Come, Let Me Guide You by Susan Krieger

Author:Susan Krieger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Purdue University Press

TEN

Visiting Her Memory

AS I WALKED TOWARD the apartment building where Marion lived, I noticed that the drapes around her windows were closed—those windows that had always been open, the light coming through. Marion did not come to the front lobby to greet me as usual, so I went down the hall and knocked on her door. Occasionally before, she had fallen asleep late in the afternoon and I woke her when I knocked. I thought perhaps that had happened again. When no one came after repeated knocks, I went out to the front office of the residence where a manager told me, flat out, that she had died two days before. A day afterward, her cat had died. I was stunned. I had not expected this and, at the same time, I believed it all too easily, as if, of course, she had died. But there was never an “of course.” I knew that Marion had been a smoker, and that, for several years, she had been on oxygen from chain smoking most of her life. But nothing had indicated to me that she was close to death. Marion was very alive for me, as she always had been. And yet she wasn’t. It was chilling.

As I walked home, I was unsure how I would manage with the news, with this change in my life, this loss. In a way, it was time, I thought. Perhaps I had outgrown the relationship. Recently, I had had difficulty talking to Marion. I was less trusting of what she would tell me or that she could help me. We had trouble relating to each other. These difficulties made me very sad. And now she was gone. Like that. No warning. No one really to talk to about it. Our relationship had been so unusual, so involving, not like any other I had known. Not only did I need Marion in a deep way, but she had needed me. And in the end, I think she needed me more than I did her, or more than I could allow.

A week later, there was a memorial service for her in the meeting room in her residence, attended by people from the building and friends. I brought flowers and wine and spoke briefly about what Marion had meant to me. I was the only one there who was a client of hers, as far as I know. I think I was the only psychotherapy client she had at that time, for she had long since left the hospital clinic where I first met her and had been working out of her home in a semi-retired fashion. I think she saw other people at first when she left the clinic, but it was never something we discussed.

At the ceremony, after people had spoken of their memories of Marion, I stepped over to a side table to get refreshments. I laid my white cane against a back wall and turned to James, her best friend, a gay man, and soon began telling him that I was going to get a guide dog.

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