I managed a "whatever." And rolled over and feigned sleep.
But as the week wore on, I got up, made it to the coffee shop (which I love) and the health club (which I don't), and gradually resumed what has become "normal" for me as I drift toward the time when I may actually get to meet Plato. (I hope he's learned English because I certainly do not know Ancient Greek!) And, gradually, the shadow passed on, taking its own sweet time, until I felt more and more like ... myself.
Still, I didn't want to do any writing ... not until today.
I am perfectly aware that depression has nothing to do with rationality. In so many ways, I know, I have to reason to be depressed. Ever. I've been married for nearly half a century to a wonderful human being. I had a 45-year career (teaching) that I loved. I've enjoyed some moderate success as a freelance writer. We have a great son who has a loving wife, two remarkable sons. Until I was in my 60s, my health was ... unremarkable. No major problems. Not many minor ones. We own our house. We're not in debt. I have health insurance, an adequate retirement income. We live in a town where people are amazingly kind to us. I have many former students who keep in touch via Facebook. I ... you get the point?
Like pretty much everyone else "of a certain age," though, Time caught up with me. Bell's palsy. Eye surgery. Skin cancer. Metastatic prostate cancer (it's lingering in my bones). One of the cancer treatments I take is a drug called Trelstar (quarterly injections); it has a number of odious side-effects. And one of them is depression.
And 2018 was a rough year in a lot of emotional ways. My mother died, as did a dear friend of fifty years, as did a couple of excellent students from years before, as did some other former classmates and colleagues. My life more and more involved death.
I've read some about depression. One of the best was by William Styron (1925-2006--author of The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie's Choice and numerous other stellar works). His Darkness Visible (1985), a slender book*--but in the way that a knife blade is slender. It dealt with his own struggles with depression later in his life and is well worth reading--especially if you share the visible darkness with him.
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| our copy |
I see that I read the 84-page book in 2008--about three years after my prostate cancer surgery, about the time my oncologist was realizing that the cancer had returned. I just checked my journal: It was March 19, 2008, and I read all of it at Starbucks before driving up to Mayfield High School to spend some time with some writing students, 8th graders competing in The Power of the Pen under the care of a former middle-school student of mine, Brian Brookhart (who is now the assistant principal at Aurora High School). Here's what I wrote when I got home: had a great time—laughing, carrying on, talking about writing. I guess Styron helped me ...?
I love these final words from Darkness Visible, words that allude to Dante and Inferno: "For those who have dwelt in depression's dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell's black depths and at last emerging into what he saw as 'the shining world'" (84).
Inexplicable, indeed.
But, for me, the world is indeed "shining" again right now. The sun is out. The temperatures are moderate. There is no snow to shovel. Joyce will soon join me for lunch. And we will laugh. And darkness, for now, will be invisible.
*The title comes from the opening lines of Paradise Lost ...
A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe ....
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