Let me count the ways. After 43 years I know your voice—whispering to me across the table, working the crowd with a mike, singing, crying, laughing, mumbling in your sleep. I know your body through the years—from young to aging with mine, every way of dressing and undressing it, all stages of childbearing, weary and thriving, dancing, dozing, rejecting, and receiving.
In the summer of 1981 when I was 30, a strange and embarrassing thing happened to me. In a group room at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, where I had just started my residency in psychiatry, as one person said her ritual goodbyes to the circle of over 25 patients and clinicians, most of them strangers to me, I cried. The cry washed through me, quiet but strong enough to bend my head, soak my cheeks, and run my nose—I did my best to stuff it and later to dismiss it.
