Therapy

Just finished reading Daphne Merkin's piece in the Times Magazine about all the therapists she's been with and her thoughts about therapy and one thing she wrote about made me remember one of mine. Ms. Merkin writes about the deaths of three therapists, one of whom committed suicide (albeit sometime after she stopped seeing him, not during her therapy). I'd been seeing Cary for a year or two when I heard that she was ill and couldn't see patients for a while. I'd been in group therapy with her and it turned out that one of the other patients was a lab technician at the hospital where Cary had been taken, so I heard all the details--Cary had been found by friends in her apartment, unable to move anything but her eyeballs (and yes, this has become a huge fear of mine ever since, since I live alone and could have a stroke and survive it, but not be able to move).

Long story short, she had managed to contract polio and she died three weeks later. A little back-story--in a couple of the last sessions we'd had with her, one of the things we had been discussing was the concept of "winning"--that at least some of us (definitely me) wanted to be The Star. We wanted the attention, we wanted to be right...for whatever reason, this was something, among other things, that some of us strove for.

A week or so after Cary's death, I was talking with one of the other group therapy patients, we were commiserating. She lived in a women's hotel (don't know if they have those anymore) and one of the other residents had been complaining about the fact that her therapist was moving to Colorado. I started laughing--obviously, my co-patient had won! "Oh, yeah? Well, my therapist just *died*!" Which, oddly, I still find mildly amusing.

I think having one's therapist commit suicide kinda beats that, though.

It's been so long since I've tried therapy. My last therapist was okay, or at least not bad. Didn't feel worse after seeing him. I was going through a big growth period, I'm not totally sure I needed him, but it was good to have someone to bounce things off of. I'm certainly not less neurotic, nor am I any better at interpersonal relationships (having none, really, for quite some years now, actually, other than friends--but I'm talking about romantic attachments, of course). So maybe I'd be better at that now, but I'm not inclined to even try.

I've got Spike. What else do I need?