Where can comfort be found? The death of a psychiatrist: Beth Lindsey, MD

Admittedly I have a very short attention span. There I was finishing up the odd but riveting Salinger story "Teddy" about a Buddhist child genius and suddenly I get the idea to Google my former psychiatrist. Why? There are invisible threads that tie us to everything else, or everyone else, and - boom! - that invisible cord was pulling.

Beth Lindsey MD, was my psychiatrist for a very short while. Short, but long enough for me to get a handle on understanding my manic-depression and its likely sources. The woman was lavish in her love for me.She told me things I scarcely knew about myself... it was you, she said, who made sure your daughter and your son had the finest education. You did a good job raising them.

Until Beth, I hadn't thought much of myself. Perennial lack of self-esteem. How our relationship raised me out of the slough of despondency.

I referred my friends to her, those who could afford her moderately steep sans insurance rate. We rode the elevator to her hi-rise office in Jenkintown. Tall shelves with New England Journal of Medicine at the top. Commanding view of the cars on York Road. A small bathroom with a cup for the thirsty.

Did you know that if you're getting good therapy you think about it all week long, the journey of self-discovery, the most necessary of all roads.

During those six months of inner growth my brain must've been swirling like cake batter, reorganizing itself like a library where the books are strewn all over the floor, then neatly put back on the shelves, dust-free. My own beautiful library of the mind.

I never needed therapy again.

Until now. Where is comfort to be found now that I have learned Beth Lindsey is no more.

But that's not all. Things happened to her before she died. Causing, perhaps, her early demise.

She died nearly two years ago in 2008 of metastatic cancer stemming from the breast. During divorce proceedings, the judge held her in contempt of court and sent her to jail. I knew about that but hadn't known that during her time in jail she read Buddhist teachings, jail house literature that served to deliver her into her next phase of being.

Knowing Beth, an immensely curious and vivacious woman, I was still surprised to read that she had not only studied Buddhism at a monastery in England, but had became that holiest of beings: a Buddhist nun.

Her photo shocked me on her memorial website. I dug through the intervening years and her new costume and short chemo hair to remember her seated across from me in a winged armchair at the Benson East. I once wrote a poem about the two of us, written on our old Apple computer as I was sitting on the futon in our family room, in which I spoke about our conversation passing like colorful ribbons across the room.

Her desk was a mess. She didn't care about worldly things. Her clothes were not high fashion. Her shoes were comfortable. I adored her and brought her in a poem I had written as a child, proof that my psyche had been buried alive, it was right there in the poem at age 8. She bid me read Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller.

And there I found myself. Who shall I talk to now? Who shall help me bear my grief?

A fantasy I shall not engage in is driving over to the Buddhist monastery in Bensalem since I haven't a rabbi of my own or a priest. But I do have a friend, a faraway friend that I will call when I am ready. Together we will reminisce about the woman who was Beth Lindsey.