CEMETERY

It’s sunny outside. Glaring winter radiance that shoots light but not much heat. I’ve opened the slider doors despite the chilly breeze. Let the outside in; allow that wind to disrupt the stale air accumulated over the past umpteen dreary grey days. A sedimentary mass of cooking smells and human smells and dust and a stillness disturbed by the near constant grumble of the aircon. I’d hoped for sun today. For a photograph to accompany a review of Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die. The destination was a tiny cemetery sandwiched between two suburban houses in the back blocks of Heidelberg. The last grave was 1955 and the earliest some hundred years before. Weathered, those stones. Illegible, some. Cloaked in lichen, huddling together; some leaning, heads bowed. Only about a dozen in all, dotted around this small parcel of land half the size of a house block, too small to build on or a developer would have applied for them to be moved. So here they sit and I position the album cover to make what I hope is an arty shot. Crouching for the best angle it occurs to me I don’t give a thought to the people or lives marked by these stones. They are long gone, and so, probably, are their kin. Such maudlin thoughts have taken residence in my brain these past few months. Several factors are candidates; the death of my friend Steven, the reality of retirement, and the visit last week to our lawyer for an update of our wills. That last was quite powerful, enshrining the boy as executor of our testaments. Because he’s not a boy, he’s eighteen and more thoughtful and responsible than either of his parents were at twice his age. The decision as to how to distribute my estate if neither he nor Cal are alive had been exercising my mind, off and on, since we had these wills first committed to parchment soon after his birth. The Residuary Beneficiaries clause caught us on the hop and I knew I wanted to change what I wrote back then. Now the bulk is to be divided between the Humanist Society and an organisation called Trust For Nature. They buy properties adjoining National Parks and impose a permanent covenant on subsequent owners to keep the land intact. Seems like a good idea, though it’s really a gesture unlikely to produce a dividend for them unless the whole family cash in our chips at the same time. The other change was a tightening up of my instructions for funeral arrangements. It’s pretty clear now. “I direct that my bodily remains (minus any organs still useful to the living) be disposed of in an eco-friendly manner and that any funeral service be non-religious”. To the two most likely to have to deal with it all, I was less definitive. Do what you like. Do what works for you. Somehow I don’t think there will be a gravestone involved.

It’s getting cold so I shut the glass doors and upload the review of Born To Die. The air is still again, but at least it has moved.

LIGHT BLACK

I wanted to lead with the dreams, but as the last meeting had been cancelled (COVID alert, false) it was six weeks since we’d sat down together. Some preliminaries were in order; a brief reconnecting chat. But I did launch into the dreams early. 

Walking along a medieval road, a statue of Aragon falls and shatters. I know it’s the Tolkien hero despite the statue being grey-black and shaped like a sarcophagus. 

It’s a park, a slope of grass with trees—perhaps a forest?—to the left. My old friend Simon who spent the first quarter of the year in hospital, most of it in intensive care, is a few metres downhill, he subsides to the grass. I’m cradling his shoulders, supporting him as he dies. The sun is shining.

I’m standing close behind a large metal building skip, the 4m x 2m steel trays that fill with the debris of renovation or demolition. It’s full; I’m behind it, belly pressing on the cold rim. That’s all.

A semi-smile passes between Don and I. Don’t need a dictionary of dreams for that lot. 

I explain that Aragon is the capital ‘H’ hero in Lord Of The Rings. A kind of warrior Christ figure, I say. It’s a gentle joust between us where I take take aim at belief systems as Don canters past, unperturbed. But it’s also kind of true about Aragon, though I’d never thought it before. Healer, leader, fighter. As an archetype, perhaps more Greek than Christian. What resonates with you about Aragon, asks Don. I flash to the scene where the anonymous king enters Gondor and seeks his friends who are gravely wounded. “The hands of the King are the hands of a healer”. Heroism, courage, compassion; they always bring sadness, and do now. I have none of those traits. When I say that, it doesn’t feel self-pitying but when it’s challenged (lovingly, gently) I feel disgust. What a ghastly little grub. I describe the dissolution of a character in Terry Gillian’s Brazil. That’s me, a sack of foetid slop banded by anxiety.

