Uprooting the Darkness

DEPRESSION - unhappiness, melancholia, misery, sorrow, sadness, gloom, low spirits, heavy heart, hopelessness, despair, tearfulness, the dumps, the doldrums, the blues, a blue funk

Everybody goes through periods of depression in their lives. What they do about it, or how they cope is where we differ. Some people let it take hold of them and they wail and moan about it but never do anything. Or they get on medication and never really work through the thing that is causing their trouble. Sometimes the hardest part is recognizing it for what it is, and then the recognition hopefully leads to a look inward to find a way to pull it out by its roots.

My dad once said to me, "It's not in my nature to be depressed." This was after his beloved old dogs had died within weeks of each other. When he said it, he was going through cataract surgery and all those endless drops involved with that. It wasn't in his nature, but nonetheless it had taken hold of him. Daddy wasn't given to a lot of self-examination, but clearly he had been thinking about it. The signs were there - sleeplessness, slovenly lifestyle, letting things go until he had no choice but to finally DO them. He stayed with us at our house for a while. He thought he might want to look for a new dog, and so we did. The new dog gave him a lot of pleasure. He had taken an active step toward the solution to his depression, even if he didn't think of it in that way. The new dog soothed him, and he became his old sunny self again.

There have been times in my life when darkness has come over me. In my early 30s I went through about a year of it, saw a psychologist for several months, came to understand a lot about myself, about being an adult, about taking charge of your own happiness. I came out of it. My marriage nearly ended -- maybe it should have right then and not lingered on for another 22 years, but hindsight, as they say, is 100%.

And that's when my next bout of it came, 22 years later, when my marriage finally did end. The wasted years were what deviled me most throughout that time. I thought I had lost so much, my whole life. I felt hopeless, useless, and old. What I didn't know then, but came to understand as time went by, was sheer determination had kept my marriage alive long after it should have been declared dead -- determination and fear of the unknown. When I took a hard look at it, I realized we had been on the brink of separation for at least half of the 34 years we spent together. There comes a time when you have to face defeat.

Then I met my darling. What a revelation he turned out to be, showing me that love doesn't have to be that difficult. We were alike at our core, held the same values, felt the same way about relationships, had the same commitment. What followed were three idyllic years before disaster struck in rapid succession: the death of his dearest friend, the death of my precious old cat, the suicide of his son. All of that in three days time. We were shellshocked. And we were in the process of moving. His work had shifted north. Our financial situation was changing. We needed to offload one of the houses. We knew the house in Texas would sell the quickest, and it did, in two weeks.

The death of a loved one is never easy to take, not even when they have been suffering with illness for a while, as was the case with the dear friend and the cat. Death by suicide leaves an empty, questioning hole in your heart that consumes your spirit. I once said that suicide was the cruelest thing someone could do to those who love them. Nothing has changed my mind about that. I watched my darling suffer, and I suffered with him. The light went out of our life for such a long time.

And then, last February, my dad died. It seemed so sudden but it wasn't really. He had been growing more and more frail, he had been falling a lot, but still, it seemed that one day he was here, watching the Super Bowl with me by his side. The next day, he gave up just as I had managed to get the attention of everyone around us that he was more critical than they believed. We were about to run tests. The nurse had finally agreed with me that he was failing. And then he was gone. Nothing I could do to save him. It hit me like a bus. My daddy, my one and only, my mentor, my North Star. Just gone. Like that.

Grief began once again.

It's not in my nature to be depressed. Nevertheless, there it was. I felt detached. Hopeless. Gloomy. I still had my darling, and my dog, but everyone else I loved was 800 miles away. I couldn't shake it off. It had been descending over me for two years, and Daddy dying closed the curtain. I loved the beauty of the summer mountains, the birds at the feeders, even the bears that occasionally showed their faces, but the thought of the impending winter, oh so long in the mountains, was something I really could not endure again. Neither of us was prepared for another long winter. We made the decision to leave. It has not been easy but it does feel right. In a perfect world we could keep both places, one for summer and one for winter. But we aren't wealthy, far from it, and it's hard for me to shift gears. I'm a homebody at my core. I get attached to a place, and it becomes part of me. An odd thing for a person who has moved as much as I have to say. I feel I have been running back and forth for two years, even longer than that, and I need to settle down, stay home, get quiet with myself. I need to write again. It has always been my solution. It's time to heal.