Our Parents – Our Depression

If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in the moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people – Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk

Like all parents, my mom and dad were flawed people – as I am.  Yet, they were something more than that.  

I’ve struggled to understand them much of my adult life; maybe more so now that they’re both gone.  The nineteenth century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote: “The first forty years of life furnish the text, while the remaining thirty supply the commentary.”  Maybe it isn’t till midlife that we really work hard to interpret the stories of our past.  I believe there’s a strong urge in all of us to make a comprehensible story of one’s life at this juncture. And our parents are a large part of that tale.

The author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, a WWII veteran like my dad, wrote:

“The most important thing I learned was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral.  All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. It’s just an illusion we have here on earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”

Now that I’m 50, I still wonder what role mom and dad played in my depression.  Looking at the facts, I guess it’s all too obvious: drinking and mental health issues on both sides of the fence.  In my most self-absorbed moments, I blame them and feel justified in doing so.  In brighter moments of lucidity, I see that they, like me, were somebody’s children once.  They didn’t start out in life the way they ended up – nobody does.  They were, in a real sense, victims.  This fact doesn’t excuse what happened; the real pain they inflicted on their children. But it does help me to understand their plights in life.  And with that understanding comes some measure of peace, a peace of heart.

Turning the pages to our Past 

Jonathan Frazen, author of the best-selling book Freedom about a family that struggles with depression, writes:

“Depression, when it’s clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it’s known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there’s a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you’re depressed, you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don’t want to feel bad anymore.”

Here’s Jonathan Frazen talking about his novel on PBS:

How much of our life is determined by our familial past?  How much of it is spun by choices we make apart from that past?  Apart from what happened to us at the hands of parents, can we really change?  I believe that shifting through our past helps us to become “unstuck.” And after all, depression is about being stuck.  We can’t go forward, if we can’t go backwards and to see the truth of about past.

There are some things we can change and some we can’t.  We can’t change our genetics and scientists now know that the genes we inherit play a significant role in our vulnerability to depression. There is a gene that regulates how much of a chemical called serotonin is produced. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter.  The amount of serotonin that flows to your brain influences your mood, and emotional state.  Those whose serotonin transporters included a gene that was shorter than would be typically expected at a certain point had a harder time bouncing back after experiencing a stress event. Chronic stress and anxiety, as I’ve written about before, have a strong correlation to a vulnerability to clinical depression.

This bit of news makes me want to know my ancestors, these ghosts of my past.  These folks and I have something in common: irksome chromosomes that could flip off the happy switch in our brains from time to time.

I heard on National Public Radio that there have been 60 generations that have lived and died since the time of Jesus.  Since the extent of my knowledge about my family only goes back, at best, 100 years to the time of the birth of my grandparents, that leaves me about fifty-eight generations or 1900 years of emotional and genetic history unaccounted for.  I wish there was some kind of recorded history of their lives because I am a continuation of them even as my daughter is of me.

Dad’s Story

Dad was born in Buffalo in 1926, the oldest of five born to immigrants from Poland.  I never met my grandparents, but from family lore I’ve learned that they were tough people who lived even tougher lives: brute physical labor for their daily staple of meat and potatoes, playing pinochle while plumes of cigarette smoke wafted up to the ceiling and crates of cheap booze on the weekends. If you looked crossways at them, they’d likely belt you in the mouth.

Alcohol played a big role my family’s drama through the generations.  Sometimes they drank at home, but more often in what my grandma called “Gin mills.”  Men would cash their checks in these Polish joints, throw their money on long wooden bars sip draught beer as they talked about all the scraps they’d been in that week just trying to get along in life.

My dad grew up in this world.  At 17, he went off to fight in the Pacific theater against the Japanese.  War must have deeply affected him, as it does all young men.  Robert E. Lee, writing of his experiences in the Civil War, wrote his wife in 1864:

“What a cruel thing is war; to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors and to devastate the fair face of the earth.”

