Life & Therapy

There’s a song by LCD Soundsystem called “Someone Great,” about the feelings that come when someone important to you dies. In the last half of the song, he sings “When someone great is gone,” over and over, enough times that it feels like a chant.  This part of the song has been repeating in my head ever since I found out that my own someone great was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, one that recently took her away from this world.  This Someone was named Mary Dwan, a fantastic person who was my mentor, good friend, and stood in as a mother to me when I was in my twenties and early thirties.  I credit her with guiding me through my transformation from child to grownup; from  self-loathing to self-loving; from directionless floater to a woman with purpose.  She also guided me into becoming the therapist that I am.  My clients, friends, children and spouse directly benefit from her words of wisdom, which I still rely on to this day.

As Mary struggled with cancer during the last 7 months of her life, she continued to inspire and teach.  Sometimes daily, she posted on Caring Bridge, sharing truthful and real feelings about her process.  When she no longer spoke, her family shared what was happening until she took her last breath.  I was lucky to attend the most incredible three-plus hour Zoom memorial that her family created and lovingly facilitated.  Over 70 people attended and most of us shared how she’d touched us in her time on Earth.  During her memorial, it became clear that Mary impacted a vast number of people more profoundly than seems possible for one person to do in one lifetime, and I left with a feeling of awe.  I share her impact here because so many more can still benefit from her wisdom, and selfishly I hope to keep her spirit alive even longer.  Trying to coherently distill the experiences, lessons, trials and tribulations of Mary’s life into this blog post has proven to be a tough challenge.  I could write a book detailing just my limited view of Mary’s life, and if everyone who knew her were to do the same, there would be volumes to say.

I met Mary when I was 25 and she was 55.  I was in my rudderless, directionless twenties, not sure what I was doing with my life, completely broke, stuck in an on-again, off-again esteem-eroding relationship, and struggling with feelings of inadequacy and self-dislike, while also healing from childhood wounds and at the same time gloriously exploring my creativity and spirituality.  She was in the latter part of her very successful therapy career, proud of her waiting-list-only private practice, and equally proud of her family of three sons and husband who was clearly her equal.  When I met her, she was enthusiastically exploring and engaging her creative side, which she saw as an adventurous shift in her life, a shift to a path she explored until the day she died.  I was teaching bookbinding classes at an art store and Mary took one of those classes.  After the class, Mary wanted more, so she came to my apartment for private lessons.  She showed up in a car with a bumper sticker that said something like “Enjoy life now, this is not a dress rehearsal!” This message suited her to a tee.

As she learned to make books, Mary embraced the lessons with joie de vivre, and her mistakes did not faze her or curb her enthusiasm. This might be the first thing to understand about Mary- she was not perfect and she made mistakes, but her mistakes and those of others did not interrupt her flow or her ability to love herself and others.  She told me that, at the beginning of her creative explorations, she’d taken a beadmaking class, where a bead she’d made turned out ugly.  She’d looked at it and said, “This is ugly, but I don’t care, I’m having fun.”  This approach was novel to me, because I grew up in a family where mistakes were met with ridicule and shame, and I put a lot of focus on making sure my mistakes were well hidden. In contrast, Mary did not hide her mistakes, nor was she ashamed of them, nor did she bend the truth to minimize them. In our relationship she taught me the importance of both owning my mistakes when they hurt others and calling others out when their mistakes hurt me.  Her guidance gave me the courage to confront someone powerful whose mistakes hurt me, and she also confronted me with the utmost dignity when I made a mistake that hurt her.  In the past year, I shared her wisdom in this area with my daughter who used it to confront someone powerful, too, which was transformative for her as a child and for myself as a parent.  These occasions caused me and others to grow exponentially.

