It wasn’t just that we had lost a child. Gracie had lost her only sibling. And the house did seem different than it had when we had two kids running around. It didn’t feel like a kid house anymore. The stillness was a reminder of what was missing.”
John sits forward, puts the cover on his salad, tosses it across the room into the trash bin. Swish. It always goes right in. “Anyway,” he says, “the pregnancy seemed to be good for Margo. It brought her back to life. But not me. I kept thinking that nobody could replace Gabe. Besides, what if I killed this one too?”
John told me that when he first heard that his mother had died, he was sure he had killed her. Before she’d left to go to rehearsal that night, he’d begged her to rush home so she’d be there in time to tuck him in. She must have died rushing home in her car, he thought. Of course, his father told him that she died while trying to push one of her students out of harm’s way, but John was certain this was a cover story to protect his feelings. It wasn’t until he saw the headline in the local paper—he had just learned to read—that he knew it was true, he hadn’t killed his mother. But he also knew that she would have died for him in a heartbeat, just like he would have done for Gabe or Gracie and just as he would now for Ruby. But would he do it for Margo? He’s not so sure. Would she do it for him? He’s not sure either.
John pauses, then quips to break the tension. “Wow, this is getting heavy. I think I’ll lie down.” He stretches out on the couch, tries to fluff a pillow behind his head, and makes a disgruntled sound. (“What’s this filled with, cardboard?” he once complained.)
“In a weird way,” he continues, “I was worried I might love the new baby too much. Like I’d be betraying Gabe. I was so glad it wasn’t another boy. I didn’t think I could handle a baby boy without him reminding me of Gabe—what if he liked the same fire trucks that Gabe did? Everything would be an agonizing memory, and that would be unfair to the kid. I was so worried about this that I did research on when to have sex so you had the best chance of a girl—it was on the show.”
I nod. It was in a subplot with a couple who were later written out, season three, I think. They were always having sex at the wrong time because one or the other of them couldn’t control themselves and wait. I remember how funny it was. I had no sense of the pain that inspired it.
“The point,” John says, “is that I didn’t tell Margo. I just made sure to have sex only on the day that we’d have the best chance of a girl. Then I sweated it out until the ultrasound. When the OB said it looked like a girl, Margo and I both said, ‘Are you sure?’ Margo wanted a boy because she loved raising a boy and we already had a girl, so she was disappointed that first night. ‘I’ll never get to raise a boy again,’ she said. But I was fucking ecstatic! I felt like I could be a better father to a girl, under the circumstances. And then, when Ruby was born, I thought I’d shit my pants. The second I saw her, I fell madly in love.”
John’s voice catches and he stops.
“What happened to your grief then?” I ask.
“Well, it got better at first—which, in a strange way, made me feel worse.”
“Because the grief had connected you to Gabe?”
John looks surprised. “Not bad, Sherlock. Yeah. It was almost like my pain was evidence of my love for Gabe, and if it let up, it meant I was forgetting about him. That he didn’t matter as much to me.”
“That if you were happy, you couldn’t also be sad.”
“Exactly.” He looks away. “I still feel that way.”
“What if it’s both?” I say. “What if your sadness—your grief—is what allowed you to love Ruby with so much joy when you first saw her?”
I remember a woman I treated whose husband had died. When she fell in love a year later—a love all the more sweet because of the loss of her husband—she worried that others would judge her. (So soon? Didn’t you love your husband of thirty years?) In fact, her friends and family were excited for her. It wasn’t their judgment she was hearing—it was her own. What if her happiness was an insult to her husband’s memory? It took her a while to see that her happiness didn’t diminish her love for her husband—it honored it.
John tells me he finds it ironic that Margo used to be the one who wanted to talk about Gabe and John couldn’t; later, if John made a rare reference to Gabe, Margo would get upset. Would their family always be haunted by this tragedy? Would his marriage? “Maybe we remind each other of what happened—like our mere presence is some kind of sick memento,” John says.
“What we need,” he adds, looking up at me, “is some kind of closure.”
Ah, closure. I know what John means, and yet I’ve always thought that “closure” was an illusion of sorts. Many people don’t know that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s familiar stages of grieving—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—were conceived in the context of terminally ill patients learning to accept their own deaths. It wasn’t until decades later that the model came to be used for the grieving process more generally. It’s one thing to “accept” the end of your own life, as Julie is struggling to do. But for those who keep on living, the idea that they should be getting to acceptance might make them feel worse (“I should be past this by now”; “I don’t know why I still cry at random times all these years later”). Besides, how can there be an endpoint to love and loss? Do we even want there to be? The price of loving so deeply is feeling so deeply—but it’s also a gift, the gift of being alive. If we no longer feel, we should be grieving our own deaths.
