Life Without Bootstraps

Depression is an illness many don’t take seriously. I have tremendous admiration and respect for anyone who deals with it.
I’ve never suffered clinical depression.

I am currently suffering environmental depression. The very idea that one could exist in this state endlessly, without a way out, without a rational connection to something that is happening chemically, but exists just as viscerally, terrifies me.

This morning, having reached the end of my rope and discovering a seriously frayed and unreliable knot, I got a phone call from a friend who lives with clinical  depression and is in addiction recovery. He is one of my oldest friends, and might be the bravest person I know.  As is so often the case in moments like these, an angel whispered in his ear at exactly the right moment. He called when I needed him most.

“How do you do this every day?”

“Medication, meditation, a wing, a prayer, and really good friends,” he said.

We vented, ranted, and he did me a favor. It meant I could finish this day without dissolving into completely useless tears.  It also gave me the push I needed to get through a week that is going to SUCK. Life sometimes does, and knowing it’s coming doesn't always help. Today I can just know the suckage is headed this way.  I’ll stop whining, wipe tears that were an indulgence, and go do what needs doing. I’m lucky. I have incredible friends, and amazing man, a furry best friend who warms my knee, and bootstraps.

Tug em if you got em, kids… life without them is a lot harder.

The Journey Itself

As 2008 approaches, many are reflecting on the year that has passed and looking forward to a new one with fresh goals. I learned a great deal in 2007. One of the challenges for me in 2007 was keeping faith. In general I am not someone who loses belief in God or the gracious force that guides the universe. I do lose faith in people. I find myself becoming disillusioned, saddened, and even angered by others who waste opportunities, impair others who would do good works, or simply treat others with cruelty, malice, ignorance. For the most part I think we all try hard. But I see more people every day becoming self indulgent, excuse-mongering anger addicts.

Where, then, to look for guidance? This past year there were revelations about Mother Theresa of Calcutta and her loss of trust in God as her life came to a close. I was shocked to hear others discounting both her work and her spirit as a result of these revelations. For in spite of a darkening heart, one that found it increasingly hard to trust God's plan, she continued to her final breath to help others. She served humanity even in the throes of doubt.

Jesus questioned the plan, too. He wept tears of blood at Gethsemane and begged for a way out. He went willingly to his cross, but in agony asked "why have you forsaken me?" Perhaps those who worship him should consider that when condemning a little woman who did God's work even when she found it hard to hear God's voice. "I am just a little pencil in God's hand," she used to say. When her certainty of glory in the afterlife waned, her dedication to others did not.

I want to make that kind of determination my guide. I'm no Mother Theresa, nor would I want to be. But how can I fail to admire the strength it takes to plow onward through the hard times without really knowing if any reward awaits? Surely the journey itself, and whatever good I can do along that path, is worth its conclusion even if no reward awaits. As my dear friend Maria often says, "what if life itself is your reward?"

When you live with a terminal illness people tend to respond in one of two ways: denial on your behalf or fear and shock that such a thing can happen. The denial camp tends to respond with dismissal. "You'll be fine, they'll find a cure tomorrow," delivered in a saccharine voice followed by a fast change of subject. The message: it's too scary, so we're going to pretend it will go away and I am simply NOT going to think about nasty things. The fear/shock camp has a more natural response: holy crap how does somebody deal with THAT? From those people I often get offers of prayer (always deeply appreciated) and gentle questions. "How do you deal?"

I believe a power beyond us drives this universe. I believe in good and evil, but suspect we (humankind) drive most (if not all) of both forces. I believe in angels, in the power of releasing a light intent on good things into the world, and that the balance of endless chaos responds to darkness with light eventually. I believe in getting up and going on with an open heart. And I believe I can be wrong. But like another woman who was "just a pencil in God's hand" I believe the journey to be worthwhile regardless. So if I take a drive to visit a little shop at the end of a meandering country road lined with maples covered in snowy lace, it's cool if the store is closed when I arrive. Not everyone takes note of what rolls past as they move along the roads of their daily travels. For me the trees and rivers, incredible skies at dawn and dusk, and even the people I meet on the way are reward enough. Anything else is just icing on the cupcake.

