For Adam (Adam Horvath, In Memoriam)

 

   1. I Woke up Yesterday to Find You Gone

 

There is a hole in the world where you have always been.

Your wry, lopsided smile and all your Adam-ness

Now missing, must live inside us, as memory.

 

You always stood a bit outside.

You didn’t join the latest consensus,

You didn’t just march to a different drummer,

You invented a new kind of drum.

 

You took an inventory of Bordin’s common sense

Notion of therapeutic relationship,

And made a simple measure of Working Alliance

Into a world-standard, used to this day.

 

 

2. Grandchild of the Holocaust

 

You always walked just outside the boundary,

Making your own way.

Last summer we spent several hours

Investigating the Krakow ghetto,

Retracing the steps that led to the Horror

From which your father so narrowly escaped.

Without this you would not even have existed,

The world poorer for your absence.

 

But when we said goodbye, I never imagined

I’d never see you again.

Even now I still owe you one last book chapter,

Sitting in my computer half-revised,

Waiting for me to respond to your remaining queries.

 

Although you are gone I still have

Answers to you to frame,

Not wanting to disappoint your high hopes

That I might help you unpack moments of impasse

in our shared labor of psychotherapy.

 

 

3. Oh, Adam, Adam, Adam

 

You always did what you felt was right,

Even when it -- occasionally –

Drove some of us to distraction.

 

But I was always glad to see you, knowing this:

Here is someone who truly understands

This community of those

Who seek the secrets of psychotherapy,

Not forgetting for a moment

How hard yet joyful this work is.

 

In these final years, this took you

Away from numbers and even categories,

Ever closer to the raw talk itself,

On which the whole enterprise is built.

 

 

4. Your Death Unleashes a Flood of Memories

 

You probably thought you were marginal,

A footnote, but it turns out that

You were always at the center

Of the SPR-sphere,

The web of interconnection that

Links all psychotherapy researchers.

 

Many of us are now wondering:

When did I last see Adam?

What did we say? Or do? Or eat?

 

The threads glow like nerve fibers

Trying to hold you in our minds

Before the traces go dark,

Before we go dark.

 

But you’re still there;

The memories of you still live:

Our shared laughter,

Echoing in the theater of our minds;

Your kindness, passed along

And multiplied in many acts of caring;

Your stubborn persistence, refusing to let us

Forget you and what is important in this work:

As if that was possible!

 

                                                -Robert Elliott; 20 – 23 Feb, Lodi, California