Last year, I read a  New York Times review of a book out about J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye.  The article notes that Salinger, who served in the infantry during WWII in Europe, witnessed a lot of death and mayhem and struggled with depression his whole life: 

“Salinger’s experiences during WWII heightened his sense of alienation.  The war left him with deep psychological scars, branding ‘every aspect’ of his personality and reverberating through his writings.  Salinger had suffered from depression for years, perhaps throughout his entire life, and was at times afflicted by episodes so intense that he could not relate to others.”

Ultimately, he stopped publishing, moved into a cabin in rural Connecticut and practiced Yoga and Zen meditation.

Dad clearly suffered from undiagnosed depression and PTSD, something that would, like Salinger, haunt him for the rest of his life.  But war can’t explain all misery, can’t explain the storms that would rage in his head.  His younger brother Roman, also a war veteran, became an alcoholic.  Dad’s younger sister suffered from depression and been treated for it with medication suggesting a possible genetic propensity in our family for the illness. 

Mom’s Story

Mom, like dad, was also part of WWII generation. Her older brother Joe went off to war in the Pacific for three years.  As fate would have it, he met my future Dad aboard a ship in the Philippines and said, “If we ever get the hell out of this shithole, I’ve got this cute, blonde sister back in Buffalo.” They survived, my parents met, fell in love and married.

Mom had an alcoholic father, also an immigrant from Poland.  She recalled being asked by her mother to go find her dad on a regular basis when he didn’t return home after work.  Often, during the harsh Buffalo winters, she would find him passed out in a snow bank.  The only intimate moments she remembered sharing with him was when for her eighth birthday he took her to a Shirley Temple movie and bought her candy.

Mom and dad quickly had three kids.  Things went well the first ten years of their marriage, but the wheels began to fall off from there on out: dad drank too much, became a gambler, womanized and had unpredictable outbursts of high octane rage.  Mom collapsed back into herself and never really recovered.  She began to eat a lot, added lots of pounds to her slender frame and watched T.V. all the time.  Maybe the dopey sitcom narratives sliced through the quiet pain my mom carried – all the time – all of her life.

Dad died 32 years ago at the age of 56 (I was 19) from too much drinking and smoking. He died sort of unrepentant, never saying he was sorry for anything.  But, in my own mind at least, I think he was sorry.  I think he just couldn’t bring himself to say it because of the enormity of his sins.  But I have learned to forgive him, this enemy of my childhood who I had wished as a boy that he would just die.  The great poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote:

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

As for my mom, well, she died almost two years ago at the age of 82 of brain cancer.  I devoted a  blog to her passing, but didn’t say just how difficult it was to really know mom. She was always somehow distant, like a star in the sky. She never had any friends, her family was her circle. She loved us, but often did not connect with her children; maybe because she had never been cherished as a child.  She did, after all was said and done, the best she could and, in this sense, was so much easier to forgive and let go of than dad.

Walter – Second Edition

Walter, my oldest brother at age 59 and dad’s namesake, and I were walking back the other night to the parking lot after our hometown hockey team, the Buffalo Sabres, had taken a real shellacking.  I asked him in the frosty, hidden darkness where men – – if they do at all – – share a sliver of their true inner lives: “Do you ever think of dad and what did he meant to you?” He replied, after a few huffing breaths: “Not really, just what a real asshole he was.” 

My brother has never been in therapy, never taken antidepressants.  But he had heroically forged ahead “carving out a living” as he was prone to say.  Yet, I couldn’t help think about the profound effect dad’s abuse had had on him and my other three siblings.  I wonder if he sometimes thinks about it at night while lying in bed with the windows cracked open on a hot summer’s night.  Does he wonder why he can’t stop feeling bad about himself? Why he doesn’t feel more confidence?  And the toughest part of it all, the thing that keeps me up at night when I think of my burly, big-hearted brother, is that he probably blames himself for all of these feekings as adult children of alcoholics are prone to do.

