Good Friday 2

Second afternoon appointment was, as usual with Mr. Sotheby. He walked down the hallway with me in front of his buddies getting store. I have this new little ritual. My office opens directly into the hallway now, instead of being part of a suite. When I leave it, of course it needs to be locked. I had a couple of days where three of my guys objected to the fact that I was opening the door for them. It wasn’t right, me holding the door for a man.

So now, I unlock it and take two steps back. Most of them get it right away, and most of them hold the door for me rather than going in first. Mr. Sotheby is familiar with this ritual, and he got to perform in in front of a myriad of people from the neighboring unit getting their store in the hallway. I hope it was a positive perception rather than one of me dominating him. I’m pretty sure it was the later.

As we were walking toward my office I caught him fiddling in his pants. As you might imagine, this can be a sign of something totally inappropriate. I was a bit surprised and gave him the horrid older sister raised eyebrows.

He opens the door for me, and rearranges his pants. He has a tape in them. A song he wants to play for me. It’s an underground rap group from Detroit, and the song is the one most close to how he feels about his mother. I should have written the title and artist down. I’ll try to remember to do it and add it into the blog.

Anyway, it is brutal and sad. His mother’s birthday has just passed. He is thinking of her. He askes me how my weekend was, and I hesitate. As always, he immediately picks up any sense of something hidden, maybe a lie, a betrayal. I tell him we just got the news that my father is dying, sooner than later. As I stare out the door, I talk about the timing of this event. My sister was in town, and we were having a weekend long music event on our farm. I talked about receiving the news and the fact that my friends, whom I loved just passed me around from one to the other all weekend. Even though they could not change the news, or take back the future, they helped me hold my grief and bear it better. The same reason I wanted him to trust me with some of his pain.

Offering up this much of yourself is controversial. It is standard practice to keep yourself totally separate from your patients, offering a virtually blank slate. This doesn’t seem to work with these guys. They need something of you to connect to, to trust. So I jumped off of this cliff. When I turned back to him he was holding his head, wiping his eyes and looking at me. The first serious sense that I had reached through to him since the day he said he needed to talk about his emotions.