Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,155

they are?” I asked.

Julie smiled. “I know that too.” And then we went back to silence.

Of course, between the silences, Julie and I have also been talking. Recently, she said she was thinking about time travel. She’d heard a radio show about it and shared a quote she loved, a description of the past as “a vast encyclopedia of calamities you can still fix.” She’d memorized it, she said, because it made her laugh. And then it made her cry. Because she’ll never live long enough to have this list of calamities that other people acquire by the time they reach old age—relationships they’d want to mend, career paths they’d want to take, mistakes that they’d go back and “get right” this time.

Instead, Julie has been time-traveling to the past to relive parts of her life that she’s enjoyed: birthday parties as a child, vacations with her grandparents, her first crush, her first publication, her first conversation with Matt, one that lasted until dawn and still hasn’t ended. But even if she were healthy, she said, she’d never want to travel to the future. She wouldn’t want to know the plot of the movie, to hear the spoilers.

“The future is hope,” Julie said. “But where’s the hope if you already know what happens? What are you living for then? What are you striving for?”

I immediately thought of a difference between Julie and Rita, between young and old, but flip-flopped. Julie, who was young, had no future but was happy with her past. Rita, who was old, had a future but was plagued by her past.

It was that day that Julie fell asleep in session for the first time. She dozed off for a few minutes, and when she woke up and realized what had happened, she made a joke, out of embarrassment, about how I must have been time-traveling while she was sleeping, wishing I were someplace else.

I told her I wasn’t. I was remembering hearing what must have been the same show she’d heard on the radio, and I was thinking about an observation made at the end of that segment—that we’re all time-traveling into the future and at exactly the same rate: sixty minutes per hour.

“Then I guess we’re fellow time travelers in here,” Julie said.

“We are,” I said. “Even when you’re resting.”

Another time Julie broke our silence to tell me that Matt thought she was being a Deathzilla—going crazy with the death-party planning, the way some brides become over-the-top Bridezillas with their weddings. She’d even hired a party planner to help carry out her funeral-party vision (“It’s my day, after all!”), and despite his initial discomfort, Matt was now fully onboard.

“We planned a wedding together and now we’re planning a funeral together,” Julie said, and it has been, she told me, one of the most intimate experiences of their lives, full of deep love and deep pain and gallows humor. When I asked what she wanted that day to be like, first she said, “Well, I’d rather not be dead that day,” but failing that, she didn’t want it to be all “sugarcoated” and “cheery.” She liked the idea of a “celebration of life,” which the party planner told her was all the rage nowadays, but she didn’t like the message that came with it.

“It’s a funeral, for God’s sake,” she said. “All these people in my cancer group say, ‘I want people to celebrate! I don’t want people to be sad at my funeral.’ And I’m like, ‘Why the fuck not? You died!’”

“You want to have touched people and for them to be affected by your death,” I said. “And for those people to remember you, to keep you in mind.”

Julie told me that she wanted people to keep her in mind the way she keeps me in mind between sessions.

“I’ll be driving, and I’ll panic about something, but then I’ll hear your voice,” she explained. “I’ll remember something you said.”

I thought about how I did this with Wendell—how I’d internalized his lines of questioning, his way of reframing situations, his voice. This is such a universal experience that one litmus test of whether a patient is ready for termination is whether she carries around the therapist’s voice in her head, applying it to situations and essentially eliminating the need for the therapy. “I started to get depressed,” a patient might report near the end of treatment, “but then I thought of what you said last month.” I’ve had entire conversations in my head with Wendell,