My Coming Around

As for me, a real veteran of therapy and antidepressant medications, I know all too well that my parents are still tangled up with me long after their deaths.   My therapist once said that I had to work out the long buried grief of never having had the parents I needed.  Over the years, I have done a lot of grieving for the childhood I didn’t have. Yet, as I was to learn, it wasn’t only my grief about my childhood troubles that I was to deal with, but for my parents as well.  For the loss of their innocence, their difficult childhoods and all that they could have been.

Despite the pain in my family, there was love; fractured though it may have been. As he aged, I sensed that my dad knew that too much had gone wrong that he couldn’t fix.  But in small gestures here and there, he showed affection and love.  As my mom’s wake last May, I was privileged to give the eulogy.  What I said was my mom’s defining quality wasn’t success, intelligence or gardening, but kindness – that this is where she planted her flowers that continue to grow in the hearts of her children and grandchildren.  And what a gift that is.  One that’s always in bloom.

My parents were both hopeless in their own ways.  They were dealt a crummy hand in life.  They were born with certain genes, into a family and time in history that they didn’t choose.  The difference between them and me, the blessing that came out of my depression that didn’t for them, was that my pain forced me to finally confront my wounds and work hard to heal them – an ongoing project for us all.  It forced me to examine the long unexamined within me.  It gave me a choice: I could continue to live out my parents damaged views of life or embark on my own journey and discover what was real and true for me.

While it is true that none of us can avoid the pains and difficulties that come from living on this planet, what modulates the pain is love — pure and simple.  Andrew Solomon, who has suffered from depression for much of his adult life, captured this in his book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression:

“Depression is a flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of despair. When it comes, it degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection.  It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself.  Love, though it is no prophylactic against depression, is what cushions the mind and protects it from itself.”

In the end, love really is the only thing that saves anybody.

Rumination in the Legal Profession

There’s always a lot going on in my head.

But then again, there’s a lot of racket coming from yours too.

Lawyers think for a living, after all.  There’s always the mental hum of marshaling the evidence, resolving conflicting LexisNexis opinions or assessing the climatic shifts in office politics and how it affects the pecking order.  As advocates, we give a lot of deliberation to turning our analysis into persuasive locution. Lincoln, reflecting on his life as a trial lawyer, wrote, “When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two thirds of the time thinking what they want to hear and one third thinking about what I want to say.”

For lawyers with depression, there’s another kind of inner buzz.  It’s called rumination.

We might be tempted to think of rumination as a form of worry, a rehashing of all the shit that can go wrong. But, it’s actually not.  Worry focuses on potential bad events in the future.

Rumination, a cousin of fretful forecasting, is similar to worry except it focuses on bad feelings and experiences from the past. 

According to book The Mindful Way through Depression,

“When we ruminate, we become fruitlessly preoccupied with the fact that we are unhappy and with the causes, meanings, and consequences of our unhappiness.  Research has repeatedly shown that if we have tended to react to our sadness or depressed moods in these ways in the past, then we are likely to find the same strategy volunteering to ‘help’ again and again when our moods start to slide.  And it will have the same effect: we’ll get stuck in the very mood from which we are trying to escape.  As a consequence, we are at even higher risk of experiencing repeated bouts of unhappiness.”

In the First Person

I need a lot of time to get going in the morning – slurps of java, (the Starbucks “bold blend” varnish remover if I need a “stiff drink”) time to read the morning news, a sliver of time to plan my day  — and sometimes, ruminate. When ruminating, it’s as if pieces of my past are painted on those little squares of a Rubik’s cube that I’m endlessly manipulating  to solve.

Even though this style of thinking ends up making me feels crummy, in varying degrees, I like to ruminate. It some odd way, it seems to temporarily relieve me of any free-floating anxiety I might be experiencing.

