Leavings
A poetic memoir of an analyst’s mourning
By Alice Jones
Photography by KwamLam Wong
The following is an excerpt from Cadence of Vanishing by Alice Jones, forthcoming from Unbound Edition Press in September 2025. © 2025 Unbound Edition Press. Used here by permission.
3/4/22
Today, beginning to imagine retiring, I think the first step is to declutter my office, cast off some of my books and papers, the accumulations of an analytic life. Opening my mother’s corner cabinet, I face a hundred spiral notebooks, about twenty yellow ones for Stevie’s sessions, twelve red ones for Claire, four overstuffed dark blue ones for Nicholas, two orange ones for Ajit, and others, green, turquoise, gray for people I can barely remember. Some notebooks date back to the 1980’s, some earlier still from my residency. Keeping the ones for people I still talk to, piling the rest into crates, stirring up piles of dust, I carry the weight of my working life to the car.
After driving to the East Bay Shredding Facility, I open the back hatch and begin to struggle with the laden crates, too heavy for my arthritic thumb. A heavy-set man walks over offering to help. He lifts and clunks the crates down on a metal table where a young man unloads the notebooks on to the conveyer belt, smooths them to a single layer, urging them to slide towards the one-inch metal teeth that grind notebooks and even their metal spirals into spaghetti in a few seconds.
A. Forty years of work there. Gone.
M. It must be hard to see them go.
A. It is.
Driving away, I think about the black notebooks for Blake wishing I had opened one at random, read a page or two of our early struggles, re-immersing myself in his frail and feisty vulnerability, his “fuck-that” bluntness alongside his shy sensitivity. At home, I open my journals of his last days.
***
10/6/14
Reentry. Three weeks elapsed without me. The rip in our fabric of dailiness will take a while to mend. My analytic patient Blake, a young art teacher, his brain tumor in remission, travelled to see London while I was walking in the Alps. Stevie, wounded, entered her trance of anger, “the generator,” fabricating a semblance of a living person. Jason, at work on a new wood sculpture, barely noticed I was gone. But returning, we’re all still here.
10/8/14
Sidling my way back into the trains of thoughts I’ve missed, lapses. A space in someone’s mind where I might have been. Couldn’t, occluded, occasional, occult, occuli, what’s unseen is the eye at the center of parental absence. A different plane of existence, my walking, outdoors body metamorphoses into a mind in an auditorium full of analysts, listening.
Speaking without notes at the Scientific Meeting, Bollas grumbles about the “brain” taking over the territory that used to be spoken of as “mind.” Thinking about free association, he demonstrates what he’s talking about, tangent upon tangent. He declares that at the start of every hour there is a tacit question which the line of thought circles around and with each discontinuity, the question reappears when speech resumes. Exercises in listening. He likes to listen to transcripts of sessions in languages he doesn’t speak. Or, “One can hear every reference as a reference to oneself.” Quoting Freud, “… to catch the drift of the patient’s unconscious with the analyst’s own unconscious …”
10/9/14
Blake comes in, announces what we’ve been dreading, “I think my cancer’s back.” On Friday he’d felt his tiredness was improving but then a co-worker asked if he was ok. His word-finding has grown more troubled, sentences losing their nouns. Then today, lost syntax, glitching synapses, “I mean that, sooner or quicker, I’m dead.” Only that’s me adding a coherence that was not there. The dread is not so much of death, but how will we talk when he has no words. Will it help to sit together? Is he still ok to drive?
10/14/14
Today Blake is angry. Having fought his way to a safe place, he wants nothing now other than to leave life quickly, without treatment, without fear, without the daily effort of trying to perform at his accustomed level of competence. He imagines torturing his parents by not seeing them. I silently agree, he would feel safer leaving them out. But I also think he will want some kind of goodbye.
