Today we woke up in Buffalo with our friends, having drunk our fill of Niagara Falls over the weekend, and tonight we will sleep in our own beds back in Lancaster, having spent a good portion of the day driving through New York State and Central Pennsylvania. Some spirit of that beautiful country seemed captured in a tall billboard we spotted today that declared Every Day is Hump Day at the Adult Outlet, featuring a personable peach nestled up against a rather tall eggplant on one side, and on the other, Find out who Jesus REALLY is! with a phone number in bold below that read something like 1-800-I REPENT.
That, coupled with the gun outlets and flags, really brought out the snobbish asshole in me on the way there. I was joking around with the kids in an increasingly unhinged way every time we passed another XXX sign. But on the way home, I felt a lot milder about the whole thing. I mean, it's not my culture, not my language, but really, is it so very contradictory for lust and spiritual longing to be pressed up against each other like that? Can't crass sexuality and Jesus occupy two sides of the same sign? You might think they are there to cancel each other out, so to speak. But maybe they just bring out something potent in each other, by seeming but not actually being opposites.
I missed church today, but I also felt a bit off the hook by the fact that we were traveling. I never know what to do with Easter. Ever since becoming a widow, I don't feel that comfortable with anything that's supposed to be all good, all triumphant. (And growing up UU and Jewish, Easter was never a big holiday for us; I only began to figure out my relationship to it as an adult.) I will always remember Mike positively glowing on the last Easter he was alive, so close to the pain of Good Friday and the miracle of resurrection, so delighted by the fact that He is risen! which he smilingly proclaimed only 10% ironically to me that morning on the sidewalk after church. The other 90% was pure faith and joy. He was alive, the sun was shining, he was well enough for church with his family, Jesus was risen. Sound the trumpets.
I was genuinely happy to see him happy. I treasure the photos we took that day. But I wasn't singing out He is Risen! from the rooftops to anyone who would listen, because I wasn't feeling that way myself. I mean, is He really? Is anyone? Will they be? What if they just get cancer and die and leave you all alone? What if suffering is always here, even and especially contained within the joyful moments, and you can't ever blast it out with lilies and brass?
Like last week, I began the termination process in earnest with two of my treasured clients.
One is a junior, and as long as all goes as planned we have another year together before graduation brings our work to an end. One is a senior, and though we haven't worked together for long, it has been very meaningful, and the fact that we have but a handful of sessions left before she launches out into the world struck her as terribly sad.
Termination is the weirdest, coldest clinical word. It simply means ending. Maybe we therapists use it because we need a little distance from the emotional reality of investing in work that calls on your whole self and that, if successful, ends.
In an ideal world it happens when the client is truly ready, in their own time. The saying goodbye is bittersweet. Happy-sad. It represents the beauty of compassion born of suffering, growth, and a readiness to part with a source of support because it is no longer needed. But if the therapeutic experience really has facilitated all that healing, the relationship was central to it. It means the client felt deeply cared for. So the goodbye can't not hurt.
And the goodbye is harder when it's not time yet. In my work with college students, sometimes we have to end because it's time to graduate, but there is so much more we could do together.
But like being alive, like everything we do and every relationship we treasure, the fact that we are ending and our awareness of it makes the present moment together extra tender and deep. Deeper than it could ever be if our work were open-ended. Because of this, and so many other reasons that you likely share, spring is full of feeling for me.
Being brave enough to talk about it, to share the sadness, to say the words I'm afraid to end with you - this blows me away when it happens spontaneously in the chair opposite. This kind of vulnerability takes so much courage, it overflows one's heart. It's especially moving because I myself am often afraid to bring it up, and put it off longer than I should, knowing it will hurt to make it explicit.
So my junior is someone I have worked with for years now, and who has taught me a lot about being brave. She has serious trauma in her past, and carries a lot of anxiety in her body as a result. When she admitted that she was afraid she might be making up her struggles, or that maybe she isn't really unwell, or maybe she doesn't deserve to be in counseling anymore, I just waited, listened. We listened together. It didn't take long for her to discover she was afraid I would leave. She was afraid this would end.
So we talked about what it is like that her struggles are real, that she should be here with me, now, and to face our eventual ending, together. When she walked out of my office and I shut my door behind her, I lay down on the floor, closed my eyes, and hugged my knees to my chest.
Right now I am dating a man that I care deeply about. It's crazy how vulnerable it feels to care like this. Sometimes I feel so frightened that the door to my heart threatens to shut of its own accord. It's scary for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that somehow or other this relationship too will end. Sometimes I can feel the ending pulsing within its beginning. The two are so intertwined, they can't be opposites. They are two threads of connection: openness to a deepening future, and grief that the openness cannot go on forever.
I think the mystery of resurrection has something to teach me, if only I could be brave enough to receive it. Something about a tenderness that transcends the tenderness of endings and permits fear to slide from its fingers, no longer needed. That beaming joy Mike embodied five years ago wasn't premised on a forced forgetting of his own suffering; he never turned away from hard truths. He knew this would all end far too soon, yet on that spring morning, for a moment, he opened his heart wider still.
Maybe next Easter I won't spend seven hours in the car. Maybe I'll go to church, and like my client, I'll find the courage to tell God the truth about how afraid I am, how Easter makes me want to brace myself for all the endings.
I'll be scared, and I'll try to listen.
