Tag Archives: Depression

Courage at Twilight: Spikes on My Boots

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The last words Dad said to me on the night of Christmas day were, “If it weren’t for you, Rog, I would be dead.”  The macabre pronouncement startled me, and I wondered if it bespoke gratitude or chagrin, and whether I should feel satisfaction or dread.  I know this: I could not answer him.  This one day of all the year’s days had exceeded my strength to generate joy.  Still single and alone and clueless about making a change.  None of my seven children or four grandchildren with me.  A loved one who will not speak to me.  Reminders of my life’s great griefs.  In response to Dad’s comment, I had strength only to slip from the room and to find my bed and sleep, without saying good-night to anyone.  This holiday darkness has been gathering for weeks, and fully came over me on Christmas day.  I have been contemplating how to illustrate depression with words.  Perhaps this: imagine a claustrophobe tied up and wedged in a magnetic resonance imaging tube with the awful wretched throbbing penetrating shredding noise of a year-long scan.  Or: a perpetual myocardial infarction gripping your chest, squeezing hard, and you think you might die, but somehow you do not.  Joy eluded me, and happiness fled, and this despite Mom’s and Dad’s cheer and generosity, my siblings’ love and support, and my children’s admiration and friendship.  My world had darkened and closed in around me, and I could feel only emptiness.  I was in the MRI tube, holding my chest.  In the dark underworld of depression, I cannot imagine any other life, in that moment, than a hopeless life.  Disabled for a spell, yet I have always had a vague sense of a far-off entity whispering to me, “Hold on,” assuring me I will emerge.  I cannot believe it in the moment.  But I can keep going through the motions of living, and I can be still and wait.  The scripture of my Church teaches that the light which shines in the universe, and the light which enlightens my mind and yours, all proceeds forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space and every human being in it.  Truth also comes from God’s presence.  Light and truth are one.  God has put a measure of light and truth in the hearts and minds of all humankind.  Through free will I can grow that light and be filled with that truth.  That thing that whispers to me is light, dim and distant, but undeniably present.  If I can but muster a mustard seed of strength, a farthing of faith, an ounce of compassion for myself, my strength will grow, and I will be able to hold on to the hope that light and truth can chase off the darkness and be mine.  Sleep is a great mercy, and I slept, and I awoke the next morning to the fact that I had survived another Christmas, that yesterday’s darkness was behind me, that today I just might possibly find a shimmer of light and hope.  I ventured onto the frozen trail, excited to try my new tool, my Kahtoola MICROspikes (pictured above), strapped to my hiking boots.  All of the 50 hikers I passed wore spikes—I am very late to the party.  But I have them now, the right tool, and I strapped them on and climbed mile after mile on snow and ice without once falling back or slipping up as I made my way slowly and steeply up the mountain.

Self-portrait in a bauble hung on a fir tree by the trail.

A friendly trailside greeter.

The falls are beginning to thaw.

View of the Salt Lake valley and the Oquirrh mountain range from Bell Canyon trail.

Courage at Twilight: Almonds by the Pound

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I am not doing well.  Of course, that sentence is so vague as to mean nothing at all.  Let me see if I can rephrase.  I am feeling acute prolonged distress on account of continuous daily events like watching my father exert all his earthly energies merely to rise from a chair and stumble on the verge of forward falling with each step as he crosses a room and knowing that one fall with a blow to the head or a broken leg or hip would take him from his home and land him in a hospital or assisted living whence he might not return and knowing the finances and the absence of long-term care insurance and that the needs for the little that is left, the needs, the needs, come constantly and persistently and if Mom and Dad are long-term hurt or long-term sick and cannot stay home the bills would take their home from them for we likely would have to sell the home, the home, and then where would our family be? and I can’t even think or ask When will this end? because the only end is a sad and tragic end which I abhor and eschew and don’t ever want ever and so we endure together and we make the best of things which often is pretty excellent though always under pall.  I know I am not doing very well because I am writing in hysterical stream-of-consciousness and I swear frequently under my breath and I am consuming large quantities of lemon-yogurt-covered almonds and milk-chocolate-covered almonds and colorful crunchy Jordan almonds and feel a general awfulness inside and out and the frequent need to sit in a dark quiet room in my recliner under a soft fleece throw.

 

(Image by WikimediaImages from Pixabay.)