His regularly scheduled scan will be Wednesday but he has gone far ahead with his end-of-life planning without any confirmation. Is he racing ahead or am I lagging behind? Grateful, he says without our work, he would not have lived through his twenties. And he’s angry, being yanked away, right when things were getting easier. Sad, he feels the one thing he wishes he had done is to become a father. And at the same time, he’s very glad there is no child to leave behind, someone growing up without him. We’ve begun our farewell before the diagnosis arrives and both feel the grinding gears of endings that began long ago and we were only partly willing to admit.
10/15/14
I’m in bed after the exhausting case conference, the week of work plus evenings while still in the throes of jet lag, re-entry, too-muchness, when my father in Mexico phones after 11:00 pm. “I can’t breathe. The oxygen meter you gave me says 78.” He loves the little instrument on his finger that reads out his pulse and oxygen in red letters. He wears it like a talisman or transitional object. I am there, as long as he’s using my gift. Or, I’m his mother hovering in the wings, as my 91-year-old baby calls out for help. I say, “Call the clinic. Get an oxygen tank.” He apologizes, thanks me, asks me to come stay for a week, gets off when his coughing takes over.
Wondering if my father will be alive in the morning, I think he will. And I imagine my schedule without the five hours for Blake, how I could swim in the morning, sleep later, restore myself more than has been possible. And I hate this thought.
10/16/14
The only times I have been to Alcatraz were for the starts of swimming races: a salty plunge, jumping into the cold, glass-green water from the pier or off the boat, then the race back to Aquatic Cove. I never visited the prison. Today we ride the ferry with Michael and Holly out to the island on a bright windy day. Out in the Model Industries building at the north end of the island, a large concrete room, flying there is a long paper dragon made of many scales: Ai Wei-Wei’s installation. Each scale, hand-painted, some with sayings from Mandela, Le Quoc Quan, MLK, Snowden. In the next room, Lego portraits of political prisoners from six continents, flat, bright, pixilated. And then from the Gun Gallery, a narrow strip beside this room where guards would walk to observe the prisoners, scaling plaster over cement walls, broken glass windows, layers of imprisonment, on the other side, ivy, rock, the Bay. Beauty walled out by dinge and dirt and crumbling evidence of man’s inhumanity to man. (The phrase comes from Robert Burns’s “Man was made to mourn: A dirge.”)
From the Gun Gallery, a view opens to the floor below where “Refraction” is hung, a steely wing like a dinosaur part composed of scales echoes the paper kite-scales of the dragon. Only these are heavy, shiny solar panels. We saw such reflectors in Khumbu, where the Nepalese monks used them to heat a giant kettle. In this structure many small kettles are welded on. Ai set up earth, air, fire elements. Kettle steam: transubstantiation, moving to flat-face surface, to dragon, symbol of heaven, who can fly above walls.
Inside the cell block, three tiers of cages, each barely six feet long, four feet wide, a mat, a sink, a toilet. Tourists come by boatloads to hear about the Birdman, see Al Capone’s cell, hero criminals. Inside the cell blocks, stale air, harsh metallic sounds as doors open and close, and the absence of any visual opening to the outdoors, no landscape, no green. Ai’s sound sculpture lures K, Michael, Holly and me into a cell. In one, MLK: “Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.” In another cell, music by Pussy Riot. In the cells which housed the mental ward, a plaque says that men were imprisoned here for refusing to let their children be taken away to government schools for Native American children.
Feeling the oppressiveness physically by now, headache, a chest pressure, the impact of enclosure, no distance vision, no nature, we walk towards the hospital ward and suddenly an open door, breeze, a view of water and we’re pulled outside. While we’re talking on a bench, my phone pings and it’s Blake. His words make no sense. Suddenly, we disconnect. A minute later his brother phones to tell me the news from Blake’s MRI: multiple sites of recurrent tumor, no treatment would be of use, hospice was called, prognosis: a few weeks at best.
10/17/14
My father reports his oxygen numbers are better, but he starts coughing violently, quickly gets off the phone.
Also today, forty people dead in a blizzard around Annapurna, some survived in the collapsed structure of a tea house. Some tried to walk to the next town and died of hypothermia.
Blake brings me his scarf which he had wanted to leave me in his will but thought might get lost in the shuffle. Is this our last meeting?
