In those first weeks there were tears. Lots of them. It was embarrassing at first, even for those of us women in the group who may have been used to sharing tears. But over time, the brother who found the courage to admit he wanted to change careers and become a comedian, even he shed some tears. His brother had done it at his family home. Then there was the man whose partner of fifteen years had left his note at the Golden Gate Bridge, had been picked up in his car, and then still managed to do his deed while in the hospital. I looked into the women’s eyes that had to find their partners after the act and realized that no matter how much hurt we shared, I had gained some perspective already. It had been two months, and I was happily off the Xanax and whatever else my friends had given to me which they had snuck back as over-the-counter drugs from Mexico or Thailand. These women had to leave their apartments so that they wouldn’t have to replay the trauma of their discoveries. We shared tears and trauma and pain, but I would only have a visual to imagine, not the actual memory of the act. My compassion for others, which I thought I had lost forever, started to grow.
In the latter weeks the comparisons started to end. Those who were further ahead on the healing path told the rest of us that they understood how we felt. “Oh, that will pass,” they said. “That’s where I was a month ago, too. Don’t worry.” We became beacons for one another. I shared how I would write about this and shared the ten or so books I had already stormed through in order to gain some understanding into my boyfriend’s suffering. Others shared their successes, in how they were now handling people and situations differently than they would have in the past. We had sessions where the collective emotion was anger. In another session all we could do was congratulate each other and laugh. The migraines that I brought into each session and left with every time started to dissipate. We all agreed how we hated missing even just one session as it stunted our well-being for that week. And when the time was right at about the sixth week, we started to ask for recommendations for individual therapists.