Melissa Kirk writes,

“It feels good to ruminate.  Why is this? Two things happen to me when I’m dwelling on a problem.  The dwelling seems to stop the immediate pain or distress, the way rubbing a sore muscle can relieve the soreness temporarily, until you stop rubbing.  Also, I feel like, when I’m ruminating, that I’m acting on the problem of trying to solve it.  Rumination, then gives us the sense of taking action towards a situation that is distressing us, which relieves the distress in the short-term.”

This type of “mind rub” also skews the facts: I ignore the positive side of those past events and accentuate the negative.  Indeed it is rumination’s focus on the negative that gives it its solution-less quality.

We usually don’t ruminate when we’re happy.  When life is good, we savor everyday plentitudes of grace that have fallen on us whether earned or not.  This type of looking back is really reflection, not rumination.  When we reflect, we appreciate and learn from our past; no need to chomp on the bitter morsels of yesterday.   Interesting aside: the origins of the word “ruminate” come from the Latin word to describe the process in which cows chew and regurgitate their food, or “cud,” over and over again – yummy! 

We chew on our thoughts when we’re upset or in some kind of emotional pain or funk.  Rumination is a way of responding to life that involves repetitively and passively focusing on the symptoms of distress, and on its possible causes and consequences.   This plugs into depression because depression is passive.  We feel scant energy and incapable of taking action when in a melancholic ditch.

According to The Mindful Way through Depression,

“We ruminate because we believe it will help us overcome the unhappiness of depression.  We believe that not doing it will make our condition worse and worse.  We ruminate when we feel low because we believe that it will reveal a way to solve our problems.  But research shows that it does exactly the opposite: our ability to solve problems actually deteriorates markedly during rumination.  All of the evidence seems to point to the stark truth that rumination is part of the problem, not part of the solution.”

According to research done by Susan Nolen- Hoeksema, Ph.D., many ruminators negative outlook hurts their problem-solving ability. According to her research, they often struggle to find good solutions to hypothetical problems.  For example, if a friend is avoiding them, they might say, “Well, I guess I’ll just avoid them too.” Even when a person is prone to rumination comes up with a potential solution to a significant problem the rumination itself may induce a level of uncertainty and immobilization that makes it hard for them to move forward. Such depressive rumination most often occurs in women as a reaction to sadness.  Men, by comparison, more often focus on their emotions when they’re angry, rather than sad.

Percolations in the Brain

According to a recent Stanford study by Sian Beilock, Ph.D., changes were discovered in the brains of depression sufferers when ruminating.   MRI’s were taken of two separate groups: those with and those without depression.  Each group was separately prompted with various techniques to promote ruminative thinking. The MRI’s of people’s heads disclosed that a lot is going on in our brains when we are ruminating. 

According to an article in Montior magazine commenting upon Beilock’s work:

“People with major depression had greater activation than controls during the rumination task in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. Thought to be involved in mood regulation, the anterior cingulate cortex may be infusing more emotion into the depressed individual’s ruminations than controls.  Depressed individuals also had greater activation in the amygdala, that almond shaped region deep in the brain that is a major player in negative emotional reactions.  Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, people with depression showed greater activation in the prefrontal cortex, where our working memory (a.k.a. cognitive horsepower) is housed.  If depressed individuals spend a lot more of this neural real estate trying to regulate their thinking, they may have less brain power left over to do other important thinking and reasoning tasks.  This may explain the cognitive deficits depressed folks sometimes show.” 

Unplugging From Rumination

Here are some thoughts about how to deal with rumination.

First, need to learn that rumination doesn’t solve our problems – it insidiously perpetuates them.  “We can’t,” wrote Albert Einstein, “solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”  We can’t solve our depression by using the same ruminative thinking habits that may have caused it to begin with.

Second, we need to see why, if it doesn’t work, we keep doing it.  We do so because it tricks us into thinking we are actually being productive and briefly reduces our anxiety.

