Years ago, I went through a really bad
stint. I am not proud of it. I went to therapy to try to help but the company
only paid for three sessions. After that I would have had to pay for it myself.
I went to my doctor and he put me on anti-depressants. They did nothing and I
quit taking them. It could have been that I was on the wrong medicine for my
chemical make-up. Who knows? But at the end of the day, I looked at the
anti-depressants as a failure because I was depressed for all the right
reasons. Here is the thing. If you win the lottery and say, “I want to kill
myself” then you have a severe chemical imbalance going on. My wife was having
an affair and wanted a divorce. To me, that is pretty fucking good reason to be
depressed.
I remember sitting in the dark, in my
son’s room, holding a bottle of Xanax pills and calculating my body weight and
wondering if it would do the job. Everything was spiraling out of control and I
felt like my life was ending. Obviously, I didn’t go through with it because I
am typing this now. But I considered it.
My mother passed away from cancer in
2005. It was a valiant but short fight. This is the reason that I abhor
smoking. In those times, when I was trying to work my way through it, I would
see these old, crusty curmudgeons in the store, yelling about the cost of a bag
of potatoes. I used to cast an eye upward to the heavens and ask, “My mom dies
at 56 and this waste of human skin gets 80-plus years?”
It is in these moments of isolation
when we are at our weakest. The world keeps spinning. People are happy. You
hear laughter. And you want absolutely no part of it. You don’t want to see any
light of happiness because you feel like you are swirling in a tornado of
darkness and despair. And when you see other people happy, it compounds your
feeling of being forsaken, as if everyone else is happy in the world and you
are alone in your misery.
Given what has happened in the world
out there, it would have been very easy for us to just load up pistols, get in
a drum circle and everyone check out on their own. But that hasn’t happened.
Instead we have pallet jack races and laughter and happiness around our
makeshift dinner table. We laugh and spend time together and have shooting
contests to see who can snipe the most zoms staggering in the parking lot. (It
is like shooting pool and the 8-ball. You have to call your shots.)
Why aren’t we all basket cases ready
to head to Norman Greenbaum’s spirit in the sky? The answer is simple. There is
not just one of us in that tornado of darkness and despair. We are all in her
eye. Everyone has lost someone. A parent, a brother, a sister, a child, a wife,
a husband, cousins…. Everyone has lost someone because everyone else is gone. We
can think about all the people we have met in this world. And if they are not
in here, chances are pretty good that they are gone.
Obviously, we hope that some family members are
reading this but, again, talking statistics, anyone reading this doesn’t know
me from Adam. And there is something about that shared sorrow. You can’t turn
to someone and say, “I’ve lost [Insert Person’s Name Here]. You don’t know what
I am going through.” If you try that, they can fire right back. “Really? I’ve
lost [Insert Three Other Persons’ Name Here].” This is a shared tragedy. But
when you have many shoulders to bear the load, it seems a lot less heavy…
