Lying On the Couch by Irvin D. Yalom

Author:Irvin D. Yalom [Yalom, Irvid D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465062973
Publisher: Basic Books

TEN

Just before six o’clock on a Tuesday evening, Ernest received a phone call from the sister of Eva Galsworth, one of his patients.

“Eva told me to call you and just to say, ‘It’s time.’”

Ernest wrote a message of apology to his 6:10 patient, taped it to his office door, and rushed to the home of Eva, a fifty-one-year-old woman with advanced ovarian cancer. Eva was a creative writing teacher, a graceful woman of great dignity. Ernest often imagined, with pleasure, living his life side by side with Eva, had she been younger and had they met under different circumstances. He thought her beautiful, admired her deeply, and marveled at her commitment to life. For the past year and a half, he had unstintingly devoted himself to easing the pain of her dying.

With many of his patients, Ernest introduced the concept of regret into his therapy. He asked patients to examine regrets for their past conduct and urged them to avoid future regrets. “The goal,” he’d say, “is to live so that five years from now you won’t look back on these five years filled with regret.”

Occasionally Ernest’s “anticipatory regret” strategy fell flat. Generally it proved meaningful. But no patient ever took it more seriously than Eva, who dedicated herself to, as she put it, “sucking the marrow out of the bones of life.” Eva packed a great deal into the two years following her diagnosis: she left a joyless marriage, had whirlwind affairs with two men she had long desired, took a wildlife safari in Kenya, finished two short stories, and traveled around the country visiting her three children and some of her favorite former students.

Throughout all these changes, Ernest and she had worked closely and well. Eva regarded Ernest’s office as a safe haven, a place to bring all her fears about dying, all the macabre feelings she dared not express to friends. Ernest promised to face everything directly with her, to flinch from nothing, to treat her not as a patient but as a fellow traveler and sufferer.

And Ernest kept his word. He took to scheduling Eva for the last hour of the day because he often ended the hour flooded with anxiety about Eva’s death, and his own as well. He reminded her over and over that she was not entirely alone in her dying, that he and she were both facing the terror of finitude, that he would go with her as far as he was humanly able. When Eva asked him to promise he would be with her when she died, Ernest gave his word. She had been too ill for the past two months to come to his office, but Ernest kept in touch by telephone and made occasional home visits, for which he chose not to bill.

Ernest was greeted by Eva’s sister and ushered into her bedroom. Eva, heavily jaundiced because her tumor had invaded her liver, was gasping for breath and perspiring so heavily that her soaked hair was plastered to her head.

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