Postcards from the edge
I haven’t been writing because I’ve been teetering on the brink of a true depression, the kind where you feel totally hopeless, helpless, and tears are always just at the surface. I’ve been there before; I don’t want to go there again. And I had this sense that writing about it might end up being the thing that would send me right over the precipice. So I waited in nervous, concerned silence to see what would happen. Depression, once you’ve made its acquaintance, can be like some creepy, over-familiar guy, and you know that if you give it more than a nodding acknowledgement, it will take that as all the encouragement it needs to camp out on your porch and stalk you day and night, breathing down your neck and never giving you a moment’s peace. I am still at a point in my grief journey where, while I’m doing pretty well most of the time, my moods are still variable, my surefootedness vulnerable. I cannot afford depression on top of that. I just don’t know how I would deal with that, but it would probably be poorly.
Depression scares me, because this, like the bad one I once went through, seemed to have no obvious and discernable genesis. It’s just that a few things go badly, and then seem to get worse, and the disequilibrating power of every new genuine issue that could reasonably expected to tank your mood is magnified. Bizarrely, it was easier when grief was my biggest problem, overshadowing all other stuff now made petty in comparison. If I was despondent, sad, irritable, it was clear why, to me and everyone else.
Once I found my way back to the land of the living, (or at least the walking wounded), I realized that all the emotional up and downs that are the human condition were still there; they had just been eclipsed by my grief. My friend, the massage therapist, tells me that the body can only deal with so much pain at one time, and attends to the worst pain. Which is why when I finally got that knot in my right shoulder blade worked out, I could recognize that the left side was pretty bunged up, too. When did that happen? Well, it had been happening all along, but I couldn’t feel it when I was too busy feeling the other pain. This phenomenon seems to be true for emotions as well.
I am not grief-free now; I do not expect to be impervious to grief at any point in the future, though I do expect I will get stronger. As it stands, though, my grief has moved out of the spotlight most of the time. It is no longer a howling storm that threatens to topple me with each gust; it’s more like an ever-present wind that rustles the very tops of the trees. It’s there; I can hear it, but it doesn’t really threaten me for the most part. Of course, that does leave room for the occasional weak branch to have been rustled one time too many, broken off, and sent crashing down upon my head. But that’s an unusual event.
Despite all I have learned from grief about not trying to think your way through feelings, not intellectualizing an emotional process, when depression sets in and threatens to stay, it’s only natural for me to consider sources and solutions. There’s a certain amount of reflection that is prudent and necessary to engage in if you want to be reasonably self-aware in this life, and I figure it’s better for me to stop it sooner rather than later, if I can. I thought a lot about it, wondered what had brought me to this place. Maybe it was the sadiversary of my dog’s death. Maybe it was all the repairs I’ve been doing on the house. Maybe it was my friend dumping me. Maybe it was unarticulated grief. Maybe it was just April. Maybe it was none of those things. I couldn’t put my finger on what might’ve brought me that low, and why now. And as I tried to figure it out, I realized that in addition to all the other feelings I was stewing in, I was angry.
I resented having to figure anything out. I resented having to fix me. I wasn’t the one who broke me; he did that, when he died and left me. I was just fine. And now I have to figure out how to clean up a mess inside me that I didn’t make. It would be one thing if I was out engaged in self-destructive activities; I’d have to take responsibility for the clean-up of that. But I wasn’t. I was just loving a man and loving my life, minding my own damn business. I didn’t sign up for this.
Neither did anyone else whom tragedy struck. And I know that. Shit happens; terrible, tragic shit, and I know I have two choices: be destroyed by it, or fix me, whether I did the breaking or not. That’s called "being a grown-up"; you have to fix all the messes, because no one else is going to do it for you, especially when it comes to the emotional realm. I can have my tantrum; I can have it again and again if I want to. I think I will; I think being able to say, "I resent the hell out of this," while it doesn’t solve anything, is at least self-validating enough for me to feel heard, if by no one but myself. More often than not, I’m the only person I have to convince of the validity of my feelings, choices, and life, anyway, and it’s always the hardest sell, isn’t it? But in the end, I will still have the same choice, and I don’t want to choose destruction. Yet I’m not sure how "fixed" I am able to be on this score; how much "better" is possible? I will have to live into that knowledge, I guess, one day at a time.
I decided that I wasn’t going to be able to figure out what was causing my funk, not definitively anyway, so I decided to focus on trying to get out of it, regardless. I brought out strong medicine last Monday night: a DVD of my favorite comedian, Eddie Izzard. And it worked as I’d hoped; I laughed and laughed despite not feeling much like laughing the whole day up until that point, or the two weeks prior. In the middle of all that, I had the strongest image of A laughing until his eyes teared up when we watched the same video. Until that moment, I’d forgotten we’d watched it together, and hadn’t really connected him at all with that particular video. Had I, I might’ve chosen a different one, just to avoid the sad connection. The memory wasn’t sad; what’s sad is that memories are all I have now—that’s what gets me. And I was trying to get out of sadness, not fall back into it. But I loved nothing better than to make him laugh, or see him laugh. To have that vivid memory of his laughing face come back, unbidden, seems more like a gift than anything else.
And it started me back from the edge, one tentative step at a time. When I went to bed Monday night, I said "Maybe tomorrow will be a little better." And it was, a little. When I went to bed Tuesday night, I said the same, and Wednesday was a little better yet. I kept that up, until Saturday when I felt safe saying that I had averted depression (this time). And yet I could only write about it today, feeling like I had enough distance and enough strength to talk about it without feeling it.