Grazie

My therapist died last weekend.  Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, doesn’t it?  How I wish it were.

I landed, a wreck, in his office two and a half years ago.  He went by ‘Sal.’  His full first name was ‘Salvatore’ – a bit of wry humor on God’s part, I always thought, giving me a therapist whose name meant ‘Savior’.  But he wasn’t there to save me.  He was there to help me learn how to save myself.  How to swim in life’s rough waters.  It took awhile, but help he did and I am learning to swim, to not drown, even, sometimes, to surf.

His funeral mass was this morning.  I saw it in the paper.  He was laid out yesterday; I know the funeral home, I’ve been there.  I thought about slipping in briefly to pay respects, but settled instead for writing a few anonymous words in the online guestbook.   Going in person seemed – too ‘friendly,’ somehow.  A therapist is not a friend, exactly.  A therapist – or at least, my therapist – is (or was) a wise, often comforting, sometimes infuriating mirror who helped me to more truly see, understand, and begin to integrate the scattered parts of my self.

And a wise mirror he was.  He had a gift for cutting right through all my defenses and funky thinking and straight to the heart of the matter.  He called bull when he heard it and spoke me right back to me.  “Do you hear yourself right now?”  “Listen to yourself!” “Yes, this Is about you!” He wasn’t afraid to ‘go there’ when ‘there’ needed to be gone to.  And, most helpful and necessary for me, he was a great champion of life on life’s terms.  “Life is messy.”  “Angst is human.”  “Let life be life, let you be you.”   “Learn to embrace your life and your self as it is, as you are, good and bad alike, and I guarantee you it’ll start to get better.”

It took a good while, but I began to learn and it began to get better.  I landed in Sal’s office with a long list of things that were wrong in my life, asking him to help me fix it all so that I could be happy.  But it doesn’t happen that way; it happens the opposite way, from the inside out.  Embrace it all as it is, learn the truth that I am both blessed and blessing, and the outside has a way of either fixing itself, or else not mattering quite so much.  Full garbage can? -full life.  Grass clippings tracked in the house? -I have a house and a yard to mow.  Pet hair? I have wonderful animal companions.  Teenagers draped all over my furniture like Dali’s watches? I have a home that they feel safe and comfortable coming into.  Kitchen looks like a hurricane hit it? I have food for said teenagers to eat.  Every light in the house plus the TV on? I have electricity.  Messy feelings? I’m alive to feel them.

And, as Sal’s sudden death has so vividly reminded me, I won’t be alive forever.  Sal was in his late fifties and a real health-and-wellness buff.  He was always eating an orange or yogurt or drinking green tea or something healthy.  He was into yoga and happily married and exuded life and energy and balance.  He was an avid cyclist, and it was while out cycling with friends last weekend that he suddenly, with no warning, collapsed and died “instantaneously, didn’t suffer at all,” according to the woman from the office who called me.

And now his mantra becomes ironically prophetic.  “This,” he would often say in response to my complaints about life, spreading his hands for emphasis, “This is Life! you can waste it hating yourself and everything else, or you can embrace it, good and bad, and learn to live it your way.”  Well, I’m learning.  Whenever my time comes, I don’t want to die and be remembered as the perfect little woman with the perfect little house and the perfect little yard and the perfect little family and the perfectly pinched-off soul.  I want to die a good soul, coming out of a good life, leaving a good legacy behind.  Messy, imperfect, unsettled, unfinished…but good.  In short, I want to die like Sal died:  Alive.

I’m not there yet; I’ll be looking for another therapist.  But I’m getting there, and saner than I used to be, and I’m even learning to have some fun along the way.

Salvatore – Grazie.

~ by Just Tracy on April 28, 2012.