In September my longstanding therapist died. I hadn’t seen her in a professional capacity for several years but I’d bumped into her in our local pathology clinic and known in an instant that she was ill. I could see the shadow of death hovering. I waited for her to speak of it – this illness – but she didn’t.
For months afterwards I fretted about her, wondering how she was, wondering if I would be told when the end got close, wondering if I needed to try to say goodbye.
I emailed but the response I got was lively. There was no mention of her health.
A little while later she came to me in a dream. It felt like a visitation. She was golden, emanating light and she was young, younger than I had ever known her. In the dream I was on some kind of quest, the details are now hazy, and my therapist – this gorgeous golden vision – accompanied me, whispering insights in my ear. She was playful, witty, vivacious. I was entranced by her.
On waking, I felt panicked. Had she died? How do you find out if your old therapist, the most private of practitioners, is dead? I googled. The was nothing. I searched the obituary section of our local paper. Again, nothing. Go to the source, I thought, and I emailed her about my dream.
Within hours she wrote back: “I believe that every feature or person or detail within the dream landscape represents an aspect of the dreamer, so I wonder what ‘I’ or ‘adventure’ or ‘glowing light’ etc represent of you?”
She’s alive! I laughed, relief flooding my chest. But – as always – that therapist-flip. The spotlight turned from her back to me.
I’d come into Varda’s orbit 20 years before. I’d been experiencing monstrous headaches and a friend had suggested the Alexander technique, which aims to improve posture. I was desperate. It was pre-internet. I looked up Alexander technicians in the Yellow Pages and there was a practitioner in the next valley. I live in the sticks. “That is very close,” I thought.
I turned up at the designated address. It was different from what I’d expected. There was Varda, tiny, with her platform wedges and her piercing blue eyes, in a long wooden-floored studio at the end of a bumpy dirt road. I was in my mid-20s, a newly single mum with untenable headaches and a backstory so sad no one could hear it. She coaxed me on to her table and tried to help my body release some of the strange tension it held. There was no massage but a gentle lifting of limbs with some verbal instructions – “The neck releases the head, forward and up … ” A new lightness entered my body.
At the end, sitting across from each other, we had a small debrief. Varda told me that often pain in the body was related to emotional experiences. She told me she was a trained counsellor. She asked me if there was anything about my life I would like to share.
Up until that point, the events of my life had seemed too big to utter out loud. There was no situation or space that could hold the words.
“No one likes to hear about that,” I said. “It’s way too intense.”
“That’s not a problem for me,” Varda replied. “I like intense.” And she reached out a hand and gently touched my knee.
My world shifted in that moment. From unseen to seen. From pain and contraction to the whole spectrum of feelings.
After this appointment, I went back fortnightly. Varda always chose her words carefully, each one imbued with a specific meaning. Intelligence hummed in the air around her. When she said, “Try writing some things down,” I listened.
“I’d like to read what you’re writing,” she said, more than once. It was hard to imagine sharing my words with another but, when I plucked up enough courage, I left her a story to read after one of our sessions.
Once I was home, she rang me. “I wouldn’t normally do this,” she said. “Ring you without prior arrangement.”
I wondered what was wrong.
“It’s just … I read the story and … I think … I think it’s something.”
I was dumbfounded. This response was outside my imaginings.
“I’m not an expert,” she pushed on, “but I believe your writing is of a publishable standard.”
“Really?”
“Jessie, I think you’re a writer.”
Crossing paths with Varda in that secluded studio was to have your life fork off in a new direction. A second birth, a second life. Before Varda and after Varda. She showed us who we might truly be.
Finally, it came, the news, via text, that Varda was going into a hospice. “Please know each and every one of you are treasures I will carry for eternity,” she texted. How to speak about the therapeutic bond without speaking about love? This extraordinary pact, this astonishing communion. I thought about how many gentle invitations Varda had issued.
I will see you.
I will hear you.
I will hold you.
I am not afraid of you.
I like intense.
I love you.
I texted back, trying to capture the depth of my gratitude.
“So reciprocal,” she replied.
Maverick healer, gifted musician, sensitive wordsmith, mad tennis enthusiast, committed beach walker, mother, sister, therapist, friend. Varda, how we loved you.
Jessie Cole is the author of four books, including the memoirs Staying and Desire, A Reckoning