Third, once we have seen that it doesn’t work and why we keep doing it, we need to make small behavioral steps and resolutions to change it.  Yet, as Dr. O’Connor says, “We aren’t to blame for our depression.   But, we are responsible for getting better.”  Responsibility implies action, not just good intentions.

Depressives often hit a wall in their recovery when asked to change their thinking and/or behavior: they’re either too tired, frozen or can’t get out of their own way.  Often, they are fatalistic:  “The way I see the world is just the way the world is and my life is – screwed up.” They feel that life has dealt them a bad hand and try to solve unsolvable problems:  “What did I do to deserve depression?  Why can’t I ever get things done?”  These thoughts just produce paralysis, not productive solutions.

Of course, there’s an element of truth to many of our ruminations.  If there weren’t so, we wouldn’t endlessly cudgel ourselves over the head because we would quickly see just how silly ruminating really is.  For example, would any of us ruminate about why we didn’t  become a circus clown?  We don’t because there’s not a scintilla of evidence in our past that we ever wanted to be a clown or had the opportunity to do so. 

Rumination is more clever and seductive than that.   The ruminative habit compels us to churn away at half-truths or things that actually did happen.   For example, “why were my parents so screwed up?” Or “why did they leave me a legacy of depression or anxiety?”  There’s truth in these questions.  My parents were screwed up.  My parents did leave me a legacy of depression.

It’s been written that the truth will set us free.  The problem here isn’t with the truth, it’s what we do with it.  Ruminators run with it in a destructive way when they cycle through these issues over and over again with no resolution in sight.  With regard to our parents painful legacy for many of us, is there any answer that would ever satisfy us?

There is tragedy in this world, bad things do happen to good people and life is often unfair.  Yet, as Helen Keller once wrote, “The world is full of suffering.  But, it’s also full of the overcoming of it.” THAT is reality too.  So, when we sit down to eat our daily fare of our thoughts and meanderings that make up our days, we might want to pick from the upbeat side of the menu. 

And not chew on our food too much.

The Trouble With Walter

If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in the moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people – Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk

Like all parents, my mom and dad were flawed people – as I am.  Yet, they were something more than that.  

I’ve struggled to understand them much of my adult life; maybe more so now that they’re both gone.  The nineteenth century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote: “The first forty years of life furnish the text, while the remaining thirty supply the commentary.”  Maybe it isn’t till midlife that we really work hard to interpret the stories of our past.  I believe there’s a strong urge in all of us to make a comprehensible story of one’s life at this juncture. And our parents are a large part of that tale.

The author of “Slaughterhouse-Five“, Kurt Vonnegut, a WWII veteran like my dad, wrote:

“The most important thing I learned was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral.  All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. It’s just an illusion we have here on earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”

Now on the doorsteps of 50, I still wonder what role mom and dad played in my depression.  Looking at the facts, I guess it’s all too obvious: drinking and mental health issues on both sides of the fence.  In my most self-absorbed moments, I blame them and feel justified in doing so.  In brighter moments of lucidity, I see that they, like me, were somebody’s children once.  They didn’t start out in life the way they ended up – nobody does.  They were, in a real sense, victims.  This fact doesn’t excuse what happened; the real pain they inflicted on their children. But it does help me to understand their plights in life.  And with that understanding comes some measure of peace, a peace of heart.

Turning the pages to our Past 

Jonathan Frazen, author of the best-selling book “Freedom” about a family that struggles with depression, writes:

“Depression, when it’s clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it’s known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there’s a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you’re depressed, you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don’t want to feel bad anymore.”

Here’s Jonathan Frazen talking about his novel on PBS:

How much of our life is determined by our familial past?  How much of it is spun by choices we make apart from that past?  Apart from what happened to us at the hands of parents, can we really change?  I believe that shifting through our past helps us to become “unstuck.” And after all, depression is about being stuck.  We can’t go forward, if we can’t go backwards and to see the truth of about past.