Because he is more verbal, I think they must’ve added a steroid to his meds, reduced edema. He thinks he may have a couple of weeks left and we speak about whether to keep meeting if he becomes unable to speak. I say, as I have before, that I could come to him if he is unable to come to me. “No. I don’t come to your house and you don’t come to mine.” This will be delicate, what realities he is able to track and which ones not. He speaks about an old friend whose emotions he has to take care of. I think he felt this would be me if I came to his house.
Done with suffering, he wants things to go quickly. Not in pain, he is frustrated his words don’t work and is unable to predict if he will soon become aphasic and possibly unable to walk. He plans a gathering of many friends this weekend and wants to feel surrounded by caring, wants no one to cry.
I am taking all this in.
10/18/14
Blake is having a party, people coming from far away to see him one more time. He wants to sit and talk with his friend’s children, the ones he sees almost every week, wanting to explain to them that even though he loves them, he’ll be “moving on.”
Yesterday in my office, he said he feels his brain more gone each day. We talk about how far we’ve come in our work, wishing he had more time, pleased with what time there is, recognizing the closeness he’s built on top of the sub-basement of fear that lives inside. Giving away one of his paintings, saying goodbye to a younger man he mentors, seeing him cry, he says that all he’s taught to his students will remain; he leaves those riches behind. And what about the value of our hours upon hours, making room for growth that will now come to its end?
Slipping by, time, sorrows, all that’s lost, all that’s built. When I ask Blake about our talking at his home when he can’t climb my office stairs, he says he will have to get his mind around this. He wants our goodbye to be in the office where we’ve lived, and once at home, he expects to be quickly unconscious, so it doesn’t matter if I’m there or not. I say I think there is a point in being accompanied to the end, since this is the only place he does not have to take care of the other’s feelings, but he must hear this as my need to be taken care of by his allowing me to feel useful. I don’t push, when I hear that he does not want “us” to change in any way. Describing his new scan to me, Blake said of the tumor, “It’s pretty much everywhere.”
10/21/14
Blake: Trouble working the key-pad that opens the waiting room door. I’ll leave it unlocked for him in the future. Today, a story about a friend’s father.
B. They found him and he was … I think he was dead, or not, but maybe and then in a box, not the best word for it, so many people came there were two boxes. And I hope there is a box for me.
A. Yes, there will be a memorial, and I know many people will be there, with much respect and care.
B. I gave you the scarf.
A. And I’m glad to have it.
B. I know.
And we talk about finishing out the week, and we don’t know beyond this.
B. My brother will carry me, on my deathbed I’ll come.
Dream: In his hand, my husband K is holding a round thing the size of a dragon-eye fruit. I think it is an embryo. Then he is holding something the size of an orange, and I know it is a fetus that was aborted.
Waking I recognize Blake as my baby who died too soon, soon before he was born.
10/22/14
Blake is twenty minutes late. I send a text, mix up about time? Ok? He arrives a minute later. In a good mood, marijuana yesterday, which he is unaccustomed to, moments of feeling blissed, grateful. Seeing a friend, “She was breaking up, broken, and I’m like in. Indefinite, and my hands and feet not working like tomorrow.” I ask how he did on the stairs.
B. I fell twice.
A!?
B. Not broken. Ok … Time, left how much? Is it about time?
Each day now he asks this when the session is almost over, he can feel it coming, very aware of the shape of the hour, even when we began so late.
A. We have two minutes left.
B. It’s precious, the time with you.
And I also know he wants me to end on time, to not stretch the shape of our hour, but hold it the same as long as we can.
10/23/14
Today, the ends of Blake’s sentences trail off. Over-medicated? Brain edema? I think this might be the last day we are able to talk. During a silence, I wonder if he has died, and think how it would be for him to die here, on my couch. Leaving, Blake bumps into the door, can’t manage his way out. Opening the door, I ask if it’s ok if I help, take him by the elbow and lead him down the stairs where a friend, whose name I don’t know, is waiting in the car to take him home.
