In the last moments of a therapy session, I have a breakthrough. “I just realized the barking dog in my dream is my father and …” Something opens up for me. “Yes, and …”
“I’m afraid our time is up.”
“But…. This is very important. What I’ve been working towards.”
“We’ll continue our discussion next week,” the therapist says kindly.
“But…” My voice trails off.
Therapists call this door-knobbing. The patient doesn’t want to leave. Wants to keep yakking just as the session is ending. Or they get in touch with a long-repressed trauma. Physicians also note patients who when they’re out the door, blurt crucial medical information, especially if it’s embarrassing. Another name for this: Bye-bye bombshells.
Yet everyone needs boundaries. Imagine if the 50-minute session went on three hours. Pity the poor shrink! On and on, her clients would gabble into oblivion. But why does revelation arrive at the last moment? Why does it have to wait so long?
During COVID, I joined a virtual meditation group that meets at 10:30 every morning. The Daily Sit in Barre, Vermont. Sometimes there are 140 people in Zoom boxes. “Good morning, good afternoon, good evening,” Buddhist psychologists Susan and Bill Morgan greet us because we live in different parts of the world. We stretch a little, come in for a landing, and begin to meditate.
Of course, monkey mind swings from branch to branch, story to memory to confused, hurt feelings, the brain debris. It’s a challenge to focus on the breath and not the stories. A challenge that I choose to pursue every morning. After agonizing moments, I peek out of the slits of my eyes at my analog clock: 5 minutes more. Oh! That’s when I finally settle. Breathing deeply, I begin to enter the zone. Yes, yes… What calm! Ah! That’s when the leader rings the bell once, twice, thrice. I bow and express gratitude for my daily practice. Then I look at the gallery of meditators, our virtual sangha. We wave to each other till tomorrow morning’s struggle.
Is it about things ending? The five more minutes of childhood play. Please! One more slice of pie. The snooze button jolting us out of a precious dream. When we suddenly grasp for wisdom, for what we’ve been searching for that has eluded us? Until now. There it is, flickering within our grasp. Just as the time has run out.
“Time is not running out,” Lisa, my good friend counsels. She’s probably 10 years older than I am. “You’re getting better. That’s all.” This is a common trope. You’re not getting older… But, of course, I am as we all are.
Isn’t door-knobbing really about finitude? Endings. The hardest part of writing a novel is how to finish it. Note the many suicides in books from Bovary to Karenina. When you don’t know what to do, kill off that character.
As a 12-year-old, I had a crush on Marty, an older counselor in the day camp of Blue Paradise, our Catskill bungalow colony. He had learned that his father died the week before. When he returned from the funeral, he barely spoke to anyone. One evening, I ran into him on the walkway. I tried to engage him. He said nothing. “I’m happy you’re back,” I finally blurted.
He looked at me, tears glittering in his bright blue eyes. “It doesn’t matter. Everything must end.”
I was shocked. “That can’t possibly be true.”
“Nothing lasts forever.”
“No, no, no!” I cried out, “It’s not true.”
“Think of something that doesn’t end,” he challenged me.
Whatever I thought of had an ending. Even if it was a long time into the future. That’s when it hit me. Everything ends because everything and everyone dies. I felt overcome by the idea.
Most revelatory was that I had not known it until this moment. I, the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, whose numbered arm stared at me when he sat at the kitchen table. I was born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. How did I not know that?
Door-knobbing is perhaps the all too human impulse to not let go, to hold on for dear life to the very end. Those last moments when time becomes most precious.
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Sonia Pilcer leads workshops for writers in New York City and the Berkshires. Her latest book “The Last Hotel,” is based on the hotel her father managed on West 72nd Street, and which the Edge excerpted for nearly a year.
