I have been in therapy, in one form or another, since 1990. I don’t tell you that as a confession. I tell you that as a baseline.
In 1990 I burned out. I had been a social worker for twelve years, sitting with people in the worst moments of their lives, and one morning I drove to the office and could not get out of the car. I went into therapy, took a leave, and started writing in a composition notebook about what I had witnessed. A woman named Edna who couldn’t throw away her late husband’s work boots. A man named Harold whose greatest fear wasn’t dying, it was becoming a burden. I wrote it for no one. I wrote it because the alternative was to keep carrying it alone.
Two years later I showed the notebook to my therapist. She told me it was some of the finest writing she had read about grief. She asked if I’d considered writing for a wider audience. I said I hadn’t. She told me to consider it.
That was thirty-three years ago. I have been writing about the emotional interior of this life ever since.
My sister Patricia died in 2018, at fifty-nine, from ovarian cancer. Twenty-three months. We had conversations in those months that we had never had before, and the thing that undid me was not the illness. It was realizing how long we had gone without saying the true thing. Why did it take this? I have been trying to answer that question in print ever since. I think it is the most important question I know how to ask.
I am seventy-one. I have been married twice. The first marriage ended because two people who had loved each other at twenty-four had grown into people the other one didn’t quite recognize, and neither of us had enough tools to bridge that gap. I don’t blame Dennis. I don’t blame myself. Both of those things took years of work to arrive at. My second marriage, to Robert, is the most demanding and most nourishing relationship of my life. We had a bad year in 2008. I’ve written about it. I write about most things.
I am the author of two books on love, grief, and the long game of relationships. I teach personal essay at a writing workshop in Ohio. I walk every morning at 6:15 and come home ready to work.
My column is not for people who want to feel better without changing. It is for people who are ready to ask the harder question. The one they’ve been circling for years. The one they almost didn’t start.
You know the one. Start it.