It is a club. The membership is exclusive and yet there are many of us. The criteria to join is involuntarily met and the cost is very high. It is a club that none of us want to be a part of but once the dark shadows block out the possibility of sunlight we have been fully pledged.
Our best hope is that we don’t visit this club very often. In fact, we spend our time trying to avoid entering at all and once we’re in we simply seek the most expedient exit.
If only it were so simple.
The Black Dog of depression has veiled my soul in darkness three times in my life. Once in my late teens, when I had a great job and my first apartment. I covered the windows and laid in my bed day after day unable to function. I had pushed through and pushed through and then my body and my mind simply took me out of commission.
I called no one. I spoke to no one. I had nothing to say and there was no help that they could give me, well intentioned as they were. So, I retreated.
My mom didn’t allow me to live on my solitary island alone. She made her way into my cocoon and refused to listen to my protests. She just kept showing up.
We didn’t speak. There was nothing to say. She would tidy the kitchen, play with the cat and then sit in my living room and crochet in silence. I resented her presence at first. I would lay in my room angry at her for simply being. I dreaded to hear her key in my lock. But it didn’t take long before I anticipated the sound; looked forward to it, even. Sometimes she would run a tub for me. But mostly she demanded nothing from me and I asked nothing of her in return.
Eventually I left the dark, seductive isolation of my bed and would lay on the couch with my head in her lap. I listened to the sound of the wool being released from its tightly bound ball and it being fed through her skinny fingers as she used the hook to knot stitch after stitch.
I still have that afghan. And I have made quite a few of my own trying to emulate her quiet presence as friends and family members heal from whatever ails them.
I don’t remember how long my depression-imposed isolation lasted – probably not for as long as my memory insists it did. But it ended, and I rejoined the world, ready to take it on. Without my mom I still may be in that bed in that apartment on Queenston Road in Stoney Creek.
The second visit from the Black Dog arrived a few years after moving to Calgary. It was circumstantial but was no less insistent on bringing me down. It was just as debilitating as the first time.
My mom had moved out here long before it started, and she lived with us. She knew me well and had battled the darkness before. This time it was kitting. Click. Click. Click.
She was simply present.
And again, she was the life preserver that prevented me from falling deeper and deeper into darkness.
This last fight with the darkness has been harder without her quiet presence. I didn’t realize how much having her heart beat in a rhythm so close to mine helped to put me back in sync with the world. I didn’t realize that her very presence strengthened my own life force enough to climb out of the depths.
I have the most amazing friends who checked in on me and ensured that I didn’t disappear completely. My boys are amazing and I’m grateful for the heartbeats, for the presence and for their life force every day.
But I missed my mother’s quiet company, her quiet insistence that the fog wouldn’t overtake me completely. I made it out but the journey was harder…and longer, because of her absence.
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