There are some things we can change and some we can’t.  We can’t change our genetics and scientists now know that the genes we inherit play a significant role in our vulnerability to depression. There is a gene that regulates how much of a chemical called serotonin is produced. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter.  The amount of serotonin that flows to your brain influences your mood, and emotional state.  Those whose serotonin transporters included a gene that was shorter than would be typically expected at a certain point had a harder time bouncing back after experiencing a stress event. Chronic stress and anxiety, as I’ve written about before, have a strong correlation to a vulnerability to clinical depression.

This bit of news makes me want to know my ancestors, these ghosts of my past.  These folks and I have something in common: irksome chromosomes that could flip off the happy switch in our brains from time to time.

I heard on National Public Radio that there have been 60 generations that have lived and died since the time of Jesus.  Since the extent of my knowledge about my family only goes back, at best, 100 years to the time of the birth of my grandparents, that leaves me about fifty-eight generations or 1900 years of emotional and genetic history unaccounted for.  I wish there was some kind of recorded history of their lives because I am a continuation of them even as my daughter is of me.

Dad’s Story

Dad was born in Buffalo in 1926, the oldest of five born to immigrants from Poland.  I never met my grandparents, but from family lore I’ve learned that they were tough people who lived even tougher lives: brute physical labor for their daily staple of meat and potatoes, playing pinochle while plumes of cigarette smoke wafted up to the ceiling and crates of cheap booze on the weekends. If you looked crossways at them, they’d likely belt you in the mouth.

Alcohol played a big role my family’s drama through the generations.  Sometimes they drank at home, but more often in what my grandma called “Gin mills.”  Men would cash their checks in these Polish joints, throw their money on long wooden bars sip draught beer as they talked about all the scraps they’d been in that week just trying to get along in life.

My dad grew up in this world.  At 17, he went off to fight in the Pacific theater against the Japanese.  War must have deeply affected him, as it does all young men.  Robert E. Lee, writing of his experiences in the Civil War, wrote his wife in 1864:

“What a cruel thing is war; to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors and to devastate the fair face of the earth.”

In today’s New York Times, there’s a review of a new book out about J.D. Salinger author of “The Catcher in the Rye.”  The article notes that Salinger, who served in the infantry during WWII in Europe, witnessed a lot of death and mayhem and struggled with depression his whole life: 

“Salinger’s experiences during WWII heightened his sense of alienation.  The war left him with deep psychological scars, branding ‘every aspect’ of his personality and reverberating through his writings.  Salinger had suffered from depression for years, perhaps throughout his entire life, and was at times afflicted by episodes so intense that he could not relate to others.”

Ultimately, he stopped publishing, moved into a cabin in rural Connecticut and practiced Yoga and Zen meditation.

Dad clearly suffered from undiagnosed depression and PTSD, something that would, like Salinger, haunt him for the rest of his life.  But war can’t explain all misery, can’t explain the storms that would rage in his head.  His younger brother Roman, also a war veteran, became an alcoholic.  Dad’s younger sister suffered from depression and been treated for it with medication suggesting a possible genetic propensity in our family for the illness. 

Mom’s Story

Mom, like dad, was also part of WWII generation. Her older brother Joe went off to war in the Pacific for three years.  As fate would have it, he met my future Dad aboard a ship in the Philippines and said, “If we ever get the hell out of this shithole, I’ve got this cute, blonde sister back in Buffalo.” They survived, my parents met, fell in love and married.

Mom had an alcoholic father, also an immigrant from Poland.  She recalled being asked by her mother to go find her dad on a regular basis when he didn’t return home after work.  Often, during the harsh Buffalo winters, she would find him passed out in a snow bank.  The only intimate moments she remembered sharing with him was when for her eighth birthday he took her to a Shirley Temple movie and bought her candy.

