Terry Laughlin as a Mentor In and Out of the Water

Jeanne Safer, PhD is a psychotherapist who has been in private practice for over forty years, and the author of six acclaimed and thought-provoking books on neglected psychological issues—the “Taboo Topics” that everybody thinks about but nobody talks about publicly. Her special areas of expertise include siblings with difficult or dysfunctional brothers and sisters, women making choices about motherhood or who have chosen not to have children, adults struggling about whether to forgive people who have betrayed them, and those coping with the death of a parent. She lectures on these and other unusual and compelling topics.

Dr. Safer’s books include Cain’s Legacy: Liberating Siblings from a Lifetime of Rage, Shame, Secrecy and Regret (January 2012); The Normal One: Life with a Difficult or Damaged Sibling, Beyond Motherhood: Choosing a Life without Children; Forgiving and Not Forgiving: Why Sometimes It’s Better NOT to Forgive; and Death Benefits: How Losing a Parent Changes an Adult’s Life—For the Better. Both The Normal One and Beyond Motherhood were Books for a Better Life Finalists for the year’s best self-improvement books.

Dr. Safer has appeared on television (The Today Show, Good Morning America and CBS World News Tonight), as a psychological expert on The Montel Williams Show, and on radio (NPR’s Talk of the Nation and The Diane Rehm Show). She has contributed articles to The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, O: The Oprah Magazine, More Magazine, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

Dr Safer lives in New York City with her husband, historian and political journalist Richard Brookhiser.

This is the tribute I gave to Terry at his family memorial soon after his death. I want to share my long experience with this remarkable man with the TI community:

I’m Jeanne Safer, and I’ve had the extraordinary good fortune to have had almost weekly swim lessons with Terry for the past 15 years. Terry’s daughter Carrie was my first coach—she taught me, with enormous patience, how to breathe on the left—and then Terry took over. As a result I’ve been welcomed as an honorary member of the Laughlin family.

I’m going to read you the story of my most life-changing lesson with Terry. It’s from my latest book, The Golden Condom and Other Essays on Love Lost and Found, which is dedicated to him. Here’s the dedication: For Terry Laughlin—My coach, my friend, my inspiration. This is an excerpt from the chapter on mentors and the effects they have on your life:

Mentors are not just for the young. They can be found at any age if you seek them, although what you need and what you get from them changes later in life. Since your own character is no longer unformed and your identity is more secure, you are no longer so naive, impressionable, or adoring. As a result, you are more conscious of personality quirks, more attuned to the dynamics between you, and freer to know and to speak your mind. Since these late editions of the mentor/protege relationship are usually voluntary, you are not beholden to the mentor as an employer, or a professor, or as a professional role-model. At last, there is no discrepancy of experience, only of expertise in a particular area.

Terry, my mentor and coach for the last fifteen years, gave me something unexpected and extraordinary, which turned out to be even more potent and profound than the skill—learning the Total Immersion approach to swimming—that I came to acquire from him. He never consciously sought to teach it to me, nor I to learn it from him, and yet it sustained me through the most terrifying experience of my life, and continues to unfold its riches. In addition to making a sleek and speedy swimmer out of me, he taught me the uses of adversity.

Thus began over a decade-long, and still continuing, dialogue between us that metamorphosed from focusing on the technique of moving joyfully and expertly through the water (or, as he would say, “with the water,”) to considering the psychological (I’m a psychoanalyst) and philosophical implications of his innovative approach. His approach, painstaking, patient, and passionate, transformed me into an athlete for first time in my life, and I became what I called the “guinea fish” on which he tried out his constantly evolving ideas. I worked with him practically every week, and the lessons were a highlight of those weeks. The water became both my refuge and a source of intellectual stimulation.

At first I felt intimidated by his prowess—was I good enough to study with such a teacher? But I need not have been, because I never known a more accessible or generous expert in anything. The thing that particularly suited him to his vocation was that the sport he revolutionized never came easily to him; he wasn’t a naturally gifted athlete. He hadn’t even been good enough to make the sixth grade team at his Catholic school. And yet he became, in middle age, a champion distance swimmer, and an attuned and inspiring coach with an international reputation, whose mission was to illuminate the sensual and spiritual joys of being in the water by reimagining how human bodies, with their inconvenient appendages, move most efficiently in that alien element.

 Terry’s motto, based on his life experience as well as his unusually optimistic       temperament, was “Injury is Opportunity,” and he took it seriously both in and out of   the pool. He himself was no stranger to pain and suffering, since he had sustained   many injuries as an athlete, and had to contend daily with a congenital tremor that   caused his hands to shake uncontrollably at times. He didn’t just profess this attitude;   he embodied it, never complaining or feeling victimized by something that would   have seriously frustrated or depressed most people. He swam through it, with   remarkable eclat, and approached his students’ physical limitations and psychological   struggles the same way he handled his own.

I had an unexpected opportunity to discover the uses of injury and to put Terry’s   philosophy into practice: One day eight years into our partnership, I showed up for a   lesson with a number of unaccountable bruises in strange places. Within a week, I was  admitted to the hospital with a rare form of dangerously acute leukemia whose only virtue was that it was curable. The cure entailed daily infusions of arsenic for a month as an in-patient, followed by another nine months of the same treatment as an outpatient. It was as awful as it sounds.

The night before I had to start the outpatient regimen, I had an astonishing dream that defined the task before me: Terry and I were standing on the shore of a forbidding body of water. We could dimly see the other shore far off in the distance. This was clearly the course for a very long, treacherous open-water swim that I was about to undertake, finding my way and conserving my strength all alone, through darkness, undertow, jellyfish, and dread. It reminded me of the English Channel, the Everest of swimming, which he had swum as part of a relay team at age sixty, an exceptional feat. On both shores there were massive, rocky, precipitous hills, which I saw that I would have to navigate both going down to the water and coming back up from it—a reference to the treacherous physical and psychological experiences ahead. As much as I dreaded the treatment, I had not consciously realized that it would be as difficult to clamber back up to the normal world at the end of the ordeal as it was to submerge myself in that dangerous, uncharted “ocean” of pain and fear at the beginning; the two struggles were of a piece. The scene was a physical representation of, and a psychic preparation for, what lay before me.

But I was not alone. Terry turned to me and said, in his calm, direct manner, “There is much to be learned from these daunting cliffs.”

I awoke deeply relieved, confident, with a mission—to be a student of my own experience, just as I was in my swim lessons—rather than a victim. I knew what I was facing, and that, arduous as the labor would be, it would offer me something priceless.

I clung to the dream image, and to his voice, throughout my ordeal. For the next nine months, I returned repeatedly to this dream. Terry’s pronouncement reminded me that I could, and I would, convert suffering into knowledge. He was telling me that this “race” was, blessedly, finite, and that I had the will and the expertise, not just to endure it, but to win it.        

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The most recent lesson I had with Terry was a phone conversation, facilitated by Carrie and Terry’s eldest daughter, Fiona, from his hospital bed the week before he died. His last words to me, which I shall never forget, were “We’ll have more lessons.”

That has already proved to be true. I hear his voice whenever I swim. Every time I get into the pool, I thank him and dedicate my swim to him, resolving, as he taught me, that it will be the most satisfying one I ever undertake, and the most joyous.

And I know I’ll continue to have lessons with him, and hear his voice, in the water and out, for the rest of my life. He will help me understand how to swim, how to live, and how to die.