The skip. The debris of a career, of a life. Don and I are the same vintage. He gets the idea of retirement, loss of meaning, dismantling of identity. The existential desert. There’s little to be seen on the featureless plain of remaining life, I say. It’s grey. Later I wished I’d pulled out the quote from Beckett’s Endgame. “Grey! Did you say grey?” demands Hamm of Clov, his servant. 

“Light black. From pole to pole.”

I wonder if a career is simply the most effective shield against meaninglessness. Rarely did I feel anxious when sitting with a client, yet elsewhere, often. I wonder about how my butterfly brain was lightly scaffolded by the rewarding task of focusing on the other. I and thou. Now just I, and I am drifting, anchored mostly by the desire to support the boy during his final years of secondary school. Oh, and the immense, unparalleled, and entirely unexpected love I have for him. Paradox for the broken. Full of love, observes Don. He’s clearly less scared of the word than me. 

He says something about connection and the healing effects of a bounded therapeutic intimacy. Neuroplasticity. Yeah, right. Like my trauma brain is going to remodel because someone is nice to me. How’s that for bravado? Yet every limping step forward in my life has been the result of some degree of willingness to accept, if not embrace, suffering. Witnessing and holding the suffering of another was at the core of my practice. We teach best what we most need to learn.

Don said something, but I didn’t hear it. It’s like water falling on an upturned axe-blade, I say. Not my best metaphor, but he gets it. Like Teflon. Things slide off, like anything to do with the future. What about with your son? No, it’s different with him. He is the exception to the dyadic lifetime seesaw anchored at one end by suffering and oblivion at the other. Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something. Another favourite quote, from The Princess Bride.

Hold that idea for me, I say to Don. Something about being gentler towards myself; a quality that came easily with clients, even the frustrating ones, and feels so natural with the boy it is invisible. As invisible as love.

DIARY

Turning the page opens up a new week. The week-to-an-opening diary, format of choice during the past three decades. Your working week displayed at a glance. Surveying the outlook helps prepare, a penciled-in warm-up for the real thing. Some space on Tuesday, a full book of appointments on Wednesday, friends over for pizza on Friday evening, Record Fair Sunday. Chores, music lesson taxi, TV night on Wednesday; the last not written down but assumed. The boy has begun studying after dinner, a recent development that leaves a hole on the couch.

A cancelled lunch tomorrow, fortnightly therapy unlikely on Friday as my bloke has COVID. Not much else. Tennis on Tuesday, the Vets comp. A new post-lockdown team who’ve been together for years but want an extra player as some of them are getting a bit slower, relishing weeks off during the cold Winter rounds. Not that anyone would concede a weakness. I’ve never been one for men’s sheds; too socially clunky and ill at ease with the shit-hanging banter. But I want the exercise.

So mostly empty space, this week. Never would have imagined having too much free time, but there it is, a beige expanse of unoccupied lines awaiting annotation. Vulnerability quivers somewhere, but also curiosity. What to do with this time? Being alone has been a common state, learned early in life. It’s the safest place to be, in my room playing with toy soldiers. Safety trumps loneliness every time. Non-connection versus gut-churning fear is not even a choice.

The bounded intimacy of therapy meets the therapist’s need for connection.  And safety, for that matter. No mystery there, nor a problem as long as it’s known and explored before sitting in front of a paying customer. But it’s a different perspective when the choice is no longer there. Truth is, I miss my clients. Miss the interrelatedness. Their struggles unfolded in parallel with my own need to grow, a shared willingness to test calcified joints, seeking forgotten options for movement. I don’t recall ever feeling superior or better; just another pilgrim on the journey trying to make sense of it all. At a high school reunion years ago some guy I never liked asked me what I did. Instead of the usual equivocation I looked him in the eye and said, I’m a psychologist. He sneered. Shrinks just do that to work out their own shit. Yeah, I said. Good, isn’t it?

I ring my oldest friend. How the fuck are you, we say simultaneously. Then we talk about how it’s easier to think about getting together than to actually make the call. We pencil in Wednesday for lunch and shit-hanging banter. At the end he quietly thanks me for calling. Afterwards I leaf forward in the diary to December and choose a random day. “Buy a smaller diary”. I underline it.