Before I go further into my relationship with Mary, I’d like to share a bit about who she was. When I was in grad school, I had an assignment to interview someone older than me and write their life story in the context of the stages of adult development, so I interviewed Mary.  Before talking about her adult life, she wanted me to know about an experience she had at age thirteen, because it colored her approach to life from then on.  At thirteen, she and her family moved to Israel for a year from Ohio, and up to that point, she’d lived her life as a “midwestern girl.”  While in Israel, she was exposed to a large diversity of people and experiences.  She gave the example that Israeli girl scouts were learning to shoot guns while girl scouts in the U.S. were selling cookies door to door.  She said that this exposure to other cultures caused her to see that everything is relative, and that in an unfamiliar environment, she was forced to define who she was from the inside, because conformity was not an option for her.  This internal frame of reference, like a good GPS, guided her and remained powerful throughout her entire life.  Mary taught me how to find and trust my own internal GPS after years of looking outside of myself for one.

Mary often expressed astonishment at the insights I already had in my twenties about life, as messy as mine was at the time, and I always told her that I wouldn’t know those things had she not bushwhacked a path for me and my peers when she was in her twenties and thirties. Mary’s twenties and thirties spanned the 1960s and 70s while mine spanned the 1990s and 2000s.  She started her twenties not expecting to have a career and believing that she was meant to be “a hostess to a man” (her words), and that is how things started out, but definitely not how things ended.  Because of Mary’s and others’ experiences before me, I started out my twenties unrushed, expecting that I could choose any career I wanted when I felt like it, if I felt like it, and that I did not need a man to define me.  During her twenties, Mary started on the expected trajectory of her time, but life redirected her, and her response to the redirection helped to knock down all those limited expectations of women so that by the time I got there, the options were way more diverse.  She was a frontrunner in the movement of women shattering these limited expectations, which gave me the freedom to use my twenties as a time of emotional healing and exploration, an insightful time that she did not get to have when she’d been my age.  She met me during a period of her life when she was free to explore the same creative things that I was exploring.  I always saw her as my teacher, but when I told her this while she was dying, she said she felt the same way about me as I did about her, and called us “soul peers.”  She treated me as an equal, which meant the world to me because I had and still have so much admiration for her.

Mary started out her twenties married, and joyously had sons whom she adored.  She loved parenting.  She then become the first divorced single parent that she knew of, during a time when there were no support groups, articles or books on the subject.  Then she became a remarried parent in a blended family during a time when the subject of stepfamilies was considered “too avant-garde” to even be written about seriously.  She also stumbled upon her career of counseling after trying her hand at teaching and publishing and even selling rings at a flea market in San Francisco when money was tight.  But when I say “trying her hand,” I do not mean a little dabble here and there: when she was teaching, she founded the first integrated cooperative nursery school in San Francisco; while selling rings for the short time she did, she was grateful rather than resentful for the exposure this gave her to people from an income bracket she’d not been exposed to before.  All this diverse exposure primed her to become the great therapist that she was.

When she finally found counseling as her career, she embraced it and loved it deeply.  She showed me that it is truly possible for a woman to not only succeed professionally, but do so in a career that feeds her emotionally.  While I knew this in theory,  Mary showed me this in true life.  The fact that she could find this for herself when she started out not even knowing such possibilities existed for her still blows my mind.  When she hit what seemed like nothing, whether it was a lack of integration in nursery schools, or zero information on stepfamilies or what have you, she created something, then taught it to others.  It’s like she started her early adulthood looking at the Tardis from the outside, happily expecting to reside and occupy a phone-box-sized existence, then found herself delighted, scared and surprised to discover that, upon opening up the door, she’d stumbled into an infinite vastness of possibility.  Between her twenties and mine, the door that she helped open never closed for women, and I entered my early adulthood taking that vastness for granted as mine to explore.

Even as Mary was discovering and developing her career, she also developed and deepened her relationship with her second husband, Rob, while growing and nurturing their family together.  Mary and Rob were an example to me of what an honest, real relationship between equals looks like. When I met them, I hadn’t seen many truthful relationships in which both partners were simply themselves with each other, warts and all.  I had no idea it was possible. They were very open and welcomed me into their home for dinners and holidays, treating me as one of their own family.  To be a mostly single, childless woman in my twenties and to be brought into the life of older people with a real family was inspiring and enlightening. I got an inside view of life that most of my peers didn’t get to see, since we all were just hanging out with people whose lives were just like ours: young, exploring, no kids.  I credit Mary and her family for giving me a good frame of reference for what to look for in a partner, and how real humans parent.  I knew I wanted a more satisfying relationship than the ones I was in and out of at the time, but I didn’t have a great example of what was out there for me to look for until then.  Mary and Rob’s example helped me to strive for the honesty and equality that shone through their relationship.  Because I had a good model of what real looks like in a relationship, I recognized it when I met my husband.  And we parent like real humans.

