Roses and Rain

  I have been reading the last book of the Elliot family trilogy, The Heart of the Family by Elizabeth Goudge and the opening chapters were hard, so hard, to read.    That morning they were hard to read though I've never noted before they were so difficult.   But Saturday morning they were hard and heavy and I could have wept for the characters whose souls were tortured by nerves and near madness and deep despair.   It brought back too clearly the days when I lived in those dark places and couldn't see enough light to find even a tiny crack to reassure me that light existed.

Perhaps too it was brought on by the knowledge that some I love dearly are suffering at the moment, in their own dark places.   And the knowledge that there are others whom I don't know, struggling and straining, attempting to hold on to the very last bits of what remains of sanity and salvation and feeling they shall never find their way out of the dark deep pits where they are currently residing overwhelmed me.

Does this seem incongruous with a morning spent sitting in the sunshine, admiring the wealth of roses that are mine only in this season?   It is not incongruous.    That warming sun, the green and blue gloriousness of the day, the abundance of rose bloom, only served to point up still further how deep the darkness was.  I lived there.  I longed to die there.  The contrast between the brilliant light and the darkness is why so many who have mental health issues and depression will choose to die in this season.   Yes, truly, more will choose to take their lives in this season, the season known for renewal and new growth, than in any other this year.   It is proven fact, with statistics to back it and it makes me ache so each year knowing that others are battling along, trying so hard and some lose.   They lose heart, they lose reason, they lose to the battle of self-loathing, and they are tired.  Hopelessness in the face of hope is the saddest thing there is.

I put the book down.  I stopped where I was, and I grabbed hold of my blessings of which there are many and I thanked God I was not where I had been.   I swallowed the aching lumps in my throat, and I got up to fill my head and hands with things to do and thoughts of the day ahead because I just could not deal with it, the knowledge of the wealth of sorrow hanging about me, past and present.   

Later in the week, I kept thinking of my days of struggling.  I apologized to my daughter Amie during our last call, for my failures, but I was wrong.  I apologized for the things I'd done wrong not knowing I was wrong.  What I ought to have apologized for, what I owe Sam an apology for, are the things I did wrong knowing full well I was wrong.   

I want to tell them I'm sorry for the days I put my mental woes ahead of their needs.  I want to say I'm sorry for the small ways I neglected their care, for the days I came in and locked the bedroom door and screeched at them to go away.   I want to say I'm sorry for those times they watched me take the six pack of beer to my room and come out with empty bottles and left them alone with the TV.   I'm sorry for choosing numbness over honest feeling.  I'm sorry for making them less important than the ways I felt I could numb myself enough.   Busyness with volunteering and busyness with friends and even just being alone for hours on end in the room next to them.  Those were choices I made, consciously and without a thought of the impact it might have upon them.  Not caring enough to care for them first.

I could excuse it away. I could own that I felt such a failure already that it seemed an inconsequential thing to fail them in one more way.  It would be truth.  But there were enough ways to fail them that I was so very unaware of, and why heap on the ways in which I knew I was a failure?

And yet redemption comes.  It does come if we choose to hang on long enough.   There was a day, after the marriage broke and the drunk driver hit me and I'd been away for months, that everything was redeemed.  We finally had a home the three of us, we were a family once more.   It had been raining and there before us on our way home was the most beautiful rainbow in the sky.  

One of the children asked, "Is there really a pot of gold at the end?"  I remember saying "Well, let's find out..." and we went down the road riding towards that rainbow instead of going home to do homework and make supper.  We came to one end of the thing in a field.  We could see it there just before us.  There was no pot of gold but there was another side.  Perhaps the gold was there...  We decided to find the other end and we drove for miles and miles trying to get to the other side before it disappeared.  We never did find the other end.  After traveling miles, we turned back towards home. We got home after dark that night.  We had soup and grilled cheese, and the kids went to bed without a bath or doing homework, but it was all right.  It was.

Something wonderful happened to us, the three of us, that day, as we chased that rainbow.  It was as though somehow without saying a word I was making a promise to them.  And without their saying a word they accepted my promise as a good one, without pointing out how many broken ones were behind us.  We made a covenant between us that we would go on and forget what was behind us.  We'd take the fresh start and move ahead.

I still had bouts of depression and dark days, but their care was my first concern.  They never again saw me take comfort in a bottle or spending long hours away from home showing others what a great volunteer I was or ignoring them while I spent hours and hours with friends.    I wasn't a perfect parent.  We can't any of us be.  We will fail in hundreds of little ways because we don't have experience to do better until after we see our mistakes, but I never again failed them in the old ways.  I held the demon darkness at bay until they were gone to their father on weekends and then I might well have stayed in bed weeping all weekend long, but when they came in Sunday evening, I was present as a parent once more.  They never again saw me shut the door to keep company with beer or wine while they fended for themselves.   They never again had to wonder if they'd done something wrong to make me act the way I did.  

