You know what I did last summer.
Ah! Family vacation!
The minivan didn’t break down. But I broke down in the passenger seat.
It happened this time last year, while I was visiting my brother’s family. My sister-in-love and my mom and my nieces and nephew and my girls fled the vehicle. Katieface and Mom conferred with my brother.
I simply could not get out of their minivan. I was sobbing hysterically in the front seat, big scary ugly tears. My face was smashed into my fists. My stupid old heart was torn to stupid old shreds over the loss of my marriage, my job, my security, my safety, my sanity.
Joe got into the driver’s seat, closed the door. He sized me up calmly.
“Let’s go for a ride,” he said kindly.
I was crying too hard to answer, and honestly, I didn’t care what happened next. I didn’t care if the driveway opened up and sucked the van into the molten center of Earth. I didn’t care if we drove to the moon, where D would be waiting for me with roses and a new fixed-up shiny life and love and maybe a Miata. I had simply ceased to care.
This is what is difficult to explain about the blackest of depressions, the darkest of griefs. The pain simply takes up all the space. There is no space left for decision-making, for caring. Things will never be better. It is impossible that things will ever be better. Do you understand? It is impossible, in a moment like this, that things will ever be better.
My brother took me to the water. He coaxed me out of the van to sit on a driftwood log with him. We stared at the horizon. Sunset was taking its good old time, just like mourning tends to.
We talked. I don’t remember the words, not all of them. Depression and grief devour the brain, raid its cupboards, leaving crumbs of no worth.
He is a wonderful brother. Did it help, that day? Talking by the water? Yes. It helped to hear that he loved me, that he wouldn’t have any other sister, no matter what. I sure wouldn’t choose any other brother.
Am I better now? A year later?
My God. I realize: No.
I’m not.
Tomorrow, he and his family come to visit for a week. I want to throw my arms around them all, squeeze my nieces and nephews tight.
But I hate telling them—like I hate admitting to myself—that I am carrying the same grief, the same hopelessness.
Then I remember: They have iPhones! They read the blog! They already know! Lucky them! Vacationing with me! Ha! Ha ha!
It is difficult to be the family of someone who cannot figure out how to stop hurting. We sad folks? We are sorry we are so tedious, and we feel awful about it. More awful. We apologize, over and over to you, in our heads and hearts.
A full year after the minivan breakdown, I am still scrabbling to get by, white-knuckling it through everything I do.
Damn it to hell. I sob alone in my car. I sob in the shower. I pray to be alone, because I can’t seem to convey to the people in my life that the pain is almost beyond what I can tolerate, on most days. Then I pray not to be alone for the rest of my life. Then I go back to praying to be alone, because smiling is just too bloody hard and breaks me down more.
There are many optimists in the world, and I appreciate their efforts to get me going, get me launched in a new direction. I have appreciated over the past year their many, many attempts to help me and I am embarrassed that not much has changed. I do the right stuff, which apparently is still the wrong stuff, because it’s not doing the right stuff.
I feel bad for the optimists, because if you’re an optimist, this world—with its chronically fucked-up people like me—is really damn confusing. I have quite a few in my family. I watch them hope and hope. They watch and watch. Things get better AND THEN THEY GET BAD AGAIN. Very frustrating! And if you’re an optimist, you’re trying HARD NOT TO BE FRUSTRATED! When you try to HELP SOMEONE, THE HELP YOU OFFER SHOULD CONCEIVABLY HELP THE PERSON. When it doesn’t, it can’t be the world’s fault, because the world is groovy and there are silver-dollar pancakes to prove it and sometimes poor people win the Lotto and go on Oprah.
“I’M JUST CRAZY, NOT DEAF, MOM,” I eee-nun-ceee-ate-ed today, to my poor mother, who is at her wit’s end with her tarnished crankypants firstborn who can’t see past the vicious fog. “NOT DEAF. BRING IT DOWN, WOMAN.”
She sees unicorns and rainbows and floating pierogies. She is not a pessimist. She was born under a bowl of Lucky Charms cereal, on a Willy Wonka candy bar, happy shits and giggles in her first nappy. It is hard for her now, with me. I am hard for her to have.
We pessimists (even non-depressed pessimists) are used to shit raining down and we have given up on umbrellas. We have a few saving graces. We’re the ones to turn to if you are, in fact, losing your own shit.
Those of us who are clinically depressed and have children are blessed and cursed—we have someone to live for, and we have someone to live for. I live for the girls now. For my family. It’s not for me. That is the God’s honest truth (and I am a rare pessimist who’s optimistic about God existing).
Self-love would be nice, but self-loathing has stolen all the best punchlines. Belief in some kind of contentment, some kind of happiness beyond my children? Lasting love? Decent career? Bipolar under control? I can’t pretend I believe in those things anymore.
I know how frightening that sounds. I know it’s not what anyone who cares about me wants to hear. But this is what can lie behind the smile of the happiest, perkiest-seeming soul you know. How about that? What cruel bodies we have, that we can thwart our own progress by hiding the hurts, so as not to ruin everyone else’s good day or Christmas dinner!
One year later. How I wanted this summer to be different. Maybe next summer.
I will keep going. And tomorrow I will hold close all the people I love, and try to love with honesty. And let them see behind the smile, if I can. But I can’t promise anything. At all.
But I can make offers.
Joe phones just now on their way to the airport. They are in the Minivan of Tears, I can hear.
“Hey. How are you?” he asks, in his usual wary-but-loving, talking-to-depressed-sis tone.
“FINE! OKAY! FINE!” I yelp like a psychotic trained seal. It is not my brother’s fault. I become the village idiot whenever I talk to my brother, because he is kind and smart and wise and active and helps dying people and delivers babies. I blather and mutter and generally humiliate myself on the phone with my brother, because I would like him to be proud of my remarkable comeback instead of having to discuss the wacky pros and cons of electroshock therapy. Zap! Pow! Hilarious!
“We’re on the way to the airport, just thought I’d check in—”
I tell him helpfully that I’ve made a list of things we can do.
“YOU’VE made a LIST? A LIST?”
“Yes,” I say. “I know you like family activity lists.” Joe does like lists. He is a very good doer, a very good savorer of good activities.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m coming there with very low expectations.”
“That, I can deliver on,” I say. “I did find some caverns.”
He finds this amusing. “So now you’re looking for REAL caves?”
“I thought it seemed appropriate. Metaphorically. And proactive. There are stalagmites and stalactites. And a boat.”
“Well, just no cocooning or cave-dwelling,” he replies.
“Right,” I say. “If I feel the need to cocoon, I’ll do it outside.”
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