A year after my father died, my wife demanded that I see a therapist, an idea to which I wasn’t averse given the positive outcomes from counseling I’d experienced at shaky moments in my past.  Michelle and I had spent my father’s last full night with him in his hospital room where I believe to this day he was speaking to ghosts, his mother and father as well as others whose names I didn’t recognize, all there, I surmised, to welcome him to the other side.  I told Vanessa, the therapist assigned to me by my university’s counseling service, about how my father would turn to me in the middle of conversations with others who weren’t technically in the room with us at all and say, “Dan, it’s time to bug out.”  He would sit upright then, swivel his legs off the bed, pulling taut IV tubes and monitor wires and revealing through the open back of his hospital gown flesh peeling from him in long, gauzy strips that clung to his bottom sheet.

“It’s what he would say to me when I was thirteen, and we had tickets to a North Stars hockey game.”

Vanessa inquired if my purpose in visiting her was to end the intrusive memories from that final night with him.  I told her it was, but that I also had an ulterior motive: that I wished to free myself from a pervasive sense of shame that had plagued me my entire life.

“Did something bad happen to you,” she asked, “to make you feel this way?  Perhaps when you were very young?”

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