Peg's garden without Peg

Volunteer kale in front of the steps, right in the middle of the pathway. Something purple and pretty growing randomly where it's finding water from the drip irrigation system. That's our "vegetable garden" this summer.

Where there was zucchini and hat squash, there are fragrant alyssum and nasturtiums. And random plants that are fun and interesting, though they very well be weeds for all I know. The strawberries are going great guns, but it looks like the squirrels and various critters will partake before the fruit's on our radar. The entire garden has literally gone to seed.

No tomatoes for the first time in several years. Zoë and I won't be around enough this summer to harvest them, and I think it's too late to plant them anyway. This was Peg's world...she knew so much about what to plant, and when, and had an orderly arrangement for the whole garden. Last summer we harvested the things she'd lovingly planted almost every day.

A year later, nothing has been planted. Nothing to pull out of the ground. But there is a quiet peacefulness in just letting the garden rest this year, as plants go to seed and volunteers pop up. I let the peas run rampant over the herb garden because the fragrance was so wonderful. I love seeing the nasturtiums appear randomly wherever they find root.

The harvest this year is the appreciation of the beauty of this space, and the wonder of how life continues to grow in unexpected places.

Love after Love

Still going through hundreds of bits of Peg's life. A photo slipped into a book. Receipts from a thousand years ago. Cryptic notes in her frequently undecipherable shorthand.

This was taken in May 1984 (I know this because Peg compulsively wrote dates, locations and the subject on the back of almost every photo). Today I ran across the photo and a Derek Walcott poem she had framed on the wall of her office, where her patients would always see it:

Love after Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here.  Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit.  Feast on your life.

Spontaneous creation

Hired someone to fix the pocket door in the middle bathroom, which has been half-broken for over ten years. Today he had a doctor's appointment.

Zoë and I decided, since Russ had taken the day off, to paint the middle bathroom.  It's been a bland grey for over 20 years...nondescript, "acceptable," ...meh.  She said, "Hey...what if it was an electric blue?"

We picked out some swatches, brought them home, and within five minutes were drawn to this wondrous shade of blue. Tonight we have a new bathroom. It was over 100 degrees in Sacramento, a perfect day to be inside and do something fun with the music cranked up to eleven. Makes me happy every time I walk through the bathroom into the kitchen and see this glorious, vibrant color that we collaborated on.

New color. New life. Good stuff.

Peggy's Colorado memorial

We're having a get-together at Marianne's house on Saturday, July 7, the day before Zoë and I return to California. Everyone is welcome. I'll post the details later, but it'll be pretty low-key and informal....kinda like Peg.

Her heart was firmly rooted in the Rockies. We haven't sorted out how and where, but we'll take her ashes deep into the mountains during our trip and leave them there as she asked us to do.

Hard to believe we leave in less than two weeks. Zoë reminded me that as much as she was looking forward to driving a convertible through the mountains, you're not allowed to drive a rental car if you're under 21.

I told her that we'd evaluate the consequences vs. the joy. I'm guessing the consequences are zip and the joy is immense. We'll be enjoying the fireworks in Aspen on July 4th, even if we have to sleep in the car. A real Colorado adventure.

Back from the beach

First Father's Day as a single dad. First camping trip with just the two of us. Life goes forward.

Spent the first night near Fort Bragg, at a private campground that's one of the few places left in California where you can camp on the beach. Zoë set up her one-girl tent just100' from the surf.

Patrick's Point was sunny but cool (as opposed to Sacramento, which was 110 degrees yesterday). Four wonderful days with Paul and Chris Andre and their two daughters, hunting for agates on the beach and enjoying each others' company. After the many camping trips our two families have shared, it was a real shift not having Peggy there...but we will never forget those memories, even as we move on and create new ones.

This is so Zoë, nimbly creating her own resting place in the cleft of a rock, spontaneously and without instruction. Finding balance and joy in a hard place.

First camping trip without Peggy

Tuesday morning, Zoë and I are headed up to Patrick's Point, way up on the coast near Trinidad. The Andre family will join us there for four nights.

It's one of our favorite spots in California. And it was one of Peg's. This photo was taken just last year, when we hiked all over the trails and overlooks at Wedding Rock with Paul, Chris and the girls.

The photo at the top of this blog was at Sunset State Beach, Peg hanging out the back door of the camper. After the first two or three years, packing what we'd need (and more importantly, didn't need) got to be routine and we could just enjoy the experience. She loved hanging out in front of the campfire until late, trading snarky stories and making up goofy songs.

I think she loved the simplicity of it.  As much as she loved this house, there was peacefulness in not being surrounded by the ten thousand Things To Be Done.

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Zoë took her ACT exams in Yuba City (about an hour north of here) this morning. That's it for academics until we do the college tour after our July Carlsbad State Beach camping trip: UC San Diego, CalTech in Pasadena, Harvey Mudd/Scripps in Claremont, UC Santa Cruz and Stanford.

Peg knew early on--even without knowing the cancer would take her before the summer--that she wouldn't have the stamina to hopscotch all those campuses...so this is a trip Zoë and I would have made solo regardless.

This will be a summer of Daddio-daughter adventures. Most fathers don't get the chance to spend that much time with their teenage daughters. In that, we are blessed.

Peggy remembered as a therapist

Paul Aikin, one of our area's leading therapists, wanted to add a voice from the therapy community about Peggy. He didn't have prepared remarks at the memorial, but in an email today asked that I distribute his thoughts to family and friends.

A Memorial Tribute to Peggy Smith

I had the privilege and honor of being one of Peggy's teachers. We met every other week in a consult group for 12 years. Peggy was an unusual psychiatrist. She loved doing deep relational psychotherapy. She had a gift for it. Peggy was a quick study and eager learner. While many therapists shy away from processing directly the therapist’s impact on the patient and the patient's impact on the therapist, Peggy became very skilled in tracking these moves between her patients and herself.  She would wade right into the relational conflicts and help her patients connect with what wasn't working for them-- creating corrective relational experiences.

In recent years we have come to know from attachment theory and research that the therapists’ love of their patients is essential in healing insecure attachment wounds. Peggy was way ahead of her time. While many therapists still felt that it was inappropriate for a therapist to love her patients, Peggy grew to be comfortable with it. The loving, exuberant, mischievous and warm Peggy described by so many friends and family here at the Memorial today entered into her psychotherapy as well. She did not need to hide behind the role of being a psychotherapist. She was able to be the real, transparent, authentic warm person we all know and love in her position as psychotherapist while at the same time keeping the relationship therapeutic.

Peggy had a message on her answering machine saying that her practice was full many years before she stopped working. She was known as a therapist’s therapist. From time to time I would prevail upon Peggy to take on another therapist. (We all know that healers need healing.) She never turned me down. Many of those therapists have expressed how eternally grateful they were to have had the privilege of being touched and healed by her awesome level of attunement, presence, caring, courage, warmth, and authenticity.

Just as it is such a loss for friends and family, the therapeutic community of greater Sacramento has also lost an invaluable friend and colleague. She is irreplaceable. She leaves an incredible hole. We all miss her so much. And at the same time, she is already part of the lore of our relational therapeutic community. She leaves a shining light of what's possible.

Paul Aikin

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Paul A. Aikin, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist
Licensed Marriage, Family Therapist
Certified EFT Couples Therapist
EFT Supervisor-In-Training