But remember: I’m aging. So don’t wait too long (Irvin D. Yalom) | Part B’

“I fly to Odessa tonight,” she said as we began the following day, “and I slept so poorly because of you that I’m not very sad this is our last meeting. Your words about Sergei were cruel, you know. Very cruel. Please answer this question: Do you speak like that to all your patients?”

“Please consider it a compliment to the strength I see in you.”

With a slightly quizzical expression she pursed her lips, started to answer, but then checked herself and instead took a long look at me. She exhaled and leaned back into her chair. Then she said, “All right, I hear you. I’m ready. Listening. Waiting.”

“Please begin by telling me more about the thoughts that kept you awake last night.”

“I slept only in short bursts because most of the night I was haunted by one dream which kept going on and on with one version after another. I am visiting the Congo with some delegation, and suddenly I can’t find any of the others, and I am alone. I realize I may be in the most dangerous spot on earth, and I get panicky. Then, in one version, I am walking in a deserted neighborhood knocking on doors and finding them all bolted and no one around. In another version, I enter a deserted house and hide in a closet as I hear loud pounding footsteps approaching outside. Or, in another version, I use my cell phone to call my delegation, but I do not know my location, and so I cannot tell them where I am. I suggest they bring lanterns and wave them, so I can see them from the window. But then I realize I am in a huge city, and that is a hopeless suggestion.

“And so it went all night long, waiting in terror for some horror to find and to take me.” She put her hand on her chest. “Even now my heart is pounding just telling you the dream.”

“A nightmare continuing all night long. How terrible! What hunches do you have about the dream? Think about it, and tell me whatever comes to mind.”

“I know I read something in the paper the other day about atrocities in Africa and the children’s army killing all in their path, but I stopped myself from reading too much. I always have a bad night after reading something like that. If I see a killing on TV, I turn it off, and I can’t count the many movies I’ve walked out of for the same reason.”

“Keep going. Tell me all you remember of that dream.”

“That’s all. I’m in a spot where, over and over, my life is in danger.”

“Think of that statement, ‘My life is in danger.’ Just free-associate to it, by which I mean: you try to let your mind run free and just observe it as though from a distance and describe all the thoughts that run across it, almost as though you were watching a screen.”

After exhaling and flashing a look of exasperation, Natasha leaned her head against the back of her chair and whispered, “My life is in danger, my life is in danger,” and then grew silent.

After a minute or two, I prodded her, “A little louder, please.”

“I know what you want to hear.”

“And you don’t want to say it to me.”

She nodded.

“Try imagining this,” I continued. “You continue to be silent here today until our time is up. Imagine you are leaving my office. How then would you feel?”

“All right! I’ll say it! Of course my life is in danger! I’m sixty-nine years old. How much life do I have ahead? My life was all back there. My real life!”

“Your real life? You mean on the stage, dancing with Sergei?”

“Did you ever dance?”

“Only tap dancing. I used to imitate all the Fred Astaire routines, sometimes at home, sometimes outside on the street.”

Natasha’s eyes popped open, and she stared at me in astonishment.

“I’m joking. I’m one of the world’s worst dancers, but I’m an avid watcher, and I can imagine how glorious it was for you to perform before those large applauding audiences.”

“You’re quite playful for a psychiatrist, you know. And a bit seductive.”

“How is that for you?”

“Just right.”

“Good. Then teach me about the real life back then.”

“Life was so exhilarating. The crowds, the photographers, the heavenly music, the costumes, and Sergei—believe me, one of the most beautiful men in the world—and the alcohol and the intoxication of the dance and, yes, the wild sex. Everything that has followed pales in comparison.” Natasha, who had been sitting on the edge of her chair as she spoke, now relaxed and leaned back.

“Where do your thoughts go now?”

“Here’s something I should tell you: lately I’ve been having a strange thought, that every day I live now, even a very good day, is also a day of sorrow because it takes me further and further from my real life. Is that not odd?”

“It’s as I said earlier. It’s as though that real life still exists in suspended animation. And if we had the right transportation, we could go to it, and you could show me around and point out all the familiar things. You know what I mean?”

When Natasha nodded, I went on. “And in a way that idea is the key to understanding your trip to the museum. You weren’t just looking for Sergei; you were looking for your lost life, even though the adult part of your mind knows that everything is transient, that the past exists only in the mind and your early world is now only a memory, an electric or chemical signal stored somewhere in your brain.

“Natasha,” I continued, “I understand your situation in life. I’m a lot older than you, and I am dealing with the same issues. For me one of the darkest things about death is that when I die, my whole world—that is, my world of memories, that rich world peopled by everyone I’ve ever known, that world that seems so rooted in granite—will vanish with me. Poof! Just like that. The last couple of weeks I’ve been cleaning out boxes of old papers and photos, and I look at them, perhaps a picture of some street in my childhood neighborhood or some friend or relative whom no one else alive ever knew, and I throw them away, and each time I do, something shudders inside as I see pieces of my old real world flaking away.”

Natasha drew a deep breath and in a softer voice said, “I understand everything you say. Thank you for telling me that. It means a lot when you speak personally like this. I know you speak the truth, but it is hard to absorb such truth. I tell you something: right now, at this very moment, I feel Sergei vibrating in my mind. I know he struggles to stay there, to stay in existence, dancing forever.”