The rest of the day, emotionally moving hours. This has happened before when I am grieving or vulnerable, opened up in some intense way.
Claire: When I jumped off the roof into the compost pile, my mother said, “Great jump.”
A. But you wanted her to say, “You’re not garbage.”
Jason: Besieged each day, each task becomes entangled, a battle.
A. It keeps your mother right there. Too attached to her to let her go.
J. She was gorgeous and horrible, seductive and cruel, abusing.
A. And the abuse goes on in her absence, holding her close.
Stevie: The Part locked in the room where no one ever came wonders why you’re here.
Matthew: The aloneness went on too long. A three-year-old waiting for my mother to return and she didn’t. Driving a little toy car across the window ledge, the smooth paint, over and over. Too long, I knew I wouldn’t make it.
10/24/14
Dream: Blake has come to my office, which now has many rooms and may be my house. This is his last day alive and he says he wants to spend it cooking with me, soy-something. I say ok, if this is what he wants. Later, I find him lying on the floor, curled up but breathing, and then his relatives come looking for him.
In real life, he comes in wobbly, lies down.
B. I wish I could die here.
A. With me?
B. Yes.
A. Here?
B. That would be nice. Right … I want you to be with me when I die. Do you do that?
A. … Do you mean, will I make it happen?
B. Yes.
A. I can’t do that, but if you want me to be there, I will do what I can to be there, and to see you each day between now and then.
His image of death is one of being conscious up to the last minute, closing his eyes and going in an instant. I am both asking about the fantasy, and wanting to make a real plan. Thinking of how my step-father approached death, I wonder if Blake will be unconscious, will fade away quietly?
B. Terrible! That’s awful, I want out the back door. Slip away, like knock over down the cash register and go.
I say I will come see him when he’s no longer able to get here, and I think that may be by Monday. I ask permission to speak to the friends who drove him today, to make a plan. During the session he drifts in an out, at times more delirious. And I slowly take it in: this is our last time together here.
10/26/14
I text Blake’s brother about my coming to see him and suggest a time on Sunday, asking if I would be able to see him privately briefly. He writes back one word, “Probably.” I write the next morning asking how things are and get no reply. The family must be closing ranks. I ache for Blake, having wanted me around, having wanted to be surrounded by friends. I assume he is becoming comatose, if not already there. And know he hoped to spend no time in that state. Friday, when I walked him down the slate stairs from my office and spoke to the friends, Blake sat in the passenger seat and looked at me. Each time I glanced over, I found a shy, child-like smile on his face. We don’t usually see each other face to face. Was this my last look?
No word all weekend. I’m left waiting to hear.
Strange intimacy, five hours a week for twelve or more years. Thousands of hours speaking what the bones want to speak, what mind utters, and flesh dictates, and the net of another’s mind tries to hold. I couldn’t do my job at the end. Having imagined sitting beside him as he left the world of consciousness, I have to picture others playing that part. I know none of them knows his fears, his longings so deeply, but assume they will surround him with love as he leaves.
10/27/14
Having heard nothing, last night I wrote to Blake’s friend who said she would talk to his brother. I wrote him this morning, stressing that Blake had wanted to see me and I felt it was important to honor his wishes. I said I could come at 10:00. No reply for close to an hour, then a text saying that would work.
Looking up on google maps what’s the best way to get there, and I hadn’t had his house quite localized in my mind. Somehow jarring, that it is on the south side of the street when I had always pictured north. The outside is close to the color of my office, a blue-gray with almost a lavender tint. Inside, two brothers, two wives of brothers, all sweeping, washing, his house rustic, modern and sleek in a way I had not pictured.
When I go into his room, he wakes up, sits in his bed, white sheets with black paisley shapes. Sitting cross-legged, hair all askew as it is when he gets up at the end of a session, couch-hair, Blake asks me to raise the shade. When I pull the cord, it goes down from the top. “No,” he says. I can’t find the right string to raise it, it gets stuck, I manage to get it back to where it started. Oh well. I sit on the extra mattress on the floor, this must be where his friend sleeps, keeping watch. But this angle is hard on my back, and I am two feet lower than he is. I go get a kitchen chair, more comfortable, more eye to eye now. All these arrangements just to begin to talk.
