The Black Dog

We once actually owned a black dog, back in the 1980s--a black Lab that was an engine of destruction. One story about him:

Joyce and I had invited some friends over for homemade pasta. We'd used our little hand-crank machine; we had strung the strands on a framework to dry and had headed upstairs to change. When we came downstairs, our Lab (named Sooner) had eaten every single strand of it. (I know, I know: Who's fault was that?) Rage, rage ...t

I zoomed over to Acme to get some store-bought spaghetti to boil ... boil, a word most apt.

Oh, and compounding it all? Sooner was sick all night--much to clean up.

I'm avoiding the subject ...  This morning, wordsmith.org (which supplies a word-of-the-day online) offered black dog for today. (See entire entry below.) Since the mid-seventeenth century, I learned, it has been a synonym/metaphor for depression--not the economic kind, the personal doom-and-gloom kind. In recent years, I've been getting to know this new black dog a little more intimately than I'd like.

I should say that I've never been a person prone to depression--no more so than ordinary, I wouldn't think. There have been times in my life when the black dog has bounded into my life: broken relationships, deaths, professional mistakes and failures ... you know.

But the dog was always a temporary visitor--one who didn't stay all that long. But I guess he seemed to say to me--without a single bark or growl--that he would be back one day for some more extensive visits. And so he has ...

I'm guessing that the black dog is a very common pet among older generations--and among the ill, the lonely. I'm finding that to be true in my own case, anyhow. I was in my fifties when things started to go wrong. (That, I know, was a blessing I didn't recognize! All those years of good health--of doing pretty much whatever I felt like doing. Some people never could have written the previous sentence. The thought of that humbles me--and sometimes is powerful enough to evict the black dog from the house.)

Anyway, once my fifties arrived, stuff started happening to my body: joints and muscles began misbehaving, ignoring my intentions for them; illnesses and "conditions" began to arrive swiftly, like packages from Amazon Prime: Bell's palsy, skin cancer, prostate cancer, metastatic prostate cancer, vertigo, blood pressure issues, etc. I could no longer do so many of the things I'd once loved to do: run (a generous term for my jogging), play tennis, play basketball and baseball--hell, walking down the damn street became an adventure!

The deaths of family and friends and other loved ones? Don't get me started. (The black dog is already on the front porch!)

I'm now on some anti-cancer meds that exacerbate the situation--that are passkeys for the black dog to come into the house and to stay and stay. The drugs battle the cancer but befriend the black dog.

Several days in recent weeks I've been unable to talk myself into getting out of bed. So there I lie, hour after hour, in a kind of dark hazy funk.

Eventually, my reason returns, and I banish the black dog ... forever. (Or until, you know ...) I think about my amazing wife, the fact that I can still read and write most of the day, that I have a son, daughter-in-law and grandsons nearby, that I live in a cool little town where I can walk most places I need to go, that I'm welcome in a local coffee shop where they treat me so kindly, that ... I could go on.

Back in 2008, I read the late William Styron's brief 1990 memoir, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, a text about his own battles with the black dog. I just pulled the volume from my shelf and saw my penciled note inside: I'd read the book on March 19. I  checked my journal entry for that day and saw I didn't say much about it--just that I'd read it all (it's only 84 pp long) in a single sitting at Starbucks that afternoon. At the time, I was reading my way through all of Styron, and this was the last.

I just went to check my Styron file and discovered I have about three pages of handwritten notes on the book, and I see I wrote down a number of locutions Styron used to characterize the disease: "depression's black tempest" (43); "a storm of murk" (47); "a daily presence, blowing over me in cold gusts" (50), "a simulacrum of all the evil of our world" (83), and on and on.

I can't say I'm anywhere near Styron--not in talent, not in the depth or darkness of my depression. I am not on meds for it--do not want to go on meds for it. My black dog is still somewhat friendly, willing to depart when I finally insist he do so.

I fight each morning to remind myself of all that is--and has been--wonderful in my life. And--almost every day--this suffices.

This morning, I walked in the May sunlight over to the coffee shop, where they save a prime table for me each day. I did my reading, some writing, talked with a few regulars. I walked down to the grocery store for something I'd forgotten to buy the other day--and need. I walked home. I walked upstairs and talked a bit with Joyce and felt the tidal surge of gratitude I always feel when I think of her.

And downstairs I came to write about the black dog and to hope (hope!) that these words will form a kind of fence that will keep him outside, away, at least for a while ...

our copy

black dog

noun: depression.

In the beginning, a black dog was a canine of dark complexion. Then it started to be used metaphorically to refer to a counterfeit coin, perhaps because such a coin was made of base metals (instead of silver or gold) that turn black over time. Eventually, the term began to be applied to depression. The lexicographer Samuel Johnson used the term in the 1780s for his own depression: “When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking.” In modern times, Winston Churchill popularized the term when he used it to describe his own depression. Earliest documented use: 1665.

 “Ed reacted without thinking. ‘I’m not that depressed,’ he said, and regretted it. He wanted to talk about the damn black dog, didn’t he?”

Bill Percy; “Climbing the Coliseum”; Xlibris; 2014.