Depression’s insidiousness can include an almost complete obliteration of one’s perception of life as God and nothing else. Maybe more than almost. This is especially unsettling when that has been one’s default orientation for decades.
Over the past thirteen months, my beloved’s internal world has become more and more both numb and agitated––empty and overwhelming––despite so-called treatment. Many days, all we can do is be together, reminding ourselves of what’s “really going on” while playing with the external.
A recent Sunday:
- Gardening.
- Walks around our pond with the four-legged boys.
- Car ride, exploring dirt roads we’ve never been on before.
- Shopping for veggies just appearing from local growers.
- Making dinner together.
- Me reading aloud some Jack (Kornfield), finding reminders the likes of: “We are designed to journey through the full measure of beauty and sorrows in life and survive.”
- Watching a movie. “The Secret of Roan Inish.” Two days earlier it was “The Help.”
I said, “Isn’t the small pleasure you’re experiencing today better than a sharp stick in the eye?”
She said, “It’s pleasant, but there’s not been a moment I don’t also have a sharp stick in my eye.”
Sometimes when I talk about how I became an alcoholic, I say that before I was born I asked for the most intense life I could get that would draw me closer to God. A request like that can open the door to a lot more than just being a drunk.
And a good thing, too. The despair of countless self-inflicted miseries has inflamed a passion to embrace the full measure of life’s beauty and sorrows.
By the time we entered Depressionland, I’d been working on that embrace for enough years that, in a strange way, I welcomed this new step into the void. Not as something desirable, or as something I was sure to handle well, but as a demand to expand, to make room, to soften any sense of how things need to shake out, and simply love as best I’m able.
It’s funny, and humbling, that every time the universe does something like slip a rattlesnake into my pocket as I’m tap dancing on the lip of the Grand Canyon, I have to admit––I asked for this.
Which means I’ve asked for nothing as annihilating as my beloved’s depression.
Yet.
Always in appreciation for your sharing of what it looks like, at ground zero, to choose a perspective that affirms the expansiveness of Life.
My sister, an incredibly solid, competent and very healthy person who’s sole desire for years has simply been to wake up, has now undergone 4 unexpected, diverse, and major surgeries in 2 years, with 2 more to come in the next 6 months – most involving an inability to walk. One of the things she has noticed most consistently is how she can feel truly devastated by her situation, and the seemingly endlessness of it, and also notice that another part of her is actually fine. I imagine that’s the part that has been asking to wake up.
May there be an abundance of grace in all our lives.
Woah. Steve, your words and spirit always inspire good thinking. Thank you, and your Beloved, for sharing.