A Star Danced

My very good friend, Sue, was a dancer and a teacher. She was incredibly gifted. When people speak of her they very often speak in terms of light. "She was a bright light in my day," they say. "She lit up the room when she walked in." There was "a sparkle to her, a twinkle in her eye," a joyous quality that eludes us without these references to sunshine and starlight. And often, in these recent days as I've talked to friends, the phrase is repeated: a light has gone out in the world. A bright light, people say with sadness, is extinguished, gone, forever lost to darkness.

Sue did sparkle, didn't she? It is the measure of our love for her and the force of her personality that this word is so strongly identified with a woman who seemed, over the years, to change very little. Her hair was always a cap of gleaming curls. Her skin scrubbed fresh and kissed with freckles. Her blue eyes always full of winking, shining merriment.

Where was this darkness that claimed her? How could we have missed it? How could anyone so bright, so full of laughter and good wishes for her world, be surrounded by something so insidious and harmful without warning signs, bells, whistles, glaring flashes of ominous danger?

None of us know. Perhaps Sandy, her love and dearest companion, has a greater sense of the quiet places in Sue that none of us knew. We will certainly need to be there for Sandy as she faces life in a dimmer place. We certainly owe her our gratitude for being the person who acknowledged Sue's darkness, embraced it, and loved it as part of the person we did not know as well as we thought. This is true love, the difficult kind, that loves not just the brilliant facets of a soul where candlelight glances over them, but loves the deep and nuanced shades, too. What a great comfort it is to know Sue had such a rich and precious gift in her time with us.

In these past weeks, long days filled with reflection since I heard of Sue's death, I've thought almost constantly of those bright words, those oft invoked images and phrases. I've thought about stars. Great, distant balls of riotous fire. Stars twinkle because the Earth's atmosphere causes refractions when the light passes through varying densities. Terribly scientific, but it's interesting... the starlight bends and scatters, so the star twinkles. Those dazzling bits of winking beauty we see each night are only visible because of the darkness. They are growing ever distant, hurtling away from their birthplace at astonishing speed.

Perhaps the metaphor, though we may not realize it, is more apt than we imagined. The darkness was always there, throwing Sue's sparkling magic into brilliant flashes for us to see. We focused on the light. It's human nature to do so. And like those stars rushing off to places none of us can imagine, beyond our sight, past the place where our small position in the greater scheme of all that flows outward from the first moment of creation, Sue is rushing off to someplace else. She didn't have an easy journey, this shimmering sister of ours. She left her home and had to find her own place in a world resistant to who she was, the essence of her spirit. So people saw her through the filter of their own experience, bent the light, scattered it, made it something they could accept as it rushed away from narrow gazes.

Sue and I used to absolutely wallow in good Shakespearean theater. Well, we wallowed in the bad stuff, too. If nothing else it made us laugh, and laughter so often seemed to be her default position. In those wonderful lines, timeless turns of phrase that move generations beyond the life of an Elizabethan poet and playwright, there are astonishing glimpses of truth. One of Sue's favorite plays is my own favorite as well. I find these lines keep running through my head. In Much Ado About Nothing, Don Pedro teases Beatrice, that most laughing and merry of ladies:

Don Pedro: Your silence most offends me, and to be merry best becomes you for out o' question you were born in a merry hour.

And she responds in a rare sober moment:

Beatrice: No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born.

There's our Sue. Born into a world that didn't completely understand her. Some could never accept her. Orphaned by intolerance, Sue still managed to shine against the darkness, sparkle in spite of a journey that was, though we did not know it then, speeding her away from us in a stunning, silent rush. She touched us with her light. We were fascinated by her twinkle and shine. Sue was born into a place that had to bend her, tip her, reshape her to see her beauty. She came from a place of sadness, darkness, and rejection. But a star danced, and she was born.

Her light has not gone out. Never say so, friends. She's rushing, racing, flying onward past the farthest reaches of our vision, but her star is still dancing. Sue shines on, and always will, in a place none of us can follow for now. But we can watch the skies, and catch glimpses of her brilliance still lighting small parts of the sky.

I look to the skies for your light, Sue. I look to your example of brightness and joy, and I take comfort in the gleam of the stars that have called you, much too soon, home.