Shrinkage

The possibility has come up that I might be done with therapy, at least for the time being, and I honestly don’t know what to think of that.

I never thought I’d be someone who would seek out therapy, much less find myself a little sad that it might be ending. But live through the last five years like I did and all sorts of things that never seemed possible suddenly become everyday. So, here we are. My therapist says that we have three sessions left before the insurance stops paying, so we have to figure out what to do.

Now, he hints that it might be possible to continue. My family doctor certainly thinks it wouldn’t be impossible to find a way to convince the insurance company to keep paying. I don’t know. I’ve never quite understood the rules for what the insurance will and won’t cover. When I decided I might want therapy, I started looking around for English-speaking therapists. Then the insurance company said ‘no silly’ and told me that they would assign one to me. I didn’t get along with her well, started referring to her as “Morticia” and then, when I asked if I could find someone on my own, the insurance said ‘sure.’

That was in 2017 and I don’t know how many sessions I started with and how many I could potentially still have if I hit the right bureaucratic levers. I’m not sure if therapy begun to discuss the way your child’s potential death could affect you needs to change, billing-wise, once you transition to the actual death of the child.

But I think it’s also a bit besides the point. I can’t decide if I still want therapy or not. The truth of the matter is, I don’t think there’s a “fix” for me. I’m behaving thoroughly rationally. My son died because life is unfair and our number came up, so I react by suffering a background level of anger higher than I ever imagined possible for me. All things considered, I think being a little more prone to anger than I was before isn’t the worst reaction to what happened. Especially since, as my therapist points out, I recognize the problem and try to keep it under control.

So, therapeutically, I feel like I’m in a dead end. There’s no therapy that’s going to make me stop missing Colin or stop feeling it was all so unfair or keep me from having a twinge every time I see a little boy who would be his age busily not dying. This is just what I do now.

To me, going to a psychiatrist is, essentially, talk therapy. I sit down. I lay out the mess that is my life. And he nods his heads at the right points and occasionally points things out from a different viewpoint. I get upset that I grumbled about going up to Colin’s room in the hospice the last night he had his eyes open. Dr. Kehrer points out that, no matter what, it showed Colin loved me that he wanted me up there one last time before he never opened his eyes again. It works for me.

And I know there’s any number of friends who will sit and listen to me or share emails with me or even read this blog. I know there are other non-professional resources out there for me. I don’t question most people’s willingness to help. But there’s also the truth that I don’t want to be that depressing guy who talks about his dead kid day in and day out. I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want to bum my friends out. I don’t want to suck all the joy out of the room every time I show up. So, I’d like to talk to my living friends about non-depressing matters, even if the state of the world makes it hard to pick out non-depressing things to talk about these days. And that’s why I’m not sure I’m ready to give up a therapist. At the end of the day, I like having someone around who’s paid to listen to me whine so I don’t have to lay this on other people morning, noon and night.

I suppose it’s also a bit of a double-hit, because the coronavirus crisis has also made it that much harder to attend the monthly meetings with the bereaved Dad’s group. Those were cancelled from March through May. They managed to resurrect them in the hospice garden for a month or two and I made it to one of those. But now they’ve moved back inside and, when I had the chance to go to one last week, I opted out of it, simply because sitting in a room with a handful of other guys seemed like too big a risk. This from a guy who’s worked up the courage to go a restaurant amid all this and sends his daughter across town by public transportation five days a week so she can attend her new high school. I know, none of it makes sense. And it’s probably based somewhat on the fact that I’m still on the fence about the Dad’s group. They all seem like nice guys, but there’s the fact that, no matter how good my German may or may not be, sitting around talking about my feelings with a group of people I barely know would be difficult in English. Throw in the hurdle of a foreign language and I feel I spent half the meeting not understanding what’s being said and half being frustrated because I can’t package my feelings into words in my second language half as well as I might like.

And, just like that, I’m going from having one professional support system and one non-professional support system to a world where I have neither. And I’m not panicky about that. As I said, I know I have people to whom I can speak. I’m just aware I might be starting a new chapter in this miserable story. And I’ve never been particularly great at change. I guess, if nothing else, I can start blogging even more. I guess, what it really came down to is that I wish I was the one deciding to give up my security blankets instead of the one having rugs being pulled out from under me. Then again, if I’ve learned nothing else from this experience, life seems to be far more about having rugs pulled out from under you than one would ever really like to think about.