Ragged claws, silent seas

The first post on this blog was an act of desperation. It describes a trip to the airport to see my daughter, Echo Romeo, off to a new chapter in her life. Like any parent, I was sad to see my child depart the nest — an abundantly normal, typical human sadness. But watching mine go through the airport door unleashed such a flood of hopelessness, I didn’t see how I would make it through the rest of the day, or the rest of my life. That’s how depression works. It takes a mundane emotional trigger and turns it into the end of the world. You know your brain is sending you bad signals, but you believe this distorted, bleak world of your own invention.

In an agony of despair that day, I reached for any handhold I could find, one of which was to write about what was happening — i.e. this very blog.

Now, just a few days later, everything looks and feels different, better,  “normal.” Which is another truth about depression, at least the version I know: put a little time between yourself and the last bout of hopelessness, and you can scarcely believe it happened. There is a distance there, almost as though the overtly dark phase happened to someone else. It’s like drinking to excess or being physically ill, or anything that temporarily distorts your perception. When the cloud passes, there’s a disbelief, a distance, an unreality. It’s like trying to recall the darkest, coldest day of winter from the vantage point of comfortable summer.

I came back from the airport convinced my life, already pretty much a waste, was on a downward spiral that would leave me a useless hulk of a person. In turn this would sour my wife’s naturally abundant well of joyfulness because she would have to take care of me. Yes, I was going to die, unhappy and unfulfilled, in some shadowy corner. And that would be best for everybody. Except that I had already passed on my depressive genes to my kids, so their happy wells were soured too. To borrow a line from the ever-cheerful T.S. Eliot (I believe his initials stand for Terribly Sad), I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Yeah, I know. It’s like third-rate literary fiction with yourself the maudlin hero. But you believe it anyway. The airport episode and its long tail lasted nearly two days.

Oddly distant as the dark bouts seem during this interval of normality, I remain aware of the real risk: which is that the bouts grow in duration and the intervals shrink. And then you are living in perpetual winter.

The purpose of this blog is to avoid that eventuality, which last befell me at age 11…. Next post.

-Aikree Van

Departures and Arrivals

Early this morning, I put my daughter on a plane. I don’t know where or when I will see her again. It is what happens when kids grow up and leave home. She is 27, so this departure was to be expected. She’s going to Mexico on a holiday for a few weeks, she and her young man (who I will call The Young Man.) Then she will relocate to a city far away — 2009 miles away, or 3,232 kilometres, to be exact.

I will call her Echo Romeo. And I guess I will call her new home Faraway City.

Our airport is small regional one, departures and arrivals on the same level. There was no time to cry, there on the curb at this small airport at 53 degrees north latitude, where I have bid farewell to people I love so many times. No doubt my daughter planned it that way. Not to linger on the curb, that is. I’d watched her in the rearview mirror all the way to the airport. She never looked more beautiful nor full of promise to me. Anyway, what words are there to say when that conjoined limb of life shared by parent and child comes to its inevitable branching point? She made it quick. She gave her mother and I identical kisses. She gave us identical orders to take care of one another. The night before, as she was packing, she had texted me a picture of her grandfather’s St. Christopher’s medal that is intended to protect travellers. May it shield her. Then she swept in through the automatic door. No looking back. Fare thee well, Echo Romeo.

Let it be noted that, in the days and weeks leading up to this departure, my daughter was happy. She has not seemed so calmly happy and optimistic since she was a kid. Not that there was anything drastically wrong before. Or even wrong at all. Just the usual bumpy teenage years, the uncertain twenties. Nor is there anything drastically right today. In practical terms, my daughter faces as many bumps and uncertainties as at any time before. My guess is that Echo Romeo has simply chosen, by the grace that exists within each of us, to embrace them. Partly it is The Young Man. He and Echo Romeo are good together. Maybe she even loves him. In his company, she has rekindled her love of books, for example. And they want to take a look over the horizon together. But mostly it is she, herself, Echo Romeo. The line between happy and less-happy is small, tender little one. We each tread it for ourselves. It is a choice, like stepping through an automatic door.

Let it be further noted that, in the days and weeks leading up to this departure, I myself have been — in contrast to my daughter — unhappy. Not since I was a kid have I been so unhappy. But no, that’s not right. Not at all. I remind myself that happiness is just a choice, an automatic door we can walk through. No, it’s not unhappiness, but another shadow altogether, one that muddles our senses with fear and confusion, so we don’t even know a door when we see one.

Ernest Hemingway, whom I will call Old Papa H, called his shadow Black Dog. I first met mine at the age of 11. And if I weren’t so supple and full of fibrous green young life then, I think the nameless beast would have shredded me in two.

The beast has come and gone enough times over the years that I’ve gotten to know it. “Black Dog” would be a good name indeed for this sturdy, powerful, opportunistic creature that bounds out of nowhere. But that name belongs to Old Papa H, that tough old scribe. Mine I will call it, let’s see — Le Gris. That’s when I refer to it all. Perhaps it is good to name our fears. But never glorify them.

Today, when my lovely daughter so full of happy promise moved through that airport door, she was travelling into light, marching with joy and purpose in her limbs, a small, new canvas knapsack upon her back. And I, at that small airport at 53 degrees north latitude, in my 53rd year, as chance would have it, knew in that same moment that the beast, Le Gris, had returned from afar.

I am not as green and supple as I once was, so I will have to outwit him this time.