An Interlude
This isn’t about glamour, you guys. It’s about me. How self-centered!
I’ve been reflecting on the past year, as we lurch into the calendar’s darkest days.
I’ve spent more time than I would have anticipated this year crying in hospital hallways.
My dad was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer a year ago and the complications of treatment have been brutal. He has been hospitalized several times, in circumstances that have been extremely traumatic for both of us. Chemo has prolonged his life, but it has also disabled him. He can’t taste anything anymore except for Oreos, Malt-O-Meal, and lemonade.
He suffers.
Thankfully, I live in a state that has paid family medical leave, so I’ve been able to care for him and sit with him during infusions and spend time with him without losing my job or my apartment.
The demands of caring for him have taken their toll on me. Powerlessly watching him suffer pulled me into the deepest depression of my life. I haven’t slept through the night in over a year.
In June, I hit something of a breaking point after a botched antidepressant dosage adjustment by my doctor. Things in my mind got bad rapidly, like a spiking fever. I knew I was reacting to the new medication, so it wasn’t purely my own dark mood, but it was scary.
I called my mom and asked her to come get me, and thank God, in two hours, she was there1.
The next day, I was sitting in her house in a blue armchair, racked with psychic pain, looking out at the lush lawn hemmed in by flowering trees and mountain hemlock. It was as offensively bright outside as the lighting in a multi-camera nineties sitcom. I was having one of those “what’s the point” conversations in my mind, one of the scary ones, when I noticed a shy doe nosing her way along the margin of the yard. In the shade of the trees, eating the clover. Sensing my eyes through the window, she looked up and met my gaze.
Then I saw two fawns behind her, with their little dappled spots.
Their innocence overwhelmed me. It called forth something in my soul that I did not think was there anymore.
Nothing’s been the same for me since.
I had a different dialogue, then, than “what is the point.” I set some things straight in my mind. I let other things go. It took about a month, and I had to do more work on it. Maybe someday I’ll share what all that was.
But I found within me a wellspring of strength, joy, and consolation.
I found the part of me that can never be broken. I finally hit bedrock.
I changed.
You know, I have a dispositional tendency towards melancholy. (I am a poet, after all. Not usually a sanguine bunch. On top of that, mental illness has run in my family for generations2.) I was first diagnosed with depression at age nine, and most years of my life have been tinted blue ever since.
But now, I’ve become one of those annoying people who sees a flower or a bumblebee and is happy about it. I smile at random people in the street with a burst of heartfelt warmth that probably unnerves them. Fathers and daughters walking in the park together regularly move me to tears of joy. I still cry sad tears easily. But I also laugh all the time now, sometimes absurdly, because life is a gift, even in the midst of grief and sorrow, even as it breaks my heart, life is a gift. And I’ll keep on believing that, no matter what comes, because it’s helped me survive—and show up for the ones who need me—far more effectively than despair ever did.
Gratitude—especially the embodied, exuberant kind that you experience once you’ve integrated a Dark Night Of The Soul—is a profoundly humiliating experience. It’s a sensation that your ego is allergic to. It makes a lot of the people around you think that you are insane. Maybe I am! But I’ll take this brand of insanity over the one I had before! And to be clear, I’m not happy or grateful because of the state of things, but in spite of it.
In material terms, my change in perspective, as radical as it is to me, means nothing. It can’t repel malevolent forces, it can’t protect me or anyone else from bodily harm or death or injustice or the negative projections of other people. It won’t make my father well. Most of the losses we face are irrevocable. My joy won’t override reality. It changes nothing.
Yet to me, it is everything. It may be all I have, in the end.
I’ll be back to regular programming next week.
She also forced me to watch Ferris Bueller, because it is genuinely my Suicide Prevention Movie. I don’t know why that movie is such a balm for my soul, and yet it is. I have never once felt worse after watching it.
at least you can say I came by it honestly!
My sister had Stage IV cancer and passed shortly thereafter, in November. And my mom passed a few years ago so some of the things you wrote resonated with me, thank you.