Unbroken Chain

After over fifty years of treating patients, my father, a psychiatrist, took down his shingle. He picked a day to stop practicing, saw his last few patients, stepped out of his office, closed the door, and walked away. In the end, after thousands of forty-five minute sessions of talking, listening, and helping, ironically, he said only, “It’s time to stop.” He was leaving behind a lifetime.

He was not turning back, but neither was he turning his back. Not on a half century of patients and their stories. Stories of sadness and of joy. Of wishes and fears. Misery and hope. Suffering and triumph. Bitter stories and sweet ones. Stories of despair and of fulfillment. Of accommodation and rebellion. Freedom and constraint. War stories and stories about making peace. Angry stories, guilty stories, lonely stories, and love stories. But mostly, stories about all the conflict and beauty in between. The stories of our lives.

How does one walk away from the relationships with patients? Patients with whom one has spent years together at sea. Straining, struggling, and delighting in intangible moments of connection that seem to hold much of the meaningfulness? How does one walk away from being immersed, day after day, year after year, in the winding and jagged paths, the various and sorted twists and turns of lives lived? And all the sorrow, satisfaction, envy, frustration, pride, shame, angst, gratification, regret, and pleasure that comes with. Most of all, how does one walk away from the sheer privilege of sitting down with another human being, and together, trying to untangle it all?

We never know in this work, when a patient walks through the door for the first time, if this will be the one and only session we will have together, or if it will mark the beginning of a relationship that will span a good chunk of a century. Will they be here and gone in a relative instant, or will this person sitting with me today, a stranger, be a person I will come to know in some ways better th