To: chaslam@wellmindassociates.org
August 11
From: dr.michael.harrison@expeditedmail.co.uk
Subject: Need to talk
Dear Charles,
I’m sorry to bombard you with emails this week. I have to admit to feeling particularly low since my altercation with Jessica, and particularly vulnerable, if I’m allowed to admit to such a thing. I was wondering if you could find time this week to meet up for a drink? This would be friend to friend and not a professional call – not couples’ therapy – I wouldn’t want to drag our friendship through that thorny hedge. I just want to talk to someone who can get my point of view. From the damage she did, Jessica clearly didn’t understand me and never has. She was always very breezy when mentioning Emma, saying she was fine to discuss her with me. She did not realise that the problem wasn’t her feelings but mine. I can’t talk about something so vital to me. It’s like amputating my own arm, something you do only in survival situations like that mountaineer. In fact, you’ll recognise that this email is maybe the first time I’ve really mentioned it to you. I’ve tried to keep it all to myself, but now the pain of it all is just spilling out.
Sorry. I’ve got to maintain my sanity. I can’t let myself break – that would embarrass both of us. It helps me very much, though, that you remember Emma. So few people in my life now do. You remember what I was like after I met her at that conference in my college on youth psychology? I couldn’t stop talking about her, how she owned any room she walked into, how her wit enchanted me. Forgive the romantic widower and his nostalgia but I remember thinking at the time that the turn of her cheek, the style of her hair had a kind of pure beauty you find only in Renaissance portraits – a hint of something eternal. That’s why I loved that photo of her taken at her graduation years before I knew her: it captured all that in one quick click of the camera. I didn’t have a digital copy so it’s gone for good, I suspect.
As for what came next, line up the clichés because they describe exactly what I felt in her presence: struck dumb, love at first sight, instant connection, soul mate, a fool for love. I’ve struggled to find a less hackneyed phrase, something that plays in your context, and all I can come up with is how a dose of amphetamines makes you feel – focused, intent, hooked – like Dorothy entering Oz, going from greyscale to colour. Remember how we ate them like sweets when we were cramming for our finals back in the ’90s? Jesus, we were cavalier about our health in those days. Well, drugs were long in my rear-view mirror when I met Emma and she still gave me that same buzz. I knew within twenty-four hours that I wanted to marry her – so traditional of me but I told myself it would be the only way of stopping her going on to someone else – or back to that nutcase she had just dumped in the woods. I couldn’t bear the thought of that. I lived in fear that someone else would also notice how amazing she was and give her a better offer than I could manage as a rather old-for-her university don, so within a month I’d hurried her off to Las Vegas and we were married in a chapel there – not by an Elvis impersonator, I hasten to add, but by a decent officiator during a tasteful wedding vacation at Caesar’s Palace, two strangers as witnesses. You would’ve hated it but it suited us.
Am I looking back at Emma through rose-coloured spectacles? Probably. Undoubtedly. Over the past five years, when Jessica has been especially difficult, I’ve reminded myself that I’m attracted to that kind of woman: complex, clever, emotionally subtle. Emma and I had less than two years together so who’s to say I wouldn’t have found the strains emerging in our relationship too – I must be ruthlessly honest with myself. But fate would have it that I only had her for those glorious first year followed by the heart-wrenching final months. She’s destined to live on, preserved in my memory as a kind of perfection. I am not completely insensitive: I can understand how Jessica found my attitude difficult to live with and that might’ve sparked her jealous rage. But I can’t forgive her for turning on the few mementoes I had of my marriage. It’s unspeakably low of her.
Emma left me an emotional legacy that I couldn’t cope with at the time. Grief made me a complete mess and I’m forever grateful for your clear-sighted advice that I had to heal before I could do anything else. Today I’m realising that I never really mended because, when I emerged from mourning, I took on Jessica and look where that led.
Regards
Michael
To: dr.michael.harrison@expeditedmail.co.uk
August 11
From: chaslam@wellmindassociates.org
Subject: Re: Need to talk
Dear Michael,
Thank you for your email – that seems a trite opening but I actually mean it when I write that this time. Despite the turmoil of the last few days, I’m relieved to see that your break-up with Jessica has been the catalyst to you opening up to talk about Emma. I’ve long worried that you’ve suppressed your loss and that it was making itself felt in other ways. If I’m allowed a cliché of my own, better out than in. I know you weren’t thinking of our meeting as a therapy session – God forbid: with whom am I able to talk PGA golf if not you? – but I would urge that you seek out a grief counsellor. I can give you some names if this feels right for you. I’ll say this much now, though: you aren’t to feel guilty for not being able to cope at the time of Emma’s death. I’ve never seen a man more gutted by someone’s passing. You weren’t able to take on anything more than the responsibility of getting yourself back in a fit state to function, and in many ways that is an ongoing situation. You couldn’t carry the burden Emma left you and you can’t carry Jessica’s when you are still weighed down by your own.
I’m afraid I have some bad news on the Jessica front. She’s dismissed me as her therapist. My fear is that she won’t seek out another qualified psychiatrist and will end up just going to her GP to keep her prescription running. I doubt he will know how to treat someone with Jessica’s condition and he’ll just keep the pills ticking over. That would be a bad move. I tell you now in confidence that I was intending to develop the cognitive behavioural therapy part of her treatment to modify her impulsive tendencies and ease back on the pills as there were signs she was using them erratically. They do have potential side effects, including hallucinations and paranoia in some patients, so it may be that some of her behaviour is not a sign of further mental disorder but a reaction to her medication. It may have reached an extreme point if she’s taking her feelings out on things she associates with you, like the bed and belongings. In rare cases, the patients have periods of selective amnesia. I was going to explore that with her but now I can’t. If you can negotiate a peace with her, that might help me make these points without it appearing as me taking your part in your difficulties.
And yes, of course I can make time for you this week. Friday at my club?
Charles