What Happens When Your Therapist Dies?

Therapy sometimes runs its course, and in the fall of 2017 we had our last session. He looked unchanged from that first meeting. Newly divorced, he’d soon leave New York for the country life he’d always wanted. He offered to extend our working relationship—which, I felt, had long ago waned in its efficacy, fortified instead by its continuity and his reliability. I declined. He smiled and reminded me of the skinny, energetic guy who walked into his office 21 years before. Then, the way a father might, he listed all the ways in which I’d grown up. He knew more about me than anyone in the world. Then all that information, context, data, vanished forever.

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