fewer hours than he actually had or that he had been awake all night long. Often he could
assure himself that he had slept only by carefully reviewing his nocturnal thoughts and
realizing that he would never, in a waking state, have ruminated at such length about such
bizarre, irrational things.
But this particular morning he was entirely confused about how much he had slept.
The kitten–cat couplet must have emerged from the dream realm, but his other nocturnal
thoughts fell into a no–man`s–land, with neither the clarity and purposefulness of full–fledged consciousness nor the quirky caprice of dream thoughts.
Julius sat in bed, reviewing the couplet with his eyes closed, following the
instructions he offered patients to facilitate the recall of nighttime fantasies, hypnagogic
images, and dreams. The poem was pointed at those who loved kittens but not their
coming to age as cats. But what did that have to do with him? He loved kittens and cats
alike, had loved the two adult cats in his father`s store, loved their kittens and their
kittens` kittens, and couldn`t understand why the couplet lodged in his mind in such
tiresome fashion.
On second thought, perhaps the verse was a grim reminder of how, all his life, he
had embraced the wrong myth: namely, that everything about Julius Hertzfeld—his
fortune, stature, glory—was spiraling upward, and that life would always get better and
better. Of course, now he realized that the reverse was true—that the couplet had it
right—that the golden age came first, that his innocent, kittenly beginnings, the
playfulness, the hide–and–seek, the capture–the–flag games, and the building of forts out
of the empty liquor boxes in his father`s store, while unburdened by guilt, guile,
knowledge, or duty, was the very best time of life and that as the days and years passed,
the intensity of his flame dimmed, and existence grew inexorably more grim. The very
worst was saved for last. He recalled Philip`s words about childhood in the last meeting.
No doubt about it: Nietzsche and Schopenhauer had that part right.
Julius nodded his head sadly. It was true he had never truly savored the moment,
never grasped the present, never said to himself, «This is it, this time, this day—this is
what I want! These are the good old days, right now. Let me remain in this moment, let
me take root in this place for all time.» No, he had always believed that the juiciest meat
of life was yet to be found and had always coveted the future—the time of being older,
smarter, bigger, richer. And then came the upheaval, the time of the great reversal, the
sudden and cataclysmic deidealization of the future, and the beginning of the aching
yearning for what used to be.
When was that reversal? When did nostalgia replace the golden promise of
tomorrow? Not in college, where Julius considered everything as prelude (and obstacle)
to that grand prize: admission to medical school. Not in medical school, where, in his first
years, he yearned to be out of the classrooms and onto the wards as a clinical clerk, with
white jacket and stethoscope hanging out of pocket or slung casually about his neck like a
steel–and–rubber shawl. Not in the clerkships of his third and fourth medical school years,
when he finally took his place on the wards. There he yearned for more authority—to be
important, to make vital clinical decisions, to save lives, to dress in blue scrubs and
careen a patient on a gurney down the corridor to the OR to perform emergency trauma
surgery. Not even when he became chief resident in psychiatry, peeked behind the curtain
of shamanism, and was stunned at the limits and uncertainty of his chosen profession.
Without doubt Julius`s chronic and persistent unwillingness to grasp the present
had played havoc with his marriage. Though he had loved Miriam from the moment he
laid eyes on her in the tenth grade, he simultaneously resented her as an obstacle blocking
him from the multitude of women he felt entitled to enjoy. He had never completely
acknowledged that his mate–search was over or that his freedom to follow his lust was in
the slightest way curtailed. When his internship began he found that the house staff
sleeping quarters were immediately adjacent to the nursing school dorm brimming with
nubile young nurses who adored doctors. It was a veritable candy store, and he stuffed
himself with a rainbow of flavors.
It was only after Miriam`s death that the reversal must have occurred. In the ten
years since the car crash took her from him, he had cherished her more than while she
was alive. Julius sometimes heaved with despair when he thought of how his lush
contentment with Miriam, the true idyllic soaring moments of life, had come and gone
without his fully grasping them. Even now, after a decade, he could not speak her name
quickly but had to pause after each syllable. He knew also that no other woman would
ever really matter to him. Several women temporarily dispelled his loneliness, but it
didn`t take long for him, and for them, to realize they would never replace Miriam. More
recently, his loneliness was attenuated by a large circle of male friends, several of whom
belonged to his psychiatric support group, and by his two children. For the past few years
he had taken all his vacationsen famille with his two children and five grandchildren.
But all these thoughts and reminiscences had been only nocturnal trailers and short
subjects—the main feature of the night`s mentation had been a rehearsal of the speech he
would deliver to the therapy group later that afternoon.
He had already gone public about his cancer to many of his friends and his
individual therapy patients, yet, curiously, he was painfully preoccupied with his «coming
out» in the group. Julius thought it had something to do with his being in love with his
therapy group. For twenty–five years he had looked forward eagerly to every meeting.
The group was more than a clump of people; it had a life of its own, an enduring
personality. Though none of the original members (except, of course, he himself) was
still in the group, it had a stable persisting self, a core culture (in the jargon, a unique set
of «norms»—unwritten rules) that seemed immortal. No one member could recite the
group norms, but everyone could agree whether a certain piece of behavior was
appropriate or inappropriate.
The group demanded more energy than any other event of his week, and Julius had
labored mightily to keep it afloat. A venerable mercy ship, it had transported a horde of
tormented people into safer, happier harbors. How many? Well, since the average stay
was between two and three years, Julius figured at least a hundred passengers. From time
to time, memories of departed members wafted through his mind, snippets of an
interchange, a fleeting visual image of a face or incident. Sad to think that these wisps of
memory were all that remained of rich vibrant times, of events bursting with so much
life, meaning, and poignancy.
Many years ago Julius had experimented with videotaping the group and playing
back some particularly problematic interchanges at the next meeting. These old tapes
were in an archaic format no longer compatible with contemporary video playback
equipment. Sometimes he fancied retrieving them from his basement storage room,
having them converted, and bringing departed patients back to life again. But he never
did; he couldn`t bear exposing himself to proof of the illusory nature of life, how it was
warehoused on shiny tape and how quickly the present moment and every moment to
come will fade into the nothingness of electromagnetic wavelets.
Groups require time to develop stability and trust. Often a new group will spin off
members who are unable, for reasons of either motivation or ability, to engage in the
group task (that is, interacting with other members and analyzing that interaction). Then
it may go through weeks of uneasy conflict as members jockey for position of power,
centrality, and influence, but eventually, as trust develops, the healing atmosphere grows
