When Ben first entered my office with his wife, Sylvie, the word that came to my mind to describe him, and I don’t mean this disrespectfully, was schlub. While Sylvie was svelte and stylish in black jeans and a cropped jacket, Ben was a mess. About six-foot-two and a good 60 pounds overweight, he wore baggy chinos that hung precariously on his hips. His shirt hung half out. His eyeglasses were held together with a paper clip. If they still sold plastic pocket protectors, Ben would be first in line.
And schlub, in its way, was the presenting problem. Sylvie was bored in her marriage. When they’d first met, she said, Ben had shown her a poet’s soul. “He poured out his heart to me, asked me a million questions,” she recalled. “He even wrote me love poems.” But those days were long gone. Nowadays, Ben would come home from work, pop open a beer, plop in front of the TV, and affably give . . . not much. Sure, he loved his three daughters and was particularly close to his youngest, Carrie, a 16-year-old, with whom he shot baskets and took long bike rides. But when it was time to set limits with their daughters, he was nowhere to be seen. Even he admitted that he was more of a playmate than a father. Sylvie spoke the words I’ve heard from women for 30 years: “I need a real partner.”
When I asked Ben what he thought and felt, he looked bewildered. “Well, I know she’s always mad at me,” he muttered, shifting his gaze from me to his wife like a kid in trouble with his parents. He went silent for a moment, and then shrugged, “Honestly, I don’t have a clue what I’m supposed to do.”
By the end of the third session, I found myself agreeing with Sylvie’s point of view. (I’m not a neutral therapist; when called for, I take sides.) It’s not that she was a model spouse: she alternately lit into her husband about his failings and kept her distance from him. But he was an immovable force. He seemed like a guy who’d made it to his wedding vows and then had pretty much given up. He seemed to expect to be left alone, much the way his family had treated his distant father.
When I told Ben that Sylvie was largely right, that he’d let himself go in all sorts of ways, he nearly collapsed in shame. I had to prop him up emotionally, but he soon digested the difficult news, and together we embarked on an explicit makeover. He went on a diet, made an appointment with a personal trainer, and went to Newbury Street in Boston for a new hairdo, clothes, the works.
The name of the game was rendering Ben attractive again, in all sorts of ways, most of all emotionally. He needed to come out of his shell of passivity and engage.
When Ben complained that it was too complicated for him, I held the line. “You have to give, Ben. You’ve got to make an effort.” I handed him a dog-eared copy of a book I kept in my office, 50 Romantic Things to Do for Your Wife. A week later, in an individual session, he told me he’d conspired with Carrie to choose the perfect romantic gesture—until she’d gotten fed up with his waffling. “Just buy Mom some damn flowers,” she’d said.
To her credit, Sylvie didn’t disqualify or criticize Ben’s nascent efforts at getting close. She loved him, had three kids with him. She wanted him to succeed. Besides, Sylvie came from Old Yankee stock and she had the best characteristics of her tribe—she was a person good to the bone. Driving Carrie home from a friend’s house, it was Sylvie’s goodness that compelled her out of her car one snowy New England night to help another car that had skidded on an icy curve and got stuck on the shoulder of the road, caught in a snowbank. That’s when a second car skidded in exactly the same spot, careening into the first car, and then careening into Sylvie and Carrie. Sylvie had multiple fractures in an arm and both of her legs. Carrie died within minutes.
When Ben called me the next morning, he was weeping, grief-stricken for the loss of his daughter. But he was also worried sick about Sylvie. She was in the hospital on a high dose of morphine, and “between the drugs and the shock, she’s pretty much out of her mind,” he said. “She keeps waking up and asking for Carrie: ‘Where is she? Where is she?’”
And no matter how many times Ben tried to tell her, and no matter how he put it, she would not let in that her daughter was gone. “She turns her head, changes the subject, acts like I haven’t even spoken,” Ben said. “You’ve got to help,” he said urgently. “She’ll listen to you. She always listens to you.”
When I walked into Sylvie’s hospital room, the profusion of flowers and gifts had the opposite effect of cheering me. It looked like a funeral home. While I’d tried to prepare myself, the sight of her was shocking—tubes everywhere, both legs and one arm in traction, her face swollen almost beyond recognition. I sat next to Ben and took her good hand. “Sylvie,” I said, “Something terrible has happened.” She closed her eyes. We went round and round for 5 minutes, 10 minutes. I felt cruel, sadistic.
At one point, Sylvie looked at me, really looked at me. Her eyes grew wide. Then she swung her head away from us and sobbed, letting out raw, heart-wrenching sounds.
After many minutes, she turned to Ben. “Go home and get Carrie’s old fisherman’s sweater.” Her voice was trembling, urgent. “It’s in her bottom drawer.” Then she turned to me. “You’ve got to make sure she gets it,” she told me. “She’ll need it. She’s cold. She’s dead.”
Carrie was buried in that sweater three days later. It seemed like half the town had come out. Friends and family squeezed into every church pew, a sea of kids spilling out the steps and into the street. I sat close to the family—Sylvie propped up in a portable hospital bed, Ben standing next to her, holding her hand, straight and stiff in his handsome new suit.
Over the next several months, I went to their home as often as I could. About three months into it, Ben pulled me aside and confessed that since the accident—and unbeknownst to Sylvie—he’d been keeping a blog. He’d been pouring his anguish out into the internet, garnering thousands of followers from all over the world. I read the posts; they were shattering. Later on, I asked his permission to excerpt an early entry, entitled “Holding My Breath.”
People ask me if I miss her. Actually I don’t, not yet anyway. Maybe I’m in shock or some kind of denial, but I actually feel close to her. I feel her in the air, the sky. She’s with me now as I write. What I miss isn’t her, but us, the two of us together. The back and forth, teasing—what she called, “talking smack.”
Everything froze the minute they told me. My heart stopped, my world stopped. Since then, I’ve hovered somewhere between here and god knows where. I’m the ghost. I don’t think I’ve taken a full breath since. I don’t really want to. If the whole thing started up again—if I begin to live again—it would mean that the world will go on without her, and that’s just not thinkable. I can’t imagine accepting that. There can be no world without her in it, laughing and alive.
Ben told me he was keeping his blog secret from Sylvie because he was afraid it would hurt her too much. But shortly after our meeting, a friend spilled the beans to her. She went right to her laptop and read every entry. “It was amazing,” she told me at our next visit. “Here was my poet’s heart—the man I loved. I fell for him all over again.” She took his hand. “It’s not just the blog,” she explained. “It’s Ben. The way he’s showing up for his own feelings. And the way he’s showing up for mine.”
Ben squeezed his wife’s hand. “We’re holding each other up, best we can,” he said. He was looking at her, not me. “We’re in this together.”
About six months after the accident, we sat together, each of us locked into what felt a heavy, interminable silence. Three people breathing, each of us thinking what Sylvie finally spoke out loud. “I lost my daughter,” she said, “and found my husband.”
You hear that the greatest single predictor of divorce is the death of a child. You hear that no force on earth is more capable of ripping apart a loving union.
But not always.
Return to the other stories in “What’s Your Most Memorable Therapeutic Moment?”
Terry Real
Terry Real, LICSW, is an internationally recognized couples therapist, speaker, author, and founder of the Relational Life Institute (RLI). His latest bestseller is Us: How to Get Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship. He’s also the author of I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression (Scribner), the straight-talking How Can I Get Through to You? Reconnecting Men and Women, and The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Make Love Work.
