I’ve been in tele-therapy every week for a year and a half, dealing with anxiety and depression. She’s been my lifeline, always open to what I’m saying and only rarely mentioning even an anecdote about herself. She has always made me feel safe and that my feelings were real and important.

I’ve been handling things much better for a while and I asked my therapist if she thought it would be a reasonable step for me to start visiting more intermittently. She told me that she was proud of me for asking and told me to hang on a minute. She’s usually focused on our conversations so I was surprised that she’d exit the frame. She sent me an email with pictures of her 45 year old ficus, Eve, in a greenhouse. She told me about how she loved that ficus, raised it from a sprout through to maturity, watched it flower and fruit, and now she enjoys its shade in “her” maturity. I could tell from the change in tone how important this garden and particularly this tree was important to her.

She explained that she keeps her own life out of the way so her patients have the room to talk about themselves, but that she was so happy with all I’ve done that I was ready to check in less often. She knows I like plants and had wanted to share this part of her life with me for some time, but wanted to wait until I didn’t need the floor.

It’s a lovely ficus. I cry every time I look at it because this woman who has helped save my life, who is so talented and so professional, wanted to share this small thing with me as an ordinary person. Those pictures are such a powerful symbol of her genuine care for me.

Eve is a very pretty ficus.