Too Near the Edge (6 page)

Anyway, a friend referred Bruce to me for
grief therapy not long after I first set up the apparition chamber.
His daughter had died from a drug overdose. He was devastated
because his relationship with her had been stormy for several years
before she died. I’m not sure he knew how much he loved her until
she was gone.

The first time Bruce came to see me, he
cried, which I’ve since learned is way more open than he usually
is. He sat in my counseling room with tears running down his face
and said, “I wake up every morning with this horrible feeling that
something is wrong. Then I remember my daughter is dead and I’ll
never be able to make it right with her. How can I live with
that?”

It only took a couple of sessions with him
for me to realize that although he’s brilliant, his feelings are
mostly unspoken and generally unknown to him. He’s the kind of guy
who’s probably never even told his wife he loves her. But when his
daughter died, it was like he rammed full force into a stone wall.
At a very deep level he got that she was gone for good, and he’d
never be able to make peace with her. He’s not used to problems he
can’t solve and he hates unfinished business, and there he was in a
situation where he felt like there was nothing he could do. He was
desperate enough to come for grief counseling, even though he
doubted it could help him.

By our third session, I realized he would be
a good candidate for the contact process, so I screwed up my
courage and asked him if he wanted to try. Once he got over
thinking it was spooky, he was enthusiastic. He was able to reach
his daughter. It was only once—but he felt immensely better
afterward. He told me they had each acknowledged their mistakes,
forgiven each other and made up. He was able to say goodbye to her
and feel okay about that. He was almost floating around the room
when he told me about it—like he’d gotten free from a heavy chain
that had been weighing him down.

Bruce’s contact with his daughter changed
him. He went from feeling isolated and alone with his bottled-up
grief, to being able to remember and talk about the good parts of
his relationship with his daughter and the love he felt for her. He
wanted other people to have the opportunity to benefit from the
process the way he did. So he decided to use some of the fortune
he’d made in high-tech businesses to fund the Contact Project.
There are some conditions as to who qualifies and what kind of
records I keep, but basically it’s my show to run. Which, I admit,
is mind-boggling—and a lot of fun.

I moved into the Pearl Street office last
year, after a Buddhist bookstore vacated the property in Boulder’s
pricey west end to move to a more harmonious location. Aside from
the lack of parking, I love everything about the place. It’s a
pinkish flat-roofed stucco building that was once a house, but
later converted to retail use. An earlier owner enclosed the front
porch, making it two front rooms with large rectangular windows on
either side of the front door. The building is finished with brown
wood trim, and has masses of ivy growing up one side. A gigantic
maple tree provides summer shade and fall color.

Inside I have four rooms and a bathroom. I
use one of the front rooms as a waiting room, and one as my office.
In the back, I have a counseling room, and a smaller room, which I
use as an apparition chamber. My funding covers the steep rent and
stretched to pay for new furnishings as well. I decorated the rooms
with a southwestern look, using shades of burnt sienna, gold, cream
and dark turquoise. I bought a wool hand-woven Mexican rug down the
street at Marisol Imports for my waiting room floor and stuck a fat
cactus next to the window. I have three of Gramma’s colorful
paintings on the walls in the counseling room, which makes my
insurance company nervous because they’re so valuable. But I enjoy
the artwork every day so it’s worth the risk to me.

At 5:30, Benita, a client whose brother had
disappeared while hiking in the national forest was on her way out
of my office.

“He’s likely to show up at my door tomorrow
and ask me why I’ve been seeing a grief counselor,” she said.

“That’s certainly a possibility. How do you
feel about that?”

“My brother always drove me crazy and he’s
still doing it is how I feel. Why couldn’t he either die or not
die? That sounds like a simple request, but not for Darren. He
always finds a way to make everything my problem.”

“Maybe you could focus on what he added to
your life and what you miss about him.” I suggested.

“Well, maybe. I’ll think about it.” Benita
said as she headed out into the waiting room.

“See you then.” As I waved goodbye to Benita,
I saw Sharon hurrying along the sidewalk toward my office.

