‘Imploding’ by Ellen Brickley

Then

There is some news that you wait for all your life. The news that flashes through your mind when your best friend arse-dials you drunk at three o’clock in the morning – is it Dad is it Mum is it Granddad has Killian been arrested again no seriously is it Granddad – before you pick up the phone and hear pub music pounding to the beat of your heart, and you yell at someone who can’t hear you as the sweat begins to dry on your skin. The news that a part of you is always half expecting.

Then there is the news that you never expect, and this is one of those.

My real therapist tells me that my ex-therapist is dying.

It’s early summer. There’s no script.

My first feeling is relief that it’s not my real therapist – that it’s someone I saw for a few months, years ago, while my regular therapist was on extended leave. I don’t know how I would handle it if it was my regular therapist.

I have been in therapy for eight years but that is not long enough, it turns out, to be able to admit this feeling to my therapist. I still want her to think I’m a good person, in case she dies before I get to convince her in my next session. I pay someone every week to listen to me try to be the person that I’d like to be.

My second feeling is to wonder how my ex-therapist’s non-backup clients must be feeling. Her versions of me. If I feel this bad for her, what must it be like for them?

I wish I could hope that she’ll get better, but since that isn’t realistic, I hope instead that she’ll be okay – whatever that means for her now. She probably hoped the same for me once.

My therapist says that it’s a matter of weeks. That my ex-therapist is in a nearby hospital and that she won’t be leaving it. That her family are around her and that she will be made comfortable.

*

The hospital where my ex-therapist will die is ten minutes’ walk from my mother’s house, where I moved when my attempts to be an adult imploded.

I want to drop in to leave a card. That isn’t quite it. I want to be the sort of person who drops in to leave a card.

I hesitate for a couple of days. I’m afraid that if I go in, someone will usher me into her room before I can protest and I’ll see her as she is now.

I saw her for once a week for a couple of months, three years ago. That does not entitle me to a ringside seat as this woman fades away.

She was attractive when I last saw her. That shouldn’t matter. Her hair was the colour of caramel and her eyes were dark. I don’t know what colour they were, but they gave her face a heft, a force. You would look twice at her, but three times at her eyes. Given that I remember her being beautiful, I can’t imagine she’d like me to see her dying.

Or rather, when she last gave a shit, I don’t think she would have wanted me to see her dying.

*

I go to the strangest shop I know. They sell books, baby gifts, chocolate bars, newspapers, greeting cards and an entire range of goods that would make perfect Christmas presents for every single one of your aunts. I have no idea how the place stays in business. I like to say that if I ever opened a shop, it would look like this, which is funny because my life imploded even when I didn’t own a bizarre shop full of white elephants and knick-knacks.

I walk past the wedding card selection, which I know by heart because everyone in the whole world has gotten married in the last year and I had to buy cards for all of them. I walk past the sympathy cards, full of doves and sunsets, because that’s not quite right. I can’t imagine a grimmer prospect than getting a sympathy card while you’re still alive, except dying of breast cancer in your fifties.

I find myself in front of the rack of blank cards, which are mostly covered with pictures of flowers or scenery.

Is it tactless to send someone who will never go outdoors again a photo of the outdoors? I decide that it is.

Usually when I don’t know what I want or what to do, I head to a shop and something suggests itself. I am unprepared for a life experience that doesn’t come with an appropriate product.

‘Can I help you?’

I turn to look at the shop assistant and decide that she probably can’t, but I may as well drag her into this with me. I don’t say, ‘Could you please direct me to the Dying Ex-Therapist section? Ideally I’d like to spend less than a fiver.’

‘I’m looking for a card,’ I tell her instead, ‘for someone I had a close business relationship with some time ago, who is terminally ill.’

I am proud of myself for using the right words. Terminally ill. Close business relationship.

‘Oh God,’ says the shop assistant.

In the end I choose a small card, a pencil drawing of a vintage Vogue cover. It’s the only thing I can find that isn’t either outdoorsy, maudlin or upbeat. I wonder if they’re the only three states of being that are acceptable.

*

Writing the card will obviously be the easy part, because of the two English degrees that failed to stop my life imploding.

I know what I want to say. I practice on scrap paper, drawing squares the approximate size of the card so that I don’t write too much. Eventually I come up with something that will do, that begins to hint at what this woman’s help did for me, at the one sentence she said to me that reverberates through my life (with some people, one sentence is enough). I seal the envelope, and I carry it around until after she’s dead, when I leave it with a nurse and wonder what her kids think of it.

*

Now

Three years later, my therapist calls me, and she has more news that I am not expecting. This time it is about her. I’m expecting it even less than the last time (she is the one who doesn’t get sick, she is defined by that, she is the healthy one who doesn’t leave me), and I cry more.

Luckily, when I get that call, I am with someone who understands enough to give me a hug before she lights her cigarette. Because when you say to someone ‘My therapist is sick and might not get better’, there is no social framework for understanding what that means. We all know what ‘My father died’ means – or what we’re supposed to believe it means. There are expectations that go with it. When my real therapist gets sick, telling people and watching them decide what to do with their faces turns out to be one of the things I do for fun. I am glad, when that call comes, that I am with someone who doesn’t concern herself with what her face does when I tell her – she watches what mine does instead.

*

When my real therapist gets sick, I find myself trying to make sense of a relationship that society doesn’t recognise, but that has spanned more of my life than almost any other. I am in the habit of dealing with things through words – writing or therapy, it’s all an exercise in putting words around things so that they can be held up to the light. How do you find the words for over a decade of emptying your mind to another human, without reservation or self-consciousness? I think I will buy a full copy of the Oxford English Dictionary – the multi-volume one that will be taller than me when stacked up – and when someone asks me what my relationship with my real therapist was like, I will point at it and say, ‘Kinda like that.’ But it’ll take up a lot of space in the living room, waiting to answer a question that I know no one will ever think to ask me.

I hope I’ve gotten stronger in the years since I last went card shopping. My life has done whatever the opposite of imploding is (I refuse to believe that it’s exploding). I am married. I’ve held two different jobs – one I liked and one I loved. Literary agents are falling over each other to tell me that they like my work but not quite enough. I only need a few squares of chocolate to handle each rejection now, and I’m hopeful that someday the rejections will stop but the chocolate won’t, which is essentially all I want from life in material terms. In my head I keep a tally of the money I’ve made from writing and it’s in danger of needing an actual spreadsheet. I write essays and look forward to going to work. There are different pills keeping me where I need to be – better pills. I don’t know how I will handle it if I lose her, but I know that I will handle it. This is the faith that she has given me, in the church where I am my own catechism.

The range in the card shop has not expanded as I have. I don’t know how I know this, though, because there are some cards I cannot bear to shop for.

From issue #3: autumn/winter 2016

About the Author
Ellen Brickley is a writer and reader of YA novels, a volunteer for National Novel Writing Month, and a civil servant. She tweets @EllenBrickley.