The grief psychologist William Worden takes into account these questions by replacing stages with tasks of mourning. In his fourth task, the goal is to integrate the loss into your life and create an ongoing connection with the person who died while also finding a way to continue living.
But many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can’t mute one emotion without muting the others. You want to mute the pain? You’ll also mute the joy.
“You’re both so alone in your grief,” I say. “And in your joy.”
In our sessions, John had dropped occasional hints of his joy: his two girls; his dog, Rosie; writing a killer show; winning another Emmy; a boys’ trip with his brothers. Sometimes, John says, he can’t believe that he’s capable of feeling joy. After Gabe died, he thought he’d never live through it. He’d go on, he figured, but like a ghost. And yet, just a week after Gabe’s death, he and Gracie were playing together, and for a second—maybe two—he felt okay. He smiled and laughed with her, and the fact that he laughed amazed him. Just one week ago his son had died. Was that sound really coming from him?
I tell John about what’s known as the psychological immune system. Just as your physiological immune system helps your body recover from physical attack, your brain helps you recover from psychological attack. A series of studies by the researcher Daniel Gilbert at Harvard found that in responding to challenging life events from the devastating (becoming handicapped, losing a loved one) to the difficult (a divorce, an illness), people do better than they anticipate. They believe that they’ll never laugh again, but they do. They think they’ll never love again, but they do. They go grocery shopping and see movies; they have sex and dance at weddings; they overeat on Thanksgiving and go on diets in the New Year—the day-to-day returns. John’s reaction while playing with Grace wasn’t unusual; it was the norm.
There’s another related concept that I share with John: impermanence. Sometimes in their pain, people believe that the agony will last forever. But feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn’t mean you’ll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week. Everything you feel—anxiety, elation, anguish—blows in and out again. For John, on Gabe’s birthday, on certain holidays, or simply running in the background, there will always be pain. Hearing a certain song in the car or having a fleeting memory might even plunge him into momentary despair. But another song, or another memory, might minutes or hours later bring intense joy.
Where, I wonder, is John’s shared joy with Margo? I ask him what he imagines would have happened with Margo had the car crash not happened. What would their marriage be like today?
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he says, “now you think I can rewrite history?” He looks out the window, at the clock, at his sneakers, which he had slipped off when he lay down on the couch. Finally he looks at me.
“Actually, I think about that a lot lately,” he says. “Sometimes I think about how we were a young family and my career was taking off and Margo was taking care of the kids and trying to run a business, and how we’d lost touch with each other, the way people do at that stage of life. I think about how things might have changed once both kids were in school and we were farther ahead in our careers. You know, life would normalize. But maybe it wouldn’t have. I used to be so sure that she was the right person for me and I was the right person for her, but we make each other so unhappy, and I don’t even remember when that started. Everything I do is wrong in her eyes. Maybe we would have been divorced by now. People say that marriages fall apart after a child’s death, but maybe we stayed together because of what happened to Gabe.” He laughs. “Maybe Gabe saved our marriage.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Or maybe you stayed together because you both want to rediscover the parts of yourselves that seemed to have died along with Gabe. Maybe you both believe you can find each other again—or for the first time.”
I think about the family of the drowned toddler in the ER. What are they doing right now? Did they have another child? Their baby, the one whose diaper was being changed while their three-year-old ran outside and drowned, would now be in college. Maybe that couple is long divorced and living with their new spouses. Or maybe they’re still together, stronger than ever, perhaps taking a hike on the scenic trails near their home on a peninsula south of San Francisco, reminiscing about the past, remembering their beloved daughter.
“It’s funny,” John says. “I guess we’re finally both ready to talk about Gabe at the same time. And now that we are, I feel better. I mean, I also feel like shit, but it’s okay, if you know what I mean. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be.”
“It’s not as bad as it was not talking about Gabe,” I suggest.
“Like I said, you’re good, Sher—” We share a smile. He’s stopped himself from calling me Sherlock, from using the caricature as a space keeper between us. Letting Gabe become more real in his life is allowing him to let others be more real too.
John sits up and starts fidgeting; our session is about to end. As he slips on his sneakers and stands to retrieve his phone, I think back to his earlier comment about telling Margo he came to therapy due to stress and how often he’s told me the same thing.
“John,” I say, “do you really think you came here because of stress?”
“What are you, an idiot?” he says, a twinkle in his eye. “I came here to talk about Margo and Gabe. Boy, are you dim sometimes.”
When he leaves, there’s no wad of cash at the door for his “hooker.” “You can bill me,” he says. “No more skulking around. We’re legit now.”