I threw in it some dirt

and then rocks and sand.

Followed it with leaves

and patted it with my hand.

It fell in,

down into dark,

and I heard the sounds

of things falling apart.

I shoveled in soil,

then branches and dust,

detritus and trash,

old parts covered in rust.

Things I've seen and used,

all things I knew well,

but nothing new or shiny.

That was the death knell.

The hole, it seems,

cannot be sealed

with what I cast aside

or would readily yield.

I threw in my love,

wedding ring, and shoes.

I jumped in, breathing,

with nothing to lose.

I do understand, really.

That life is temporary.

That we may live our lives careening off in wrong directions, one after the next, then coming to rest only briefly, quiet only momentarily, before flying away again toward the next unachievable impossible stupid.

Okay?

I get it.

I will even say it aloud, if it makes you happy.

You can stop making me sick just so I'll quiet down for a day or so.

Stop making people die to remind me of mortality, impermanence and the preciousness of each single time I saw my beloved father-in-law, whom I miss so much I want to hide under this desk, flooding the carpet below it with tears.

You can stop making death a light topic of conversation each time I phone my aged mother. I know she is comfortable with it;

but, you see, I AM NOT.

Do you think you are preparing me?

I don't buy it.

I think you are cruelly traumatizing me over and over with pre-death, then actual death, then it will be post-death grief.

Can't we skip over the first two and deal with the post-death part in time?

I really have got enough grief already; Gene, Elaine, Doug, Bruce, John, Jim, Gary's uncle Howard, Joanne's sister Joyce, and, yes, still Marsha nearly 3 years on.

Could the post-death grief for my mother (for me) really be so much worse that you need to toughen me up with all this?

Universe, I do not believe you are preparing me.

Universe, you are lying.

Loss does not toughen me, Universe. You opted in to the false masculinist notion that harder is better. What does not kill me, strengthens me. LIES.

I'm not copper, hardened through work.

I am paper, softened, then torn.

Universe, treat me better than this.

I see bumper stickers that read, "If you aren't outraged, you aren't paying attention." I think: doesn't the same sentiment apply to depression? We all suffer many material and emotional losses, witness so much injustice, grieve so many lost friends and family -- why isn't everyone depressed? Outrage suggests action; demands it, in fact. Outrage assumes one has the resources to write, donate, volunteer, and speak out against wrong. Wrong.

In 12 months, in my small circle of friends and family, three parents have died, a brother killed himself, another brother died of cancer, two cancers recurred (one will be fatal), and one young mother discovered she had late-stage pancreatic cancer. As a middle-ager, my losses are not extraordinary. People are beginning to die at my age, especially parents. A few stage four cancers are not surprising.

There is overwhelming struggle and injustice around the world. It's always been there. I pity the women in Juarez (and a thousand other places) who have no defense against dealers in unspeakable violence that corrupts their children and kills their neighbors. And them. I grieve that evil people dupe young women into traveling to America for a better life only to end up abused as indentured servants and slaves. I mourn the embittered boys forced, under threat, to fight wars they do not support, losing their innocence and lives. I am saddened that people live in fear and poverty under vile political regimes that only feed themselves.

There are much more mundane influences, too. Like the teenager next door who spits on the ground and won't clean up his dogs' waste. The ladder-climbers at work who would sooner eat a cockroach than ponder another person's needs. Rude reviewers of submitted publications. Everyone has these, too.

Depression doesn't care about any of these things. It walks on, whistling. It adds pain to tragedy, never looking at faces or learning names. It treads rudely over lonely teenagers, beaten women, recent widows, men without jobs, new mothers. It cowardly targets the low-hanging fruit, waiting on those with purpose and joy, for later, when they're down.

At 14, I was fond of wearing jeans with dark solid colors, like grey and hunter, and I would not spray my hair into untenable positions until it stood out, stiff, in just the right curl, like the other girls. Christmas break I spent listening to All Things Must Pass and embroidering a snake on the hem of my jeans.

At 15, walks to the cemetary down the street were a Saturday diversion. Especially good when the weather was rainy and the sky gray. I drew pictures of graveyards and dark threatening trees. Friends dropped away.

I babysat for a foolish couple who admonished me, "These are the best years of your life. Enjoy them now!" They made this clueless pronouncement in the presence of their three children. To a sad teenager, such a statement deepened despair rather than simply reflecting poorly on them, as it should have.

I wrote in my journal about teenager things: how wrong my parents were, how wrong society was, how disappointed I was in all my stupid teen peers. I drew, painted, and played my flute alone.

Mom took me to the Filipino doctor who had purchased the practice of the doctor whom she saw as a girl. He thought I maybe had rheumatic fever. Because teenagers had no reason to be depressed (it was the best years of our lives!) Maybe because strict Catholics did not believe in depression. And because the drugs, in 1975, weren't all that good and the side effects were legend.

When the Filipino doctor had no solutions, Mom said she'd take me to a psychiatrist if I didn't shape up. I took this as a threat, as it was meant, but part of me hoped it might help.

Dad did not approve of psychiatry. He didn't need a "head shrink" to survive three years in a Japanese prison camp during the war. How could a middle-class, over-indulged, teenager in a small town in Ohio need one of those? I was ungrateful.

My grades fell, but not too badly. They were still respectable enough for National Honor Society. The other students thought I was smart but haughty, which was much better than smart but wounded and vulnerable, in my mind. Eventually, I was pretty accomplished at pretending to be mysterious and smug instead of terrified and sad. One of my older sisters did it, too. It was a way of coping without losing face.

At 18, my high school portrait was deadpan. At 19, my parents told me to leave home; they were tired of my working at minimum wage and taking community college classes and making out with my boyfriend on their couch. Dad said, "Out of sight, out of mind." So I spent a year away taking university classes and working minimum-wage jobs and making out with other men. I had party friends, but no close friends. I did keep my boyfriend, and we got married when I was 27.

When I was 33, my husband moved away to a new job, while I stayed behind to finish graduate school. On days, it was impossible to leave the house. I wore my bathrobe all day and watched television. I'd seen counselors on and off, and thought maybe it was time to try that again.

The counselor said, "You have to see a psychiatrist before I can help you. You need medication." I'd never heard that before. The psychiatrist stopped me partway into describing my symptoms, saying "you fulfilled the criteria." Of the symptoms of major depression in the DSM, and I had recited all but one of them. So I walked out with a prescription for Prozac and and brand-new label: I was now mentally ill.

I had discovered my depression. Now I had to explain it to my husband, my family, and myself, but it was good to have a name for self-loathing that persists in the face of personal achievement and good fortune. I told my parents it wasn't their fault, knowing that they would think it was. Part of this came from my nursing education and part from family history.  They blamed my sister and her husband for their son's schizophrenia.  Assigning blame was often the first order of business in our house.

(Hmmm....maybe I'm not fully over that blaming thing yet.)

Twenty years and several drugs later, I cope all right. Few people know of my disease. I exercise, I have the same wonderful husband, I have friends now, and I try to avoid negative self-talk. I could write a book about self-help techniques for the depressed, but it's been done.

I have learned that the drugs and the self-help do not change the disease. Depression is as indifferent to drugs and therapy as it is to objective reality. Depression lives on, no matter how we subdue it. Periodically, it gathers its strength and rises again, then subsides. Depression is patient; it lay there, undiscovered, in my brain for 20 years until someone spoke its name aloud, and I began to emerge.