My comfortable career as an executive assistant in a large corporate office ended 11 years ago when my boss took a job as CEO for a competitor 3,000 miles away. I could have followed him and been Assistant to the CEO, which, now that I think about it, would have been pretty sweet, but I didn’t want to live in Miami. Besides, I didn’t feel like I fit in corporate culture. The people I worked with were great, our company created a fantastic product, and the paycheck was generous, but on a daily basis, I felt cranky, bored, and unfulfilled.

Angst of that sort is a luxury, I know. “Affluenza,” I’ve heard it called—the experience of meaninglessness or emptiness, even though you’re doing well and have everything (or nearly everything) you thought you wanted.

For the record, I was ashamed of my affluenza. My parents wouldn’t have complained about a cushy corporate job, not ever, and even my Generation X peers told me to grow up and get over it, to just do my job and enjoy my life. But I never could. I honestly don’t know if it was because I was spoiled, immature, and entitled, or if I simply had another, deeper calling and the Universe wouldn’t let me have peace until I heeded it. Probably both.

In any case, my brilliant second career as a licensed marriage and family therapist began as a belief that the grass would be greener. I believed it wouldn’t matter if I made a lot less money if, at the end of the day, I went home knowing I’d helped someone.

I was neither right nor wrong about that.

My own therapist at the time was an inspiration. Aviva was a pre-licensed intern who’d studied postmodern therapy. I didn’t know what that meant, and I didn’t need to know. What mattered was that she got me.

She asked amazing questions—questions I would never have thought to ask, and for my answers, I usually got a sweet, curious, head-tilt gesture that helped me feel seen, heard, and accepted as never before. She seemed to know exactly how and why I thought/felt as I did, and she could articulate truths I’d always known but to which I could never put words. She believed in me and brought me to life, all within the four walls of that little office. I’d been in therapy before, but never like this. These changes were going to stick. I was becoming a better person.

Before long, I wanted to be a therapist, too. I wanted to wear soft, casual clothes and comfy shoes to work. I wanted to sit in an overstuffed armchair and drink tea while dispensing insight and wisdom to grateful, paying clients. I wanted to change people’s lives for the better just by being me. It looked like the perfect new career for me, and I thought I’d be great at it.

She thought so, too, apparently (for reasons that now seem mysterious), and with her support and encouragement, I signed up for a masters program in counseling psychology that Fall.

Just before classes started, one warm September evening, I arrived for my weekly session and something seemed off. I wasn’t sure what it was, and she didn’t say anything, so I launched into my usual monologue. After a few moments, she interrupted and said she needed to tell me something.

“I need to tell you that I have to go on hiatus for a while.”

“Hiatus?”

“I won’t be seeing clients for a while.”

I nodded. “For how long?”

“I don’t know. A while.”

A detail I’d carefully forgotten came rumbling back to mind.

When I’d first met her, Aviva had been bald. I’d found it curious but didn’t say—or ask—anything. A few months later, she mentioned that she would be studying with the Dalai Lama for a week while he was in town. Nevermind that her tight, brown curls had grown back; I now understood she was a Buddhist. I couldn’t imagine finding solace enough in a religion to shave my head for it, but I found it intriguing, and I admired her for it.

But that wasn’t why she’d been bald, and now she was telling me that she had to go back into chemotherapy.

I was shocked and frightened, but I tried to stay cool. I asked a few polite questions, told her I was sorry, and told her I would wait for her. We talked about all the progress I’d made those seven months and about what school might be like for me. She kept it light and kept the focus on me, and I played along. When the session was over, I left.

It was surreal. I intentionally didn’t think on it much. She had been in chemo once and had come back to work. That was that.

A month later, I mailed a get-well card telling her how intense, exciting, and challenging school was and how I looked forward to telling her more in person. I received a typed response. She was dictating the letter to her supervisor, she explained, “because the cancer is affecting my hand.” She echoed my excitement about school and encouraged me to work with another therapist for the issues that school was sure to stir up.

I thought she probably had to say that, and I felt like I was coping fine. I wanted to wait.

Another month later, I received a voicemail message from her supervisor asking for a return call. I wasn’t ready to hear, so I took my time calling back, and we played phone tag for almost two weeks. In the meantime, I sought out a new therapist and arranged to start seeing her.

Finally, one afternoon while baking for the holidays, I answered the phone.

It was confirmed: Aviva had died.

It’s strange for a client to lose a therapist. Despite its intimacy, the therapeutic relationship is artificial and excepted from social etiquette and norms. You’re not supposed to buy your therapist a birthday card or Christmas present, because the relationship exists outside those conventions. You’re not supposed to be invited to their wedding, or they to yours, because you don’t live in each other’s worlds. And you’re not supposed to have to grieve them, because you’re not supposed to lose them, not to death. That isn’t part of the deal, and there’s no customary way to react and recover from that.

I suppressed my grief. I had been her client, so she had known me, but I hadn’t really known her, and I didn’t feel I had the right to get upset and “make it about me.” In hindsight, I can say that it was partly an attempt to honor her. She’d taught me better than to implode and wallow in self-pity. She’d taught me coping skills, so I coped.

Down the long, hard path to my new career, she was with me.

Two years after she died, I started my practicum at a community counseling center, and in the counselors’ lounge, there were large, framed, group photos all around the room from the annual staff retreats. She smiled down on me from two of them. I hadn’t known, but she’d trained there, too.

When I turned 32, I was aware that I was her age, and when I turned 33, I felt the bittersweet sting of having out-aged her.

It wasn’t all idealistic. She wasn’t perfect. I remembered things she’d said in sessions, and especially our last session, that I realized through my clinical training were missteps and mistakes, but in the end, that helped me, too. To make it through the flubbing and floundering I did with early clients, I needed to know—to really know from personal experience—that helping people didn’t require mastery or perfection, just caring and curiosity. Because of her, I did know it.

When I became licensed, something she never achieved, I was awash with gratitude and awe for the privilege of standing on her shoulders and carrying her legacy into the profession.

In me, Aviva’s curious head-tilt lives on.

My brilliant second career is complex, challenging, exhausting, enriching, fulfilling, and more, and it can be all these things sometimes on the same day. I do help people, but I don’t necessarily “know it” as I go home at the end of each day. When I am aware of it, sometimes it’s enough and sometimes it isn’t. I do miss my corporate paycheck, but I no longer suffer from affluenza.

I think of Aviva less now than I used to, and that’s fitting. Her inspiration and example carried me for a long time, but now I have grown and matured into a therapist all my own. She was an angel in my life, and I hope I’m an angel for one of my clients, too, someday.

Her death wasn’t about me, but her work was, and through my work, I hope I do her proud.