Dr. Marianne Goldberger helped me when I most needed to be helped, and I don’t plan on grieving too much or too long for her, I can see her shrugging that off as sentimental and gloomy.

But I don’t think I could have slept tonight if I hadn’t noted her passing and taken a few minutes to thank her for all that she did for me.

Thank you, Dr. Goldberger, I will not disrespect you by wringing my hands and feeling sorry for your loss, or engaging in drama.

You always said death was just another part of life, something to be accepted and not feared.

Curiously, it was Paula, my first wife, who e-mailed me with the news that Dr. Goldberger, who was 89, had died peacefully at home and in her sleep, in New York City, as she intended.

Paula never met Dr. Goldberger, but she wrote that she knew she was important to our family. So true.

I have long expected to learn of her death but was still struck in the heart by it.

She was one of the most influential people in my life, and I think of her often and will probably never stop missing her wisdom and sensibility, although it isn’t really gone, I draw upon it all the time.

I’m not sure anyone in the world could ever know me as well as she did, or understood me so completely.

It was Dr. Goldberger who started me on the long journey to understanding and self-awareness, one that was to take more than 30 years and continues to this day.

It will never be over. Freudian analysis, which has fallen out of favor in our time (and no insurance company will pay for it), saved my sanity in many ways and changed me.

She was essential in helping me to understand my fear and to open up as a writer. Years after I moved away, she called every now and then to check up on me.

My work with her shows up in almost everything I write and everything I am.

In those sessions, I began to see myself in a new and essential way. It changed me. I learned to be open with her and honest with her. She was the first person in my life I was ever totally candid with, and that took a while.

Marianne Goldberger was one of those women who usually did what she intended to do. She was born in Prague, her family fled the Nazi’s and was the first woman intern at Mount Sinai hospital in the class of 1941.

She went to Radcliffe College and NYU Medical School.

She was the daughter of famed composer and conductor Max Rudolf.

She was strikingly beautiful, in a traditional European way, and also disarmingly modern.

She wasn’t a stickler for Freudian practices like the couch, and once or twice, I ran into her walking on Madison Avenue, bobbing her head up and down to the music in her Ipod, then new and different. She loved music and the culture of the young.

Dr. Goldberger was a psychoanalyst, trained as a Freudian analyst with a passion for experimentation and change. She was my analyst; she treated me for severe anxiety for almost six years, four days a week.

It s seems another era now, CBS News and my insurance paid for all of those visits, they were in a gorgeous, high-ceiling room in a Park Avenue rowhouse in the upper East Side. I slipped out of work four days a week for years, and no one ever knew where I had gone all those days.

For the first two years, I didn’t speak to Dr. Goldberger, and she sat quietly and patiently and regally looking at me and waiting. It is your time, she said, you can do whatever you wish with it. I wouldn’t lie on the couch either, and she didn’t seem to care.

Later, we talked about my submission issues.

Eventually, I began speaking, and we communicated easily, even warmly. Some sessions were excruciating; some were great fun. All were instructive in one way or another; I began the healing process with her. I came to understand who I was and how to heal the deep wounds of childhood.

She was smart and impossible to fool; her only Achilles heel was a wonderful sense of humor, I could usually get her to laugh, even when she tried to hide any emotion.

We shared a surprising number of ideas, including a determination not to waste our lives in regret, lament, or prolonged grieving, or to disrespect life by expecting it to last forever and always be pleasant or comfortable.

They say the analysand always falls in love with the analyst, and I suppose that happened for a while. The relationship is quite intense. She talked me through it.

I remember telling her how embarrassed I was when I got sick during an office meeting one day and ended up urinating in a sink, something I found horrifying.

I scrubbed it over and over again until it was spotless, and I could barely get the words out when I told her about it, I was so upset.

I had been a bed-wetter until I was 17, and Dr. Goldberger understood immediately what that meant, and why the sink incident was so painful for me.

She smiled and told me that people drink urine in many parts of the world, it isn’t poisonous or lethal, it was no big deal, drinking urine goes back thousands of years and can save a life if someone is dying of thirst.

It wasn’t as safe as water and isn’t healthy for long periods, but it wasn’t something to be mortified about, she said, I had no choice other than to urinate on the floor, there was no toilet nearby. This was the beginning of my understanding of what it meant to be human.

A strange story, but it always stuck in my mind.  I could never have told it to anyone else.  She taught me how to take it easy on myself, even when the world didn’t.

That was one of the many ways in which Dr.Goldberger – she specialized in cases of child abuse and incest – began the process of opening me up and getting me to start liking myself.

She changed my life; she was an excellent shrink, intuitive, demanding. She helped me see that I could go on and lead a healthy life and  be a good father. I remember her lessons all of the time; they guide and ground me.

Good journey, friend, wherever you decided to go. And thanks.