Am I Doing This Right?

“What would you like to try to accomplish in your sessions?” the counselor asked me.

I was sitting in the counselor’s small office in Tucson, AZ. The space was packed with books, filing cabinets, and bags of psychiatric drug samples. I had qualified for two months of free counseling by doing an intake at the clinic the day before. The clinic was queer friendly and even though it had nothing to do with why I needed counseling, if you had ever used drugs ever before (which, like so many folks, I had once in college) and if there was a history of drug use in your family, that checked the necessary box that resulted in free counseling.

“My father died five years ago suddenly. We were very close. I tried to go for counseling at the time but it didn’t work out. I am wondering if I would benefit from grief counseling.”

“Why do you think you need grief counseling?” The counselor had red hair, some of which she had to occasionally tuck behind one ear as she spoke to me.

I tried to mask my irritation at being asked what I felt to be a repeat question, “Because my father died suddenly, we were very close, and I wasn’t ready for that to happen.” I paused. “Are you saying I don’t need it because it has been five years?”

“How do you think your grief impacts your day-to-day life?” the counselor continued.

“I don’t know. I think about my dad a lot. But I thought about him a lot when he was alive.” I tried to come at the issue from another angle. “It just impacts me a lot still. And five years seems like a long time for it to be impacting me this much. Can you give me an example of someone who would be a good candidate for grief counseling?”

The counselor thought a moment, “Someone who lays in bed all day, holding a picture of their deceased loved one, crying, not being able to do anything else.”

“Well, I can’t say that describes me,” I sighed. I felt like I was searching for a code word or key phrase that, if I could just stumble upon it, would unlock the help I needed in order to process my father’s grief. If I could just make someone understand what I needed. But I myself didn’t even know what that was.

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The first time I tried to go to counseling after my father’s death I was still living in Los Angeles. My father had been dead for about eight months. While I had never laid in bed, holding his picture, crying and doing nothing else, there was a period of time (two weeks? a month?) where I remember coming home from work at the coffee shop, eating, and then going to sleep as soon as possible.

Work, my roommates, my other friends, traveling back and forth to Phoenix to deal with my mom in the aftermath of Dad’s death, my Grandma Rita dying a few months later–these things kept me in motion. But I was still devastated.

My health insurance via Peet’s was Kaiser Permanente and so there was a prescriptive process in place for me to start grief counseling. I had to go to an intake location and have an initial valuation.

As part of the evaluation, the intake coordinator asked me how much alcohol I drank. I did the mental math in my head: probably one beer or glass of wine with dinner during the week, maybe an extra glass or two on the weekends–a total of seven to ten drinks, approximately. The rest of the intake seemed uneventful to me: I did not have any drug habits. I went running at least a few times a week. I was a vegetarian.

At the conclusion of the intake, the coordinator said to me, “Prior to being allowed to join our group grief counseling sessions, you will need to enroll in our Alcoholics Anonymous program.”

I burst out laughing, “What? I’m sorry. I thought you said Alcoholics Anonymous. Do you mean Al Anon? The group for people who live with alcoholics?” I had researched Al Anon throughout my high school and college years and had considered going as I lived through my mother’s and Rick’s drinking problems.

“Your response to our intake questions indicates you drink more than the recommended intake of alcohol during the average week. You could be an alcoholic.”

“I’m sorry–what are the thresholds?”

“For women, low-risk drinking is defined as no more than 3 drinks on any single day and no more than 7 drinks per week. For men, it is defined as no more than 4 drinks on any single day and no more than 14 drinks per week. These are standards set by the National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.”

“So, my roommates, who are all men, who I all drink with, they get to drink twice as much as I do? I don’t understand why that is. I weigh as much, or more, than any one of them,” I said, starting to raise my voice. I was already insulted and upset by this conversation, but categorizing me as an alcoholic because of my perceived gender put me over the edge.

“I don’t want to do group grief counseling sessions. And I am not an alcoholic. I want to go to individual grief counseling sessions, please,” I started to cry. I was so frustrated that I was crying–I felt like a child. “Please–I just miss my Dad.”

“If you do not first attend the Alcoholics Anonymous group we offer for at least eight sessions, you will not be allowed to attend grief counseling therapy of any kind. There is no point trying to help you with your grief if your alcohol abuse is just making it worse.”

“I am not an alcoholic,” I growled. “I am 23 years old. I know what an alcoholic is, because I grew up with a few. And I am not an alcoholic.” I was trying to stop myself from crying, but the more I thought about what was happening, the more I cried.

“I am sorry we cannot help you then. When you are ready to get help, please feel free to come back to us,” the intake coordinator said, compassion absent from her tone.

I never went back.

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About six months after I concluded the free counseling sessions I had qualified for in Tucson, I decided I was going to transition genders. My transition, in conjunction with a sudden move to New Jersey because of Dan’s need for emergency back surgery, in conjunction with his years of recovery and my inability to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, lead to years of counseling with a few different counselors.

Throughout these counseling sessions, I would talk about my father’s death and the deaths of other loved ones that had occurred right before and right after Dad died (Dad’s best friend Jim, Grandma Rita, Jim’s wife Jan). But these discussions were incidental to the other pressing issues I was addressing at the time. Although I still felt the weight of my father’s loss as time continued to pass–5 years, then 10–the farther away it got, the more I devalued my own desire to definitively, formally deal with my grief. As I prepared to start graduate school, I decided it was time to stop going to counseling.

Three years later, I went back to counseling again as I began to consider leaving my then-husband. Then I stayed in counseling for the year following as I went through my divorce and the aftermath of getting my life back on track. It was then thirteen years after my father had died and I had long given up on counseling to deal with my grief.

Two surprising things happened during this year of counseling. First, in addressing the failure of my first marriage, I ended up talking about my parent’s marriage a lot. And in having these discussions, I ended up talking about things related to my father and my family that I had always imagine I would have talked about as part of my grief counseling. The second surprising thing was as I progressed through this year of counseling, Basil encouraged me to get back into my writing. And as I did, I began to write a lot about my dad (as any reader of this blog can affirm).

At first I felt hesitant to write about my grief and focus so much on my thoughts about loss.

“You write about whatever you want to write about.” Basil told me. He also reminded me of one of his favorite pieces of writing advice from Ray Bradbury, “Don’t think.”

And through my writing of this blog since then, I feel like I have processed more about my father’s death and healed more than I ever knew would be possible.

As I thought back this week to my counselor in Tucson describing the example of someone in need of grief counseling–someone who lays in bed all day, holding the picture of their deceased loved one, crying–I realized that for all of the years since then, I have worried if I was grieving the right way, if I was grieving enough, if I thought about Dad too much, if I over-estimated the importance of my father’s death on my life.

If you were walking down the street and a stranger with a machete suddenly cut off your right leg, there would be no right or wrong way to deal with that loss and the aftermath of that loss: there would only be the reality of how you dealt with it. There is no wrong way to grieve: there is only the reality of how we grieve.