“Parking in this town is impossible,” Sharon
said as she dashed through my front door, wiping sweat from her
forehead.

“Sorry you had to rush,” I said, beckoning
her inside. “The sun is wicked at this time of day. Would you like
some water or iced tea?”

“Tea would be great, thanks,” Sharon said as
she plopped onto the chocolate-brown sofa in the counseling room.
“Before we get started, I want to apologize again for my father’s
rude behavior the other night. Sometimes I think he deliberately
tries to embarrass me.”

“You and your father do seem to have some
disagreements,” I reached for the pitcher of sun tea in the
under-counter refrigerator on the back wall. I grabbed two tall
glasses from the cabinet above, added ice cubes from my tiny
freezer compartment and filled the glasses with tea. I handed
Sharon a glass and sat across from her in a tan leather
armchair.

“Thanks,” she said. “Maybe I’m too hard on
Dad. I have to admit I’m grateful to him for the help and support
he gave me in the weeks and months after Adam died.”

“It’s good that he could be there for you.
Sudden death is such a shock that the details of daily life can be
overwhelming.”

“That’s for sure.” Sharon paused, took a deep
breath, and continued. “I got this horrifying phone call about
Adam’s accident and I had to fly to Las Vegas because that’s the
closest airport to the Grand Canyon. I was in complete shock. My
dad happened to be in Vegas at the time at a professional
conference. So he met me at the airport and drove me the five hours
to the Grand Canyon. He was amazing with all the gruesome details
of picking out a coffin and a burial site, and arranging the
funeral.” Sharon swirled the tea around in her glass, staring at it
as if she could see those miserable memories floating by.

I sat quietly, giving her time to experience
her feelings and collect her thoughts. After a few minutes, she
looked up and said, “Lately, though, I’ve been getting fed up with
Dad’s bossiness. It takes me back to when I was a teenager.
Sometimes I’m not sure whether I’m making my own choices, or
following his single-minded plans for my life.

Sharon didn’t exactly seem like the passive
type. And I had seen her stand up to her father at least for a
short time. I wondered if sometimes he managed to gradually wear
her down. “Do you often go along with his plans?” I asked.

“No, I don’t. In fact sometimes I think I
react against his plans just to show him he can’t tell me what to
do.”

I sure could relate to that kind of
reactance, but I merely nodded to encourage her to go on. “He likes
to call me stubborn and selfish,” she said, “but I see it as
determination and backbone. I think of myself as a ‘can-do’ person.
When I set my mind in a certain direction, I sort of mow over the
objections and keep going until I get there. I think that’s why I
became a social worker, and it’s a good fit. The people I work with
need someone on their side who doesn’t give up easily.”

“But it doesn’t work as well with your
father?”

“Well, you know he’s a big deal
psychologist,” Sharon said, taking a big drink of her tea.

Probably not as big a deal as he thinks he
is, I thought as I nodded to show I followed Sharon’s story.

“He studies behavior, which he sees as pretty
much determined by what gets reinforced and what doesn’t.”

“Yes. I knew that.”

“So, when my brother and I were growing up,
we lived in what the behaviorists call a token economy. My father
set up charts of everything we were supposed to do—all broken down
into small steps—and then added a point system for each step we got
done. We could turn in the points for spending money, TV time, use
of the car, stuff like that.” Sharon set down her glass to tick off
on her fingers the prizes available for points.

“Hmm…could make you feel more like a pet than
a daughter.”

“I’m not saying it ruined my life, but even
now I find myself thinking I should get points for washing my car
or cleaning my house,” Sharon said. “Which I expect is why those
parts of my life are so disorganized. Why do that stuff if you
don’t get any points for it?”

“How did your mother feel about that?”

“My mother died when I was only four,” Sharon
said, staring off at one of my grandmother’s paintings on the far
wall. “Dad never talked about her. Most of his energy went into his
work. Not that he neglected us—everything was organized at home. We
had our charts of jobs and our point system.”

