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“You're sweet.” Her words startled me, and their sympathetic tone came as if from out of nowhere. So I must have sounded a touch surprised when I asked to what she was referring, what she had in mind.
We were near the start of what was our last hour before a vacation break, indeed for me the final hour of a long last day before the summer interruption. She had begun to speak of her apprehensions about the impending separation when she stopped and made her perceptive and caring statement.
Her explanation was soft yet clear, ‘You don't really want to talk about this, but you keep trying to do what you think you should do. That's sweet.”
She was registering something she saw in me that I had not at that moment recognized in myself, but only a moment's reflection convinced me of the accuracy of her observation. The accuracy, of course, does not explain the appreciative tone her words carried. Nor does it explain what she saw that brought forth her words.
Yet what she observed from the private part of my mind was valid. I cannot be certain, but I think that she picked up something in me at that moment that included a shadow cast by my engagement with my preceding patients as well as my own concerns. I had spent my afternoon immersed in the preoccupations and fears of others whose imminent vacation interruptions had brought forth their individual concerns over abandonment, loss, and death; and those evocative anxieties had reawakened my own fears about departures and demise.
Both her observation and her explanation surprised me. I was touched by her sensitive concern for feelings I believed I had kept to myself. I felt troubled that I had unwittingly communicated