*trigger warning*

I have been looking for somewhere to a post a tribute to an old T of mine for a while amongst people who understand and I hope it is okay to post this account here. It is some writing about a T who meant an awful lot to me and definitely not intended as a sad story but I want to be clear that it does mention the death of an old T and for that reason to be on the safe side, I think it should carry a trigger warning.

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Things went bad for me when I was a student living away from home. They always were going to head that way - I was an accident waiting to happen and university is full of potential for the type of experiences that can lead to your world tilting alarmingly. Eventually I had to drop out, regroup and try and sort out the train wreck that I had become.

J was a gestalt therapist. I think my parents found her, probably in desperation. She was recommended by friends or colleagues of theirs. I was 21, quietly and desperately ill and almost completely without any insight into why I was quite so crazy. She was on the edge of retirement, very patient, warm. It was very early days for me so we didn't touch a lot of deeper things that I ended up having to do later work on but I did some really vital early groundwork that ended up paving the way for future healing.

We worked pretty well together, although I was painfully shy and found it very difficult to talk about my life. I stubbornly held on to the view that there was something intrinsically wrong with me, that the things that had happened to me at university were my fault, and we wrestled with that a lot. She sort of had a grandmotherly feel to her, which I found comforting.

We got to a point where I was a lot more functional and I was able to go back to university and finish. Towards the end of therapy she suggested I look into training to become a T someday. I kind of laughed inwardly because I was training as a scientist and I also felt very young and still fairly messed up, but I was touched that she seemed to have more faith in me than I did. She lent me some books to read, which I thanked her politely for, took them home and put them on a shelf where they sat unread.

We worked together again briefly when I hit a bump in the road several years later and was dealing with some traumatic events in my life but eventually it became too overwhelming and I chose to discontinue therapy until I felt stable enough to continue. I think I came to the conclusion then that although I respected and liked J and I knew she cared for me, she was not well equipped to deal with trauma and when I finally decided I was ready to go back to therapy, I chose to see someone different.

I remember the last time I saw her very clearly. It was Christmas in around 2005. Things were still very unsettled and I had been in hospital for 10 days, having voluntarily admitted myself to a psych ward. I felt very guilty about discontinuing therapy without much of an explanation so I dropped a home made card, which was a picture of my tortoise with a santa hat photoshopped on to his head, and a gift at her house, which is where I saw her for sessions. My intention was to just place them in her mailbox but she saw me coming up the drive, came to the door and asked me in. She seemed genuinely pleased to see me. We talked briefly and I let her know I was okay and thanked her for being concerned about me. I told her I would return the books when I'd read them.

Life continued, I got a lot better, I got married. I wrote her a Christmas card that I forgot to post one year and then didn't send because I was too embarrassed at being so disorganised. The books still sat on my shelf. I felt pangs of guilt when I looked at them but life was extremely busy so I told myself I had plenty of time to get them back to her.

About a two years ago I found myself thinking about J. I wondered how she was, whether she was still practising and felt guilty about never returning her books. I'd just enrolled on a counselling skills course and wanted to tell her that I was starting the journey she'd recommended, although it was by this point over 10 years since she had made the suggestion and I wanted to ask whether I could drop the books back. I looked for her number in the phone book, which was where I always located it when I needed to contact her, and couldn't find it listed. I went into Google sleuthing mode and eventually found her obituary online in the local paper. She had died suddenly over a year previously at the age of 72. I had no one I could really contact to say how sorry I was - her husband was always a peripheral figure I never really saw and I knew that her sons were living in New Zealand. The online obituary had the option to 'light a candle' which is a little animated picture. I did that and put my name next to it.

The other day I found in a box of saved things a letter from her, handwritten to me shortly after I stopped therapy. She could never wrap her head around email and didn't own a computer. She was thanking me for some journal entries I had shared with her in our last session. It was warm and heartfelt. She didn't need to write it - but she did and I am grateful for it.

I am sad that I did not get to give her books back, but secretly glad that I have them with her name in. I used one of them recently as a reference in an essay I had to write for college and felt glad to be connected to her, even though I cannot tell her that I am working towards qualifying as a counsellor, although not to work with individuals, or the modality she recommended.

I am so very grateful for J's gentleness and patience with 21 year old me, for persisting in trying to drive into my head that having needs was normal, that my sole purpose in life was not to make everything okay for other people. For helping convince me that I mattered.

I hope one day I can pass that on.