Doug Monroe's OPENLYOLD

When Your Life Coach Dies

My Life Coach died.

Her name was Patrice Dickey.

We first met when I was a newspaper reporter in Atlanta and she had a wildly successful public relations business, with clients like British Airways. About 20 years ago, I ran into her at a bookstore, where she was signing copies of her spiritual book, “Back to the Garden: Getting from Shadow to Joy.” I bought a copy. It won several awards in her category.

Patrice, who had a lovely home in Avondale Estates, taught a popular evening course at Emory called “Get the Life You Love,” and developed quite a following among women in and around Atlanta.

Not Porking

Patrice and I went on a couple of dates, but we weren’t porking or anything. I was on so much Prednisone at the time that the skin on my knuckles was splitting and bleeding and I was crying a lot. The Prednisone was for ulcerative colitis, a digestive disease that disrupted my dating life with projectile diarrhea. Prednisone melted my spine, and I have 10 compression fractures to show for it.

But I digress.

Patrice was smoking weed and I wasn’t because I’m in a 12-step group for alcoholics, which frowns on smoking marijuana. Some people in the fellowship do smoke it, an act that is called “California Sober.”

Anyway, I was going broke and running out of medical insurance. I was on the Cobra insurance after quitting my job at Creative Loafing in a Prednisone rage. That insurance lasted 18 months, which I spent living on credit cards and getting a good tan at the Bass Lofts pool in Atlanta’s Little Five Points.

My pale white skin turned dark brown. My niece, a blonde nurse who had skin cancer from the sun, asked why I never got skin cancer.

“I inherited Mama’s greasy skin,” I said. My niece got mad. My theories are never very scientific.

The Vision Board

There I was. Tanned and broke. Patrice suggested I do a Vision Board.

My goal was to find a new job with medical insurance within 30 days.

I made the Vision Board. I cut pictures out of magazines and pasted them on the board. It was like a grade-school project. I was deliriously happy just doing it. I glued on pictures of healthy food, Lotto tickets, books to read, a buff guy I wanted to look like, on and on.

I glued on pictures of Brooklyn. I visited there with my son, Matty, when he was going to law school. I fell in love with the place.

Days went by and I began to think the Vision Board might be some sort of bogus metaphysical bullshit of the type you now see on YouTube from chiropractors who have the secret of life and who you would love to punch.

But, on Day 28 or so, my phone rang. It was Matty. He had seen an ad on the subway for the New York Teaching Fellows Program. He gave me their number.

I called. They invited me to come up for an interview. I met with a teacher and did a lesson plan. He was amazed that I had been on Al Franken’s radio talk show back in Atlanta.

The Vision Board Worked!

I got hired! I had to move up right away to enroll in Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus to start working on an M.S. in Education for Urban Adolescents with Disabilities while I had to find my own teaching job for the fall.

I landed as a special education teacher at David A. Boody Middle School in Gravesend, Brooklyn. Starting pay was $60,000 and the benefits through the United Federation of Teachers were excellent.

As soon as I got settled, I called Patrice and hired her to be my Life Coach to help me finish a novel I’d been working on for 20 years.

I sent her a check for $2,000 and we got to work. I called her once a week and told her how much writing I had done, which was usually none.

After a few weeks, she began to sound irritated. But we pressed on. One day I called and she asked me how I was doing. I just said I was exhausted.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“Do you really want to know?” she asked.

I hesitated and said, “Sure.”

Cancer

She said she had just been diagnosed with a fast-moving cancer, Stage 4, and was going to die within a month.

I flew down to visit her. She had a lot of swelling but was happily holding her cat, Hillary Rodham Kitten. I took flowers, then I sent a lovely meal for her and her cousin. I was able to attend her funeral, which was quite upbeat. The church was packed with women.

One of her sorority sisters from the University of North Carolina, in a eulogy, said, “Patrice had more and better sex than anyone in the sorority.”

The congregation exploded in laughter while I had to ask myself, “What were you thinking, you moron?”

I finally finished the novel Patrice had been helping me with. I sent it to an agent who had contacted me when I was writing for Atlanta Magazine. His editor read it and sent me the nastiest rejection letter ever written in the history of modern literature.

The novel grew out of a relationship I had in the 1990s. The narrator was an 11-year-old girl, based loosely on my daughter.

The agent’s editor wrote me to say the man in the novel, based on me, was the worst father she could ever imagine. She hated everything about the book, especially me.

I tell friends that it wasn’t a rejection letter. It was more like a vomit emoji.

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