And I suppose that's what I really want to apologize to them for.  To say "If I made you feel it was your fault it wasn't.  It was me.  It was only about me."  I'd tell them I was sorry I put my own mental health issues ahead of what theirs might be.  I'd tell them it's okay to fail their kids in small ways, but I'd also say, "Please....Let the children know NOW that it's you and not them when you're having a bad season.  Meet their needs first and fall apart after they are in bed...even send them to bed early if need be but let them know, it's not something they did.  It's just that mommy/daddy is hurting inside right now."  That's what I'd say.

How did I survive?  Why did I?  Why did I keep going on when all I wanted was to just not be any more?  How did I make it through those last final days before I could make a promise once more and keep it?

One of those weird things that happen once or twice in a lifetime is why.  You see, I'd made another promise, when I was 16.  I went to sleep filled with despair and I remember my last prayer that night was "God please just let me die."   I had a dream.  

I stood before a map on a table, the sort you see in those war movies from WWII where everyone is standing about the maps of the battlefields.   I stood looking down at this map and was filled with awe.  I remember looking up at the people about me, no one I knew, all dressed the same and I asked, "Is this really how my life will turn out?"   One stood before me and said "Yes.  But tonight, you have the choice.  Live or die."   I gazed a few minutes longer at the map and I remember saying slowly "Then I choose to live."  And just like that it was all gone, the map, the people, the room.  I was back in my own room staring at the dark ceiling (Lord, how many times over the years have I found myself doing the same, staring at the dark ceiling of my room?), committed to life, promising to live.

Somehow, I kept that promise.  I'd plan my death, how I'd kill myself and sometimes I'd go far enough to equip myself with the means.  I'd imagine the relief of letting go of life and floating into whatever lay beyond, much as one floated on a pool of water.   But somehow, that dream always reasserted itself in my mind.  "You promised...." I'd hear whispered somewhere in the back of my mind and I'd nod.  I'd promised.  Somehow, I believed the promise that had been made to me, even though it was many years before I'd feel I'd finally reached the promised life.  You see the memory of what I'd felt in seeing my life mapped out before me, though I couldn't tell you one single thing that was there even half a second after I'd dreamed, somehow that memory of something wonderful ahead, sustained me.  I would resolve all over again to choose life and I'd go on until hope faltered and stumbled and fell face down and then I'd promise all over again.

Now, years after the depression, free of that horrible prison in which I dwelt for too long, there will come a threat, a whisper from the enemy.  "Why bother?  It is hard to live...  Just die..." and I laugh, literally laugh in his face and say, "Oh no!  Not yet...I want to see this thing all the way through..."

That was me.   My brother couldn't see that promise, perhaps he never heard it.  Nor did a lovely friend.  Or my nephew...

Recently though I've had another thought.  I have to stop denying other's mental health struggles.  I see them.  I acknowledge them.  John doesn't 'believe in' depression.  That's not to say he's never struggled with it.  I lived with him through two different periods when depression won him.  He came out of it, but he still denies that others suffer more deeply, can't see the way out as he did.  I've been compliant and kept quiet even though he knows my back history.  But lately, I've spoken up.    I'm speaking up.  

There is such a thing as mental illness.  No one chooses it.  Some fight hard against it and still have bad spells to be got through.  They take the pills. They go to therapy.  They struggle through the bad spells and when it's over they pick up life and get on with it all over again.  But now and then there is damage they can't undo.   I know this to be truth.  I've seen it first-hand.

All I can say is what I've said.  Apologize to those you've harmed and vow to do better by them.  And be better.   Yes, it's hard to schedule a breakdown.  I get that.   And yet, I know firsthand that you can...It takes a lot of strength to wait until bedtime or to make it through a morning until the school bell has rung.   But it can be done.   It's hard not to want to self-medicate with alcohol or drugs or sex or compulsive eating and bingeing.   But you can do it.  I know you can do it.  You've held on so hard for so long.  I can see you have it in you to keep on without leaning on those faulty crutches that make you fall to your lowest moments when you've employed them.  You're strong.  You've been strong all along.  That's why you keep fighting your way clear through time and time again.  

But we won't end here on the dark side of the day.  We'll go back to the sunshine shall we and let it warm us through.  We'll take deep breaths of the fragrant air and glory in the sound of leaves that sound so fluid and lovely, like waves on a shore.   We'll breathe in peace and breathe out prayers that all of the sorrowing ones will find their way.