Last week's snow has melted. The rain that lashed down most of Saturday and all of Sunday has vanished. I draw back curtains to a dawn smoked pink with lifting mist. An English spring sky spray-painted egg-shell blue and sun that streams through the window forging the frame gilt.
Mum won't see any of it; Depression has its hands over her eyes. It snuck up from behind and planted them there so firmly she couldn't prize them off. It didn't need to say Guess Who? We all knew. We could see it coming. Sometimes I don't know if she doesn't. Or won't. Does articulating a thing, ‘I think I'm getting sick again' set it in stone? Does acknowledging a condition out loud make it unavoidable? Inevitable?
So there we are. It's back again. Nearly two years since we shooed it out of the door, Out Damn Spot, Out, it's back. With vengeance. Always with vengeance. Thumbing its nose and curling its thin lip in an ugly sneer, ‘Hah! You thought you'd got rid of me for good'.
We did actually. We thought the latest wonder drug was just that: a wonder. Ah yes, says the psychiatrist, it was. Until it became suspiciously apparent that its efficacy had a Use By Date. Two years. ‘Probably a bit less' said Dr H, ‘it seems to run out of steam after that'.
And that seems doubly-whammy unfair; Mum's Depression-born despondency exacerbated by bitter, bitter disappointment that the bloody stuff wasn't the prophylaxis it was touted to be.
And so it's back on the exhausting hamster-wheel of recovery: Dr H leafs through Mum's not insubstantial file, making notes about what she's been prescribed before, what's left in the pharmaceutical arsenal against this bloody, bloody (and bloody-minded) illness.
Lots as it happens. For the armoury is constantly evolving. It has to: Depression remains quick-silver enigmatic, foxing the experts and slinking into lives against the drugged-up, CBT-sandbagged, odds.
There is hope, says Dr H, for there are new silver bullets we can arm Mum with. And I want to hug her. Hope is a bullet in itself.
But I want to hug Mum more. I want to hug her and then put her in my pocket where she will be safe and warm and where I can keep taking her out to check on her, where I can leave her be, cozily ensconced at the worst-dawn-end of the day, where I can draw her carefully out come dusk and see if she has the energy for a laugh, the stamina for one of my inane jokes, twilight, when to tell her, ‘I want to hear you smile Ma', won't make her cry.
******************************
My youngest daughter frets that Mum is sick because of her. ‘Was it something I did?', she asks tearfully, ‘did I make Granny sad?'.
I want to weep.
But I want to rejoice more.
I was her age when Mum first succumbed to this monster. I thought her surrender to despair was my fault. I don't know why. Because when you are 13 the world revolves around you, because when you are 13 you believe you are pivotal to everything that happens, good and bad, just because your small world is beginning to crack the tiniest window on a big, big world? Because Mrs X next door told her daughter, who told me, ‘that girl has made her mother sick with worry, sick with worry!'? Cow. Because children - and my youngest is just a child, as was I - can only see the black and white of cause and effect, they can't see the smoke and mirrors and shades of grey that muddy grownups' world.
And though - for the most part - I began to understand that Depression was a stealth that stole into lives regardless - that it couldn't be helped, that it just happened, that it wasn't anybody's fault - there was still an uncomfortable part of me that continued to guiltily fret, ‘did I do this to mum'.
And so it is only now, only now as I sit across a supper table from my beautiful little girl, with her welling eyes and quavering voice, ‘Is Gran sick because of me?' that I can begin to believe I was blameless.
‘Absolutely not', I tell her as I take her small hand, ‘sometimes grownups get sick and sad and it can't be helped, it just happens and it isn't anybody's fault'.
