Wounded Healer

James Dykes (1950-2024)

Hanging in the waiting room of Jim Dykes’ office—a large homey building that had been a famous hippie house in the Sixties, when I was in college—was a mammoth painting of Jesus.  That seemed characteristic of the man.  He seemed to be saying that Jesus was the ultimate healer—I think he felt that way—also that healing was somewhat mysterious, and that he couldn’t do it alone.  At the same time, it was one of those sentimental views of Jesus, what I call the Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild portrait, seriously anglicized.  As Guy Davenport said, “The falsest myth about him may be the Romantic and Sunday school pictures of him as a pious matinee idol with a woman’s hair, neat beard, and flowing robes.”[1]  Jim’s spirituality was like that, I would say.  It was an important part of his life, but a little fuzzy and sentimental.

I first met him when I lived on Onslow Street in Durham, right behind Baldwin Auditorium on Duke’s East campus.  There was a party on my street that my wife attended but I did not (I don’t know how I got out of it.  I’ve always hated parties), but at some point she walked in the house with a young man—about my age—who wanted to meet a guy who was about to publish his first novel.  That makes it somewhere around 1979-80.  He was a medical student, about to graduate himself, and it was mildly surprising to me that someone on that track would be interested in a budding novelist, but he was.  My memory is that he had delayed his entry into medical school with various other activities, as if not quite sure he wanted to do it.  Now he had decided.

When, years later, he opened Integrative Family Medicine on Swift Avenue, a medical practice that would demonstrate his idea of what medicine should be, I decided to make him my doctor.  I’ve always been glad I did.

He would sit there and talk to you at any length.  He wanted to know about your whole life, not just your body and your physical health, but everything, how your work was going, how your family was, how you felt about things.  I suspect that every hypochondriac in Durham soon became his patient, and that he spent more time talking than he would have liked, but that was an occupational hazard of his method.  You might spend an eternity out in the waiting room, but when it was finally your turn, you saw him as long as you wanted.

He once startled me by saying, “David, the first thing I need to say is that you’re ten to fifteen pounds overweight.”[2]  That led me to relate a long history of struggles with my weight, and after hearing all that he was never quite so blunt again.  Another time, when I came in with a slightly raw throat, he swabbed my throat, went off to culture the results, came back with a test tube and said, “All right, you look at it.  If that is blue, you have strep throat.”  The liquid in the tube had just the slightest bluish tinge.  Too close to call.  Another time I had expressed some concern about my prostate, and he had me begin to take saw palmetto; the next time he examined me, he said, “Your prostate is smaller.”  I thought, Good grief, this guy remembers my prostate?  For a whole year?  What a mind.

When my first wife and I split up, I went through real anguish, three nights when I couldn’t sleep at all.  When I told him that, over the phone, he said, “I know you’ve had problems with sleep in the past, but this seems a situation where you could use some help.”  He prescribed a mild tranquillizer.

In the late nineties, after I’d been talking to him about my weight for years, I got back from a vacation in San Francisco and, to my surprise and horror, weighed 180 pounds, a weight that I hadn’t approached since high school.  (I got close to 200 in high school.)  I was not only alarmed, but deeply ashamed.  “I don’t know what to do,” I said.  Without skipping a beat, he said, “Go to Weight Watchers.  I can tell you where it is.”  I walked out of his office and went straight there, began a diet that day.  Within a few months I had lost twenty pounds, and haven’t gained them back since.

He had a period of time when he was ill, and shared that with his patients.  I believe it was some obscure form of cancer.  He wasn’t afraid to talk about it.  He was a doctor and wasn’t afraid to be a patient.  He talked to me about my regimen of exercise, which he admired.  “You have a daily practice,” he said, something which he was trying to establish.  He was having some trouble with that, but of course he was much busier than I.

At one point he had a Chinese doctor working with him, who had not only gotten a degree in Western medicine, but had also trained in Chinese medicine, and could treat people with that if they liked.  He was open to such things.[3]  He also had a receptionist whom he said was a medical intuitive, someone who could tell just by meeting someone what their illness might be.  I don’t think he relied on her, exactly, but he did consult and listen to her.  How many Western doctors would have done that?

Then, rather abruptly, some years ago, he closed down his practice.  He had been complaining about the rules that doctors had to operate under, all the paperwork, and finally that seemed to get to him.  He had still been talking to me the way he always had, but now he was typing into his computer as he did so.  He had a variety of interests, and other things he wanted to do.  He decided to start a farm, grow healthy food and raise livestock, see if someone could do all that the right way.  I believe he succeeded.  I can’t remember the occasion, exactly, but one time he had me and my wife out to his farm to meet someone or other, and the place was beautiful, and exemplary, just like his medical practice.

I lost track of him.  His farm was out in the country, and he wasn’t around as much.  Some months ago I was taking my regular walk around East Campus at Duke, and all of a sudden—at the same moment he realized it—saw that the man I was passing was Jim Dykes.  I asked how he was and he said, “Oh.  Pretty good.”  I wondered what he meant at the time, wondered if he’d had another health setback, but eventually found out that he and his wife had split up, a real shock, since I’d had no idea they were having trouble.  Jim was one of three couples in their seventies that I knew to be splitting up.  Another friend told me Jim was quite bummed out about suddenly being alone, and wished he could find a partner (how the hell do you do that, when you’re past 70?).  The next time I saw that friend, to my surprise and shock, he said that Jim had died.

He died in his sleep.  He was subject to seizures, something I hadn’t known, so the speculation was that he’d had a seizure and that had killed him, but no one actually knows, at least as far as I’ve heard.  His stepdaughter happened to be staying at his house that night, and when she woke up in the morning he had died.  That’s all I’ve heard.

He wasn’t a perfect doctor, there is no such thing, and I sometimes wished he’d continued to practice medicine after all that training, but he was an important healer for people when he did practice.  He was interested in the whole person, and the whole life, the way doctors should be.  He was a model of that.  He tried to do things the right way, and if the system finally wore him down, maybe that wasn’t his fault.  I was glad he was my doctor when he was.

For some reason his death shocks me more than others I’ve heard about recently.  He was the man who was taking care of me.  How can he be gone?

But he is.

[1] In his book The Loggia of Yeshua, Davenport hazards a guess as to what Jesus actually looked like:  “History can tell us that he wore trousers of the kind we call Turkish, that he most certainly had oiled sidelocks and a full beard.  A man so out-of-doors would have worn a wide-brimmed traveler’s hat, a caftan, or coat.  His sandals are mentioned by Yohannan.”

[2] I’m not sure of that number.  He might have said fifteen to twenty.  He also might not have specified a number.  But he made it sound serious.

[3] That woman later established her own practice, and has become my doctor.  She shares all the qualities that Jim had.