In addition to teaching about good relationships by example, Mary also taught me directly.  In fact, the terrible relationship I was in when I met Mary was the catalyst that flipped our teacher/student roles over.  Mary came for a bookbinding lesson right after I’d ended an emotionally fraught phone conversation with my then boyfriend.  I had not wiped off the emotional residue from that call when she walked in.  I made a brave attempt to teach whatever I was teaching her that day, when to my complete embarrassment, I burst into tears. Unfazed, Mary jumped right into the teacher role, assessed the situation and then come up with an intervention immediately.  Not once did she behave as if it was weird that her bookbinding teacher melted down into a puddle right before her eyes.  In fact, she acted like it was the most normal thing in the world, which did wonders for preserving my dignity.  When I was calm enough to listen to logic, she asked me, “Elyn, have you ever asked yourself what you want in a relationship?  I want you to write down your 10 requirements for a healthy relationship.” It wasn’t enough to write them down, she coached me to describe the actions and qualities of a partner who would fulfill those requirements.  I’d never before thought of myself as someone allowed to have actual, tangible standards.   Prior to that moment, the confusing advice I’d gotten from friends who didn’t know any more than I did was along the lines of, “Dump the lemon,” “You should be with a man who worships you,” and “You deserve better.”  None of this was as clear and sensible as Mary’s advice.  In that moment, we both consciously agreed that we wanted to have a friendship with each other that went deep: I wanted a mentor and Mary wanted to be one.  That day, we set the intention to do so.

Our friendship was active for the rest of my twenties and into my thirties, and there were so many lessons that Mary taught me, which I hope to describe in more detail in further blog posts.  When I became a mother myself, my second child had many medical issues over a period of several years and I became quite myopic and absorbed in this world.  Mary and I fell out of physical touch, but her lessons and influence caused me to think of her as if she were present.  She too, confronted one of her children’s medical issues in early parenthood.  I drew upon what she shared about her experiences to help me through ours.  As I mentioned before, I used her wisdom to coach my daughter through her own struggles with confronting a person in power.  My clients hear Mary quotes on a regular basis.  My husband knows deeply just how much Mary’s influence played into me being able to recognize him as the person who I could have such a real and truthful relationship with.  Even the seemingly insignificant things Mary introduced me to bring me joy.  The first time I made marinara from garden tomatoes, it was seemingly a disaster and I was about to chuck the whole thing, but I called Mary and she made the correct guess about what I needed to do (just be patient and wait until you’ve cooked down all the extra liquid), and the result blew my mind.  I think of her every time I make marinara from fresh tomatoes.  I’m also eternally grateful that she taught me how to make olive tapenade, and I hold dear the memory of the moment she introduced me to Cambozola cheese with the most excitement I’d ever seen anyone show about cheese or any food.  Mary’s infectious enthusiasm did not discriminate: the big things and the little things that she loved all lit her up with the same amount of joy.

As I struggle to wind this blog post up, or to go back and make it more linear or well-packaged, I realize that this might have to go out into the world in its imperfect form. I can’t tie this up in a neat bow because I don’t want this to be a one-sided treatise on Mary or Anyone Great.  I would like this to be the beginning of a conversation.  I also hope to write more posts about the lessons Mary taught me.  I truly believe that if we can share our memories of those special ones that have died, we keep something of them alive.  I want to leave this open enough that if anyone reading this wants to share about Mary or about their own Someone Great in the comments, you can.  Whether you can think of Someone Great or just someone who left you with a Great Moment, please feel free to write about it here.  Maybe they changed your whole life, or just introduced you to some incredible cheese, but something they did mattered enough to lodge itself in your memory.  I hope you can share it here.  Now, if you are thinking of someone who is still alive, don’t just share here, go tell them all about their impact.  Don’t wait too long!