Maggie and the gratitude prayer

...a dispatch from bewilderness

I made this for Maggie

At various times in my year of outpatient brain rehab, I was assigned a Physical Therapist, an Occupational Therapist, and a Speech Therapist, but not a Psycho Therapist. So I invented an Imaginary Therapist who let me talk about my feelings —and seemed to like me, too.

At our first meeting, she asked me if I knew why I was there. I said, “Something happened. It was my last day as me. I knew things then like what is a thumb, a bigot, a spigot. I could make headlines, deadlines and dinner.”

She asked to hear more. I said, “One minute, I was in media. Making headlines. Intimations. Inflammations. Injections of fear or hope. Volume and velocity. You don’t walk, you race.”

The Imaginary Therapist said, “Tell me more.” I said, “The next minute, you don’t walk or talk. You’re rolling Play Doh balls or pounding plastic pegs in boards. [My eyes were getting hot, so I paused, then persevered.] With a bunch of other people who are parked there with you.”

She asked me to tell her more. I liked that. It meant she believed I might say something that mattered.

So I added, “There were fifteen people there and fifteen people not there. They were who we used to be. Depending on the day, we might include a former short order cook, a former bus driver, a former professor of psycholinguistics, and a former physician who treated people like us before she became one of us. Plus…[My throat felt very tight]…Plus a former freelance writer like me.

The Imaginary Therapist leaned forward, which somehow let me feel both heard and safe. So I said, “Some of us could walk and talk. Some of us could dress ourselves. Some felt “normal” at times or seemed “normal” at times. But we were all…” [I stopped — then began again.]

“We were all missing persons, missing the persons we used to be. Some of us were lawyers or teachers or troops in conflict zones which were once called wars.

“Some were parents. Some had parents. Some had toddlers. Some spoke like toddlers. Or did not speak at all. We each had a story, but most of us couldn’t say what it was. One of us was a former lawyer named Maggie. She couldn’t say much, but still she somehow started each meeting with a gratitude prayer. I write this to honor her.”