“I want to say something more about Sergei,” I told her. “I know a lot of people who have gone back to high school reunions and immediately fell in love, sometimes with an old boyfriend, often with someone they did not know well. Many settled into a late-life marriage, some successful, but some disastrous. I believed many of them loved via association, that is they loved youthful joyousness, their early school days, and their dreamy anticipations of an exciting life, stretching out magically and immeasurably before them. But it wasn’t falling in love with someone in particular. It was making that person a symbol of all that joyousness of their youths. What I’m trying to say is that Sergei was part of that magical time of youth, and because he was there at that time you imbued him with love—that is, you put the love into him.”

Natasha remained silent. After a couple of minutes I asked, “What’s passing through your mind during this silence?”

“I was thinking about your book title, Love’s Executioner.”

“And you feel I’m being love’s executioner with you?”

“You cannot deny that?”

“Keep in mind that you told me you fell in love with Pavel and have had a marvelous life with him, and when you said that, I felt nothing but pleasure about you and him. So it’s not love I’m stalking. My prey is the mirage of love.”

Silence.

“A little louder.”

“I hear such a soft voice, a whisper, inside.”

“And it says? . . .”

“It says, ‘Damn you, I’m not giving Sergei up.’”

“It requires time, and you have to go about this at your own pace. Let me ask you a different question: I wonder if you’ve experienced any change since we started?”

“Change? What do you mean?”

“Yesterday you described that awful dizzying feeling of being outside of life, of not experiencing anything, of not being present. Is that symptom any different now? It seems to me you are very much here in our sessions.”

“I can’t deny that—you are right. I cannot be more ‘here’ than right now. Holding my feet in boiling oil does powerfully concentrate my mind.”

“You think me cruel?”

“Cruel? Not exactly cruel, but tough, real tough.”

I glanced at the clock. Only a few minutes remained. How to use them most effectively?

“I wonder, Natasha, if you have questions you want to ask me?”

“Hmm, that’s unusual. Yes, I have a question. How do you do it? How do you cope with being eighty and feeling the end approaching closer and closer?”

As I thought about my reply, she said, “No, I’m the cruel one. Forgive me, I shouldn’t have asked that.”

“There’s nothing cruel in your question. I like your asking it. I’m trying to formulate, to put together, an honest answer. There’s a Schopenhauer quote that compares love passion with the blinding sun. When it dims in later years, we suddenly become aware of the wondrous starry heavens that had been obscured, or hidden, by the sun. So for me the vanishing of youthful, sometimes tyrannical, passions has made me appreciate the starry skies more and all wonders of being alive, wonders that I had previously overlooked. I’m in my eighties, and I’ll tell you something unbelievable: I’ve never felt better or more at peace with myself. Yes, I know my existence is drawing to a close, but the end has been there since the beginning. What is different now is that I treasure the pleasures of sheer awareness, and I’m fortunate enough to share them with my wife, whom I’ve known almost all of my life.”

“Thank you. Once again, I tell you how important it is when you speak personally to me. It’s funny, but just as you were speaking, a dream that I had earlier this week sprang into my mind. I had forgotten it, but it’s just come back, and it’s very clear now. I was walking on a deserted road, and somehow I knew that the last one who used this road was my dog, Baloo. Then I saw Baloo by the side of the road and went to him, leaned over, and looked right into his eyes. And I thought, You and I are both living souls, and then I thought, I’m no better than him.”

“And the feelings that accompany this dream?”

“At first I was so glad to see my dog again. You see, Baloo died three weeks before we left for the US. He was my companion for sixteen years, and I’ve had a hard time getting over my sadness. In fact I welcomed my trip to the US because I thought it might help me get over my grief. Are you a dog owner? If not, you won’t understand.”

“No, I’m a cat lover, though, and I think I can appreciate the depth of your pain.”

She hesitated and nodded as though she were satisfied with my answer. “Yes, it was very deep. My husband says too deep. He thinks I was over-attached to Baloo and that he was a substitute child. I don’t think I told you that I have no children.”

“So, in the dream, you’re traveling on the same road that Baloo took weeks before, and then you looked deep into his eyes and said, ‘We’re both living souls, and I’m no better than you.’ What do you think the dream is trying to communicate?”

“I know what you’d think.”

“Tell me.”

“That I know I’m walking on the road to death like Baloo.”

“Like all living souls.”

“Yes, like all living souls.”

“And you, what do you think?”

“I think this whole conversation is making things worse for me.”

“In that you’re more uncomfortable.”

“A few more healing sessions like this, and I’ll need to go home by ambulance.”

“All the symptoms you described yesterday—being removed from life, being insulated, not being in your life—all served to anesthetize yourself from the pain inherent in being a living soul. Let’s look at how we began. You entered my office with your photograph—”

“Oh no, not that again!”

“I know you forbade me to discuss it, but I’m disobeying you because it’s too important. Please listen to what I’m going to say. You know all this already. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. It’s just easier to fend off something told to you from the outside than it is something rising from the depths of yourself. I believe that some part of you had already arrived at the same conclusion I’m suggesting to you. It’s all there in that dream about traveling the same road as Baloo. I’m struck that your dream, which offers the key to our puzzle, returned to you just as we prepared to stop. And the photograph you gave me at the beginning was a hint to me about what direction I should take with you.”

“You say I knew all this? You give me far, far too much credit.”

“I don’t think so. I’m just siding with the part of you where wisdom dwells.”

We both looked at the clock. We had run over several minutes. As Natasha rose and collected her things, she said, “May I get back to you by email or Skype if I have more questions?”

“Of course. But remember: I’m aging. So don’t wait too long.”

Creatures of a Day

Irvin D. Yalom