“And you didn’t get any points for talking to
him about your feelings.”

“Actually, I don’t even remember wanting to.
As soon as I was old enough, I put my energy into sports. I’ve
always been athletic. I played tennis, soccer, and basketball. And
I skied and hiked whenever I could. I still do.” Sharon perked up
as she mentioned the sports.

“So you got out of the house and into a
different point system.”

“Yes. And after that I couldn’t wait to get
out of there and go away to college.”

I could easily relate to her desire to escape
an overbearing father. But as a therapist my job was to listen, not
to share my personal experiences. So I nodded, and asked, “So you
did go to an out-of-state school?”

“Absolutely. Dad’s a sucker for education, so
as long as my grades were first-rate, he was willing to spend the
money to send me to an expensive school. I went to Stanford, and I
loved Palo Alto and the school. But I missed Colorado, so after I
graduated, I came back and got my Masters degree in social work at
the University of Denver,” Sharon said, clinking the ice cubes
around in her empty glass.

“Is that where you met Adam?” I took a few
notes on a yellow pad, beginning a social history on Sharon.

“No, I met Adam three years ago here in
Boulder. We were only married two years. He’s not Nathan’s father.
They were really close, though, and Nathan started calling Adam
‘Dad’ after we got married. And last fall Adam adopted Nathan. That
was Nathan’s choice. You can imagine how Adam’s death has hit
him.”

“What about Nathan’s father?”

“His name is Joel,” Sharon sighed. “He left
when I was pregnant with Nathan. I was 26 and we’d been together
for two years. We weren’t married because Joel always said it would
be unfair to both of us if he made a long-term commitment before he
really knew himself.”

“So he left when he found out you were
pregnant?”

“No, at first Joel got into the idea of being
a dad. We planned to get married. But one day I came home from work
to find him gone, his things cleared out. He left a long letter
explaining that he had been having nightmares where he found
himself trapped in a small space, desperately trying to escape. He
wrote that as much as he wanted to stay with me, he knew these
dreams were a sign that he wasn’t ready.”

I hoped Joel had been at least an absentee
father to his son. “Has he kept in touch with Nathan?”

“No, we never heard from him at all—until
last February when he called out of the blue and said he wanted to
come and visit and meet Nathan. Right!! After eight years, he’s
finally ready! I told him to forget it. He never cared before, and
now Nathan had finally found a dad in Adam. We didn’t need Joel
showing up and complicating our lives.”

“What about child support?”

“I never tried to get anything from Joel
after he left. In fact, since he left so early in my pregnancy, I
didn’t even put his name on Nathan’s birth certificate. I figured I
could raise Nathan on my own, and if Joel didn’t want to be
involved, that was his choice. But that also meant he couldn’t just
drop back into our lives at his convenience.”

“It sounds like you’ve had a lot of loss
earlier in your life—and now Adam. I know you said you really want
to talk to him again. Is that mostly because you miss him so much?
Or is there something specific?”

Sharon leaned forward and looked me in the
eye. “I just can’t believe that Adam would fall accidentally like
that. In the first place, the canyon rim isn’t even a hike. Adam
saw it more as a walking meditation. But he was so fanatical about
hiking safety—reviewing maps, preparing for weather fluctuations,
carrying food and water—that I can’t imagine him falling
accidentally. When he was a teenager he went off a trail, slipped
on some wet rock next to a mountain waterfall and fell into the
rapids. He was lucky he didn’t drown. Instead, he got tossed onto a
rock that was right in the middle of the waterfall. But he had to
be rescued, and he had a fractured skull and concussion. So he’s
been extra careful ever since.”

“I can see how that would bring on an
attitude shift,” I said. “So what do you think happened at the
Grand Canyon?”

“The rangers said he went off the trail,
stood too close to the edge, slipped on some icy rocks, lost his
balance and fell off. They told me Adam fit the profile of the
person at the highest risk of a fatal canyon fall—a young male
hiking alone. But Adam was the opposite of a reckless tourist. You
can see why I don’t think it sounds like him.”