What Healing Is

Buddhism, death and dying, meditation, religion, spirituality

For My 72nd Birthday

The morning my father died we had barely gotten back from the hospital when there was a knock at the door and my mother opened it to Mrs. Shriver, a neighbor from across the street.  She was an older woman, with a ruddy, deeply lined face, kept herself busy with outdoor sports, like golf and trout fishing.  I don’t think she’d ever been in our house.  She stepped forward to embrace my mother, a total shock to me.  Hugging wasn’t as common in 1965.  Then she put a card on the table that stood beside the front door.  She said a few words, turned around and left.  She’d been there all of about thirty seconds.

“Why’d she do that?” I said.

“What?” my mother said.

“Leave that card.”

“So we’ll know she was here.  We can send her an acknowledgement.  It’s considered polite.”

How did she even know my father had died?  We’d just gotten back.

I believe I was in a state of shock.  I didn’t know it at the time.

My mother had gotten a call from the hospital that morning saying my father had taken a turn for the worse.  She called my sister Sally to come over and went to the hospital with my brother Bill.  My father wasn’t conscious by the time they got there.  Bill called me at my friends’ house where I’d spent the night, told me to get to the hospital as soon as I could, but by the time I got there my father had died.  Bill was standing in the lobby, tears pouring from his eyes, waiting to tell me.

I knew it before he said it.  I knew it when I got the call.  I’d been expecting that call for months.

I stood there in a state of numbness, utterly divorced from my surroundings.

An intern in a white coat stepped up to me and shook my hand.  “You have my deepest sympathy,” he said.

No one had ever spoken to me that way.  I had suddenly, it seemed, become an adult.

Sally was at the house with her husband and two small children.  Rusty was upstairs watching TV, as he did every morning.  He was nine years old, knew my father had been ill, in and out of hospitals for years, but didn’t know he’d had leukemia and was dying.  My mother had to go upstairs now and tell him.  That was what we all dreaded.

He screamed bloody murder.  “No, Mom, No.  No, Mom.”  My sister’s husband Don, the most stoical person I knew, blanched at the sound.  It was blood curdling, the unbridled version of how we all actually felt.

Later that morning, my grandparents showed up, my mother’s father and mother.  They too had not known my father had leukemia.  My parents had known for six years, hadn’t wanted to tell anyone at first, because my father was a doctor and didn’t want his patients to be alarmed.  Gradually they told this person and that one, explaining why they had waited so long.  Somehow they never got around to her parents.

My grandfather was an upbeat convivial person, great fun to be around, in his late eighties at that point.  He’d come over dressed in a suit, as he always did.  I met him at the coat closet.  “Hello Dave,” he said.  He had a dark stunned expression on his face that I’d never seen.

“Bill Guy is dead,” he said.  “I don’t believe it.”

The next day, when we went to visiting hours at the funeral home, I drove the car, let the family out at the front door and proceeded around to the parking lot in the back.  I saw that my three best friends had arrived, Gordon, Gerry, and Creston, all together.  Somehow—though they’d be coming into the funeral home—I couldn’t face them, turned and walked away.  But Creston called out to me, walked over to where I’d left the car, turned off the engine, took out the keys, and shut the door.  I’d left the door open and the motor running.  He handed me the keys without a word.  He looked at me as if I were out of my mind.  I think I was.

The funeral was two days later.  We gathered in an outer parlor before walking into the sanctuary.  I vaguely remember walking in.  After that, nothing.  I have no memory of my father’s funeral.  It’s a blank.  A black hole.

 

My life divides rather neatly into two parts in my mind, before my father died and after, or perhaps before I knew he had leukemia and after.  Everything changed from one of those moments to the other, like the intern speaking to me that way, or Mrs. Shriver hugging my mother.  The world suddenly didn’t make sense.

Healing from my father’s death, however, took an immense amount of time, didn’t really begin until nineteen years later, when I met a therapist named Victor Zinn.  The time in between was a kind of limbo, though I continued to live my life.  I saw two other therapists, both of whom were helpful.  I wrote essays and a novel about my father’s death, wrote another novel.  But the healing began when I met Victor.  It was he who made me whole.  Not perfect, but whole.