Mom and dad quickly had three kids.  Things went well the first ten years of their marriage, but the wheels began to fall off from there on out: dad drank too much, became a gambler, womanized and had unpredictable outbursts of high octane rage.  Mom collapsed back into herself and never really recovered.  She began to eat a lot, added lots of pounds to her slender frame and watched T.V. all the time.  Maybe the dopey sitcom narratives sliced through the quiet pain my mom carried – all the time – all of her life.

Dad died 32 years ago at the age of 56 (I was 19) from too much drinking and smoking. He died sort of unrepentant, never saying he was sorry for anything.  But, in my own mind at least, I think he was sorry.  I think he just couldn’t bring himself to say it because of the enormity of his sins.  But I have learned to forgive him, this enemy of my childhood who I had wished as a boy that he would just die.  The great poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote:

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

As for my mom, well, she died last May at the age of 82 of brain cancer.  I wrote about her death in a recent blog, but I didn’t say just how difficult it was to really know mom. She was always somehow distant, like a star in the sky. She never had any friends, her family was her circle. She loved us, but often did not connect with her children; maybe because she had never been cherished as a child.  She did, after all was said and done, the best she could and, in this sense, was so much easier to forgive and let go of than dad.

Walter – Second Edition

Walter, my oldest brother at age 59 and dad’s namesake, and I were walking back the other night to the parking lot after our hometown hockey team, the Buffalo Sabres, had taken a real shellacking.  I asked him in the frosty, hidden darkness where men – – if they do at all – – share a sliver of their true inner lives: “Do you ever think of dad and what did he meant to you?” He replied, after a few huffing breaths: “Not really, just what a real asshole he was.” 

My brother has never been in therapy, never taken antidepressants.  But he had heroically forged ahead “carving out a living” as he was prone to say.  Yet, I couldn’t help think about the profound effect dad’s abuse had had on him and my other three siblings.  I wonder if he sometimes thinks about it at night while lying in bed with the windows cracked open on a hot summer’s night.  Does he wonder why he can’t stop feeling bad about himself? Why he doesn’t feel more confidence?  And the toughest part of it all, the thing that keeps me up at night when I think of my burly, big-hearted brother, is that he probably blames himself for all of these feekings as adult children of alcoholics are prone to do.

My Coming Around

As for me, a real veteran of therapy and antidepressant medications, I know all too well that my parents are still tangled up with me long after their deaths.   My therapist once said that I had to work out the long buried grief of never having had the parents I needed.  Over the years, I have done a lot of grieving for the childhood I didn’t have. Yet, as I was to learn, it wasn’t only my grief about my childhood troubles that I was to deal with, but for my parents as well.  For the loss of their innocence, their difficult childhoods and all that they could have been.

Despite the pain in my family, there was love; fractured though it may have been. As he aged, I sensed that my dad knew that too much had gone wrong that he couldn’t fix.  But in small gestures here and there, he showed affection and love.  As my mom’s wake last May, I was privileged to give the eulogy.  What I said was my mom’s defining quality wasn’t success, intelligence or gardening, but kindness – that this is where she planted her flowers that continue to grow in the hearts of her children and grandchildren.  And what a gift that is.  One that’s always in bloom.

My parents were both hopeless in their own ways.  They were dealt a crummy hand in life.  They were born with certain genes, into a family and time in history that they didn’t choose.  The difference between them and me, the blessing that came out of my depression that didn’t for them, was that my pain forced me to finally confront my wounds and work hard to heal them – an ongoing project for us all.  It forced me to examine the long unexamined within me.  It gave me a choice: I could continue to live out my parents damaged views of life or embark on my own journey and discover what was real and true for me.

While it is true that none of us can avoid the pains and difficulties that come from living on this planet, what modulates the pain is love — pure and simple.  Andrew Solomon, who has suffered from depression for much of his adult life, captured this in his book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression:

“Depression is a flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of despair. When it comes, it degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection.  It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself.  Love, though it is no prophylactic against depression, is what cushions the mind and protects it from itself.”

In the end, love really is the only thing that saves anybody.