I was 25 years old, sitting cross-legged on a couch, unable to stop my foot from wagging. My new therapist sat ten feet across from me, his middle-aged girth swallowed up in a high-backed leather chair, masculine: thick wrists, the wide beige band of his watch, receding silver hair, pale, freckled skin. Tortoiseshell glasses obscured the blue in his close-set eyes. In one of those weird associations the mind makes, when I looked at his face I thought immediately of Bert Lahr, the way his thin lips curled into what might be a smile. Outside that office on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, barely audible over the low rattle of a window AC unit and the whir of the requisite white-noise machine, I heard snatches of sidewalk conversation, the din of a car-stereo bass, the faint boop-boop-boop of a truck backing up.
It was our first session, and I went all in. I explained my life story in a rush, arms and hands gesturing wildly. When he asked questions, I gnawed on a fingernail. (In grade school, my father threatened to use red nail polish to get me to stop biting them. He decided instead on clear and stood over me as I applied it; when he left the room, I peeled off the coat of polish and continued chewing.)
Week after week, and then year after year, and then into decades, I told the man everything. Things I’ve never told my wife, never told my best friends, won’t tell you here. The relationship between therapist and patient is unique in the human experience—I paid him to listen to me, to guide me, to interpret me, and to hold all that shit in his head for me in case I ever needed it again.
My father? He told me he loved me at the end of each visit and phone call, and he meant it. He also told me, “Your grandfather was arrogant, I’m arrogant, and you’re arrogant.” I was ten—the year my parents split up. His temper frightened me. Once, when I was a teenager, he kicked the hubcap off a moving vehicle that cut in front of us as we crossed West End Avenue and 79th Street—we had the right of way. The car braked to a halt; the driver shot out and charged at my father. I stood on the curb, not knowing what to do. The guy had a good five inches on my dad, but he slunk off after getting a good look at the danger in my father’s eyes. The man was born for escalation.
A few years after starting treatment with my therapist, I began to establish boundaries with my father. How he loathed that word. Ditto inappropriate. I reported back to my therapist that my dad despised psychological jargon, to which he said, “When you take care of yourself, you’re bound to piss people off.”
In the late ’90s, my father had a quadruple bypass. He stopped drinking and smoking but still ate like a man possessed. I sat with him in the café at the Hotel Edison one afternoon as he devoured a sandwich thick with pastrami. In therapy I had been talking about the fact that my father was slowly killing himself, and as he ate I looked down at the page of handwritten notes that I’d prepared. My hands trembling, I said, “Dad, it makes me sad to think you might not be around long enough to see your grandchildren.” He didn’t snap back at me. Then he finished the sandwich.
My therapist’s eyelids grew heavy during our evening session a few days later. The radiator hissed. A couple pigeons cooed on the windowsill, and cool air whistled through the cracked window. “People are going to do what they want,” he said. “Everyone has a right to screw up their life. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
He used to encourage me to call him during the week if I needed to. It was years before I started taking him up on this, and when I did, a surge of nervousness coursed through me as I dialed. If I got his answering machine, I’d feel relief. When he picked up or called back, I would panic, as if he could see the bong through the phone. But after a while, those calls worked. We never talked for more than a couple minutes, because we didn’t need to—I could cut right to the problem since he already knew the lifetime of backstory. It was like a friendship that way. In all seasons of my life for two decades, he said, “I’m here, and you’re okay.”
My father died of a heart attack in 2007 at the age of 69, shortly before I got married. He sat down with a plate of angel-hair pasta in his apartment, slumped over, and never woke up. We’d spoken earlier in the week, and I searched my memory for the details of our last conversation. They didn’t come. When I returned from my honeymoon, I sat in my therapist’s office for a long time, neither of us speaking. His eyes were bright as he leaned forward, looking at me, then he leaned away. The phone rang twice, his machine clicked on, and it was quiet again. Finally, he asked if I missed my father.
“No,” I said—and pretty quickly, too, surprising myself.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Like I can breathe.”
A half-dozen offices after that first office, he was in one where we could hear the sounds of kids laughing and shouting from a playground. We also, over the years, met in his double-parked minivan scattered with his son’s football gear and in a back booth at the Metro Diner. But therapy sometimes runs its course, and in the fall of 2017 we had our last session. He looked unchanged from that first meeting. Newly divorced, he’d soon leave New York for the country life he’d always wanted. He offered to extend our working relationship—which, I felt, had long ago waned in its efficacy, fortified instead by its continuity and his reliability. I declined. He smiled and reminded me of the skinny, energetic guy who walked into his office 21 years before. Then, the way a father might, he listed all the ways in which I’d grown up. At the end, he stood and shook my hand, placing his other hand on top.
A few months ago, I got the news that he had died.
I, too, now lived in the country, and I stared out my living-room window at the holiday lights decorating the small rural town where my wife and I settled at the start of the pandemic. My therapist died alone in his country home, sitting in a chair, which was how I knew him—sitting in a chair. After the initial shock, I thought of his eldest son, roughly the same age I’d been when I began treatment.
But I mostly considered his death in terms of what it meant for me, selfish or not. (He would understand.) My stomach ached. I felt unmoored and then helpless, as if a giant storage unit holding all of my most valued possessions had burned to ash. Everything I’d ever told him, all that context, all that data, all that information—gone.
But those hundreds of hours of conversations we had—they still exist. I hear him sometimes when I face some new dilemma, something he didn’t live long enough for me to tell him about. His death didn’t leave me without help—I’ve seen two excellent therapists since him. It reminded me that I had learned how to help myself.
We never spoke again after that final session, but I’d known he was out there. I could have called him if I needed to, and he would have remembered everything about me. This knowledge provided a comfort I hadn’t considered until it vanished. Outside, the town was quiet, and beyond the streetlights, the country sky was pitch-black. I thought of him sitting in his chair, dead for several days before his body was found, and tried to conjure our last conversation, but I couldn’t remember what we’d said.