He was a physical man.  Tall and thin, good looking, relaxed in his body.  He’d been a major league pitching prospect when he was younger, had also, for a time, been hired by a disco to get out on the floor and started dancing, so everyone would come out.  He was a serious competitive tennis player, devoted a huge amount of time to the game.  His office featured large block-like chairs, and one of the things I remember most was the way he sat in his chair, arms on the chair arms, perfectly open and utterly relaxed, ready for whatever came his way.  He rejected nothing.

At first I was wary.  The person who recommended him told me he had a spiritual bent, and I was prickly about religion[1] or any kind of spirituality.  If he’d shown that in our first few meetings I would have bolted, but he never did.  I told him I’d be checking him out for the first few sessions and he was unfazed.  “That’s your right.”  My previous therapist had been a woman, and I felt she understood me in a way that male therapists didn’t.  I went on about that for a while, the way men and women were different, women less judgmental.  “I think you need a good therapist,” he said.  “Male or female.”

He told me a story at our second session.  As a young man he’d worked with speech therapists at whatever school he went to.  It wasn’t until he was a teenager that a therapist mentioned, rather casually, that Victor had been born with a cleft pallet.  He thought Victor knew.  Victor was furious with his parents for not having told him, went home and raged at them.  They’d had a misplaced kind of shame; his mother, in particular, blamed herself for giving birth to such a child.  The idea that his parents were ashamed of him was something he’d never known.  He’d found it devastating.

For years as he saw therapists he worked on that sense of shame, that feeling there was something fundamentally wrong with him.  That wound was central to who he was.  Finally, after a session of group therapy, there was an exercise where the others talked about the way they saw him, and nobody said anything about the cleft pallet.  He brought it up.  And they said, “That’s not part of you.  It’s no longer a part of who you are.”

I’d noticed the slight wound from where the surgery had repaired it, but it was true, the overall impression had nothing to do with that.  You didn’t think of him that way.

“I tell you that story because, whatever you’re coming to me with, it can be healed.  There can be a time when it’s no longer part of you.  I say that without knowing why you’re here, or what we’re dealing with.  But it’s the basis of all my work.  Healing is possible.”

I didn’t believe him.  I thought what was wrong with me—it didn’t seem to be one thing, but many—was not fundamentally curable.  I might learn to cope, to walk—so to speak—through life with a limp.  But that fundamental problem was part of me.  I didn’t expect ever to be rid of it.

I’d come to him because a friend and mentor, the novelist Reynolds Price, had recently been diagnosed with a malignant tumor on his spine.  His condition was so unusual, the possibility of treating it so new, that no one had any idea of the prognosis.  I wrote in the morning and had afternoons off, so I was available to see him frequently, and we got much closer, visiting maybe three times a week.

For the first few months I assumed he was dying.  The visits reminded me of seeing my father at the hospital.  I’d met Price eighteen months after my father died, and he’d become a substitute father for me.  Some days after a visit my stomach hurt so much that I was bent double in my car, waiting for the pain to subside before I could drive home.  I wasn’t seeing a therapist because I wanted to.  I had to.  I was in terrible pain.

For that reason it was odd that, in one of the early sessions, I talked to Victor about my compulsive sexuality, the way I’d spent years, over ten years, going to massage parlors for illicit sex.  That had been a major part of how I’d coped with my deep anxiety.  It seemed to have nothing to do with my father’s death.  But when that session was over Victor said, “That was good, David.  We’re going to get somewhere.”

It was all part of the same brokenness.

Victor wasn’t glib of tongue.  You imagine the quintessential shrink—some guy in a movie—and you can’t get past him; he’s got an answer for everything you say.  Victor was not like that.  He sometimes apologized for not being more verbal.  You said things to him and they slowly penetrated.  He sat there and took a long pause.  Finally he spoke, in a halting way.

But he heard everything you said.  It sank into a deep well.

He was great at interpreting dreams.  I asked what approach he took, Freudian, Jungian (I had read both men) and he said he didn’t have one.  He heard the dream and spoke from an intuitive place.  But that was most helpful, gave me a new approach to my dreams.

Another thing I learned from him was how to listen.  I came from a tradition where you didn’t take in what the other person said, heard the first few words and prepared your witty rejoinder.  Victor was not like that.  He was the greatest listener I ever met.

