Excerpt, The Things We Do

As asked to do, Jane remained facing Eleanor and Eleanor scrutinized her face without shame. There was a strange mixture of emotions that for an instant she couldn’t name, nothing familiar, yet neither anything she feared. She thought how often words had spoiled an emotional moment for her, and now they were the very thing she needed for that same sense of fulfillment she’d always found in their absence. How often had she watched people, anguished or fidgety, embarrassed or guilty, smother their emotions under the cover of words.

            But not Jane. For Jane there was silence. Silence was her cover. Silence was her nature—a silence that Eleanor had come to regard not as stubborn or challenging but as a language unto its own. The space of what is not said, a lacuna. In her silence Jane spoke more than all her other patients who, filling their sessions often with angry words directed at anyone except their righteous selves, strengthened her belief in the predictability of human nature while crushing any hope that one’s soul or better self would evolve and triumph. In Jane’s silence there was the purity of restraint and the ability to hear without reacting. It was a thoughtful silence, and it encompassed not only respect, but kindness.