Marie's death was partly my fault. She was an early case of mine. At the time I did not yet understand the total effect of lack of ethics and irresponsibility on illness. Had Marie really wanted to live in the first place, she would have sought treatment three years earlier. In our counseling sessions she always evaded this question and I had not been wise enough to pin her down with my knee on her chest and make her answer up. Marie had too many secrets from everybody and was never fully honest in any of her relationships, including with me. I think she only came to Great Oaks at her lover's insistence and to the day she died was trying to pretend that nothing was wrong. All Marie really wanted from her life was to be loved and have a lot of loving attention. In the end, her dramatic death scene gave her that, which is probably why she manifested cancer and kept it and eventually, died from it. The name for this game is "secondary gain." A lot of sick people are playing it. Their illness lets them win their deepest desire; they get love, attention, revenge, sympathy, complete service, pampering, create guilt in others. When sick people receive too much secondary gain they never get well. One of the hardest things about being a healer is that one accumulates an ever-enlarging series of dirty, failed cases like this one. It is depressing and makes a person want to quit doctoring. Whenever I get involved with a case I really want them to get better. My life is put entirely out of joint for several months dealing with a residential faster. My schedule is disrupted; my family life suffers; my personal health suffers. No amount of mere money could pay for this. And then some of these people go and waste all my help to accomplish some discreditable secret agenda that they have never really admitted to themselves or others. Constant Complaints Alice was a middle-aged woman who couldn't understand why she had always felt tired, even when she was young. Her life had been this way ever since she could remember. Most puzzling to her was why her life was so Job-like. She did everything the proper way. Doing things correctly was important to her, and fitted her Puritan background. Alice supported all the right causes, did good works, was active in a Unitarian church and bought all her food at the healthfood store--and made sure it was organically grown. But in spite of Alice's righteous living, her existence was a treadmill of constant, minor complaints. She was constantly exhausted, so much so she had difficulty getting up in the morning and feared she might have chronic fatigue syndrome (whatever that is). Alice suffered bouts of depression over thoughts like these, and had many acute illnesses like colds that hung on interminably and would not go away. She had a constant post-nasal drip. Though she enjoyed life, her body was a millstone around her neck.