What I would say now was that I’d lost a major part of my adolescence.  My father had been so ill that I couldn’t rebel against him.  I couldn’t stand up and be a man.  I didn’t act out sexually and have a normal adolescence because I was overweight and lacked confidence.  The boy who arrived at that hospital the morning his father died, stood 5’8” and weighed 200 pounds.[2]  One way I stifled feeling was by filling myself with food.  My deep problem wasn’t that I’d never mourned my father or that I avoided emotion in sex by finding women I could pay, but that there was a gulf between my mind and body the size of the Grand Canyon.  My wound didn’t show like the scar from a cleft pallet, but it was deep.

One of the things I hadn’t come in touch with, or even realized I felt, was anger against my father.  I’d made him into a plaster saint, this benevolent doctor who died young, but never noticed that many things I didn’t like in myself were things my father was critical of.  Victor and I had several sessions where I came in after hours and got out an encounter bat, raged and screamed and stomped at things I was angry about.  I was completely wrung out afterwards.  But after one session, I was listening to music as I drove home, heard a sad song and burst into tears.  A funny song came on and I couldn’t stop laughing.

I wasn’t just touching into anger.  I was finding feelings in general.

There was another strange day when I felt depressed, just kind of down.  Victor told me to express my feelings in a physical posture.  That was the kind of thing that would have made me bolt when I first met him, but I sat on the floor and curled into a fetal position.  Victor stepped over, knelt down, and put his hand on my heart.

What happened after that was startling.  I rolled over on my back and began to convulse, as if having a seizure.  Seen another way, my body was having what Wilhelm Reich called the orgasm response, writhing through a kind of S motion, though nothing sexual was happening (again, that would have made me profoundly uncomfortable at one time, but by that time I trusted Victor).  Energy rushed through my body, an enormous discharge, and tears poured from my eyes, though I wasn’t feeling sad about a particular thing.  The fit went on for at least thirty minutes.  At one point I said, “Do you have any idea what this is?” and Victor said, “No, but I think it needs to happen.”  When it finally ended I was limp.

I saw the man for years and he helped me through all kinds of things, the end of my first marriage, a disastrous love affair that followed, a long relationship after that.  He too ended a marriage while we were together, and experienced a brother’s suicide.  There was a day when we talked only about that.

I didn’t stop seeing him until I’d met the woman who would be my second wife, and was heading to Cambridge for a couple of years while she went to Divinity School.  I felt somewhat at sea, not knowing how I would do.  I was giving up a city where I knew many people, my connections with local publications, a men’s group, my sessions with him.  I wasn’t sure how I’d fill all the gaps.

“I think you should master, I mean actually master, a Martial Art,” he said.

It was an odd thing to say to a lifelong pacifist.  But he was sending me in the direction of body practice, and though I tried Tai Chi briefly, what I wound up doing was Soto Zen, the simplest of all body practices (all you do is sit there) but one that can forever heal the mind/body split.  I have not become a master.  I’m not sure there is such a thing.  But that longstanding breech between mind and body heals more every day, and that’s what my psychological and spiritual paths have been all about.  The boy who was divorced from his surroundings on the day his father died had to learn to feel at home in his body, and at home in the world, at home in the cosmos.  At home, period.

But he couldn’t have done it without that man who let him be just as he was, and wasn’t afraid to touch his heart.

[1] There’s a story about that.  Several years into my therapy, I went in one day and mentioned that a friend had said I was very angry at religion.  “Yes,” Victor said.  “You are.”  I said I didn’t know why that would be.  He said “I do.”  That’s the only time I can ever remember him saying such a thing, giving me an answer rather than letting me discover it.  “I have five clients right now with the same anger.  All of them lost a father when they were adolescents.”

[2] I was only seriously overweight for ten years, from the age I was eight (my younger brother was born when I was seven) until I went to college, but I have always thought of myself as having a problem with my weight.  At age six I was a skinny runt, at age eight one of the fattest kids in the class.  When I came back from my first year at college—where I’d been eating in a dining hall, paying for my meals, eating whatever I wanted but not going back for seconds and thirds, the way I always did at home—I had an intestinal bug and got down to 160.  After I got better I leveled out at 165 or so, which was what I weighed for years.  I weight slightly less now.