1. I am a psychotherapist. That is to say, I am an archaeologist and midwife to the human soul. (“The unique role of the analyst, moving to the minutest detail of a person’s history, gives a perspective and clarity to the direct cause and effect — the reactive nature — of childhood experience on later adult behavior.” — Alice Miller) I believe, after fifteen years of doing this work, that what happens in our earliest years has a radical — root — effect upon all that we experience thereafter.

Feeling my way toward some understanding of the mystery of death, I find that I must begin by talking about my mother. She was my beginning, at least in this life. Her appearance in my room immediately after she died in a hospital, one-hundred­ eighty miles away, was the only time I can say with certainty that I interacted with a “ghost” while I was wide awake.