B. It’s so good to see you! I wish we had more time.
A. So do I, time for you to enjoy what you’ve built, your lovely house, the people who are close to you. All you built from scratch.
B. I did. (Smiling.) I wish we had more time. So late, birth time, no time, is it time. (Crying.) I think I’ll be here tomorrow.
A. I’ll come back tomorrow.
B. So what’s been happening in your life?
And I think he no longer knows who he is speaking to, has launched into a social self, filling a blank. But then he says,
B. We’ve worked together more than twelve years.
A. That’s right. And you’ve worked so hard and deeply.
B. So hard. Precious. I wish there was more time. Precious time.
A. And where you’ve gotten to, so much growth. And it’s been a privilege to be part of that work, to be able to watch you grow and thrive.
B. I wish I could see you more. More year. Time. Is this time? Precious. Enough time.
A. Is this enough for today?
B. Yes. I’m so glad you came. It means a lot.
Afterwards, I stand in the kitchen speaking with his brother, the sun in my face, so I move closer. He says they are stopping Blake’s steroids. And I say this is what he wanted, a quick exit once he got to this point. I tell him I’ll be back tomorrow at 2:30. He tells me to call mid-morning to check in.
10/28/14
Claire comes in and thinks something is different, maybe they have taken down the run-down building next door. Later, she notices many planes flying overhead, wonders if they have always been there.
C. I feel like I’m going crazy, losing my mind.
A. I’m thinking, you’re losing your mother’s mind.
She likes this idea. We’ve been talking about her dream of living inside her mother’s head, trying not to touch the walls, the mind where she is an unwanted child, has no value. And she likes thinking that after these years, she does not have to keep inhabiting this experience of herself as nothing.
While talking to Jason, I hear my phone buzz in its drawer, and know it’s about Blake. At the end of the hour, I get the message. His brother says Blake died last night. After stopping the steroids, I knew his brain would swell, then herniate, the mass of it pressing on his brain stem, cord. But I thought it would take a couple of days. Maybe he had been signaling this in the kitchen and I wouldn’t grasp it. After spending the evening with a few friends, wine, music, they gave Blake his night pills, he went to sleep, and did not wake up in the morning.
In my next hour, Stevie comes in and says, “You look upset.” I say that yes, there is something on my mind, not wanting to bluff or pretend otherwise. Being real. So, she says, she will tell me her niece’s troubles, not her own. A story of divorce, custody, a child with lost parents. And where we go during the hour is my vacation, time away, the fragile her who felt as if part of its head had been ripped off, an image she recognizes as placental. And then we get to the mother who Stevie learned never to lean on. “My job was to be weightless,” says Stevie whose anorexia aspired to weighing nothing. Then I talk about how, when I look fragile, she’s now being weightless with me.
10/29/14
Dying the same day as Blake, Galway Kinnell: “To me poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”
11/1/14
Day of the dead. I try to reach Blake’s brother again and receive no answer. I want to know if he was cremated. I think so. But I receive blankness, reach across the gulf… and no one’s there. Blake used to talk about what happens next, and imagined meeting his step-father in an afterworld, expecting him to follow before long.
I think he knew Monday would be our last meeting. I knew and did not know, said “See you tomorrow,” not goodbye. I didn’t touch him. No hug, no caress on the head as I longed to, watching his scarred and partly bald head on the couch’s pillow post-op, later watching his new hair growing in. He would remove his watch cap and scarf when he arrived, put them on as he departed our hours. The brain that saved him also killed him. Gone.
Alice Jones, MD, is a consulting and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, the author of 7 collections of poems, including Gorgeous Mourning and Vault. She is the recipient of awards from the Poetry Society of America and Narrative Magazine.
Published May 2025Potentially personally identifying information that relates directly or indirectly to an individual, or individuals, has been changed to disguise and safeguard the confidentiality, privacy, and data protection rights of those concerned.
