Depression, like many serious illnesses, robs its sufferers of access to a common language,one that fuels our ability to communicate. The bridge of words, incoming and
outgoing, is cut off, increasing the weight of isolation. But sometimes, with the "gift" of depression, we are able to join those who also struggle to be heard.
Between the two of us, my father and I were responsible for spending an entire year in the hospital. My brain took one of its wrong turns, catapulting me into a wretched combination of anguished depression and uncontrollable agitation. Salvation lay in the application of electricity, pills, and a near fatal dose of group therapy. During these times it feels like the language of each day changes, and my minimal fluency is diminished further. Over time the agony receded, but it took far longer for the isolation to end. I left the hospital feeling like a pilgrim without a destination. Hollow and lost. Stupid and shabby.
Meanwhile, my father's 82 year old heart began to press for retirement. The solution involved substituting the valve of a pig for his weary one. Aside from the likelihood that my father would never look at a pork chop the same way, his doctors were optimistic about his recovery. At the end of a very long day, the surgeon told us that the operation was a "complete success." There were "no complications" - a statement that strikes me as simply silly when you're reconciling the plumbing of a man and a pig.
Good news always makes the depressive in me nervous. There's nowhere to go but down. His recovery-or lack of it- made a liar of his surgeon. A routine one-nighter in the ICU stretched from mid-September, through October and November. His doctors shared a maddening mantra in the daily submission of my father's condition: "He's not out of the woods." "What woods?" I wanted to scream after several days of this news."How far is he into the woods" "How is it exactly do we get him out of the woods?" In hundreds of years of the study of medicine was it too much to ask for something better than forestry metaphors?
Each day the news grew more alarming and the cardiac team decided to put him into a chemically induced coma. For weeks my father lay stone still, in a state of suspended animation. I found my family's exhortations it my father oddly familiar and disturbing, They were the voices of warriors, athletes and cheerleaders. The melody
was 100% love. I had heard it from them in my own hospitalization. It's what kept me going. But it was the lyrics that seemed foreign. "You have to hang in there." "You have to fight." "Give it all you've got." "Just keep going." "Try." "Push" "Win." At one time those would have my encouragements too. But standing with my father amidst the hissing and pumping, the rythymic beeps and clicks, the tangle of tubes flowing in and out of his poor broken body, I knew in my bones that I had something different to say. "Dad," I whispered,"You are far away right now, but you'll be back. We'll be waiting. Just let yourself rest. It will be alright."
Over several months my father emerged from his coma like an alien plopped down on the wrong planet. When we tried to fill him in on his medical trip from hell, he countered with many interesting accounts of his comatose adventures. Each was a singular experience that he described with clarity, drama and and absolute insistence of its reality. There were priests, con men and prostitutes. There were taxis and a steamer to Sao Paulo.
Following one of my father's unlikely exploits, my mother reached over, patted his hand and said quietly,
"Oh, John, you're just having a little hallucination."
When my father I were alone together he asked if I believed him, if I thought he was crazy. I silently questioned
whatever judgment led him to get a reality check from the offspring who has spent the most amount of time
on psychiatric units.
"It was real," he insisted. "I think I get it Dad. You were on a journey. One that was very personal. One that only you will understand." I wondered why he chose me to share his secrets. We don't usually talk on this kind of level. We were now connected by long periods of pain and uncertainy. Our lives had suddenly turned us upside down. The stranger my father's stories were, the more I was impressed with their wisdom. During the next week
his recountings spanned continents and modes of transportation. They were filled with adventure and adversity. His yearning for my mother was aching and constant. He was perpetually lost and confused, lonely
and homeless. When I asked him why he kept traveling against such difficulty, he shrugged and answered,
"What else was I supposed to do?" At that moment I got it. I'd been listening for his lyrics which I couldn't understand. It the melody that I'd missed.
Weeks later he called. He hadn't talked on the phone before and his voice was gravelly and hoarse. "Vito...
Don Corleone--, is that you?" He got the joke. "Listen, he said urgently, I've got another memory and it can't wait." You'll probably think I'm ready for the nuthouse," (uncomfortable pause) "Well you know what I mean. Right?" Following assurance that the nuthouse crack didn't leave a mark, he launched into his final tale,
He was lying in a hospital, surrounded by people in white coats who kept talking about what was wrong with
him. Finally, a pompous doctor pronouned, "I know what's wrong with him," he said. "He's dead."
They left him in the room covered in a white sheet. For the first time he had complete certainty,
"I'm not dead, he proclaimed. "I just need a second opinion!"
He jumped off the bed and walked to Yale Medical School where a resident assured him that he was very much alive. It was then that he noticed he'd been walking all over the place in his skimpy open backed
hospital gown with his "bare ass hanging out." But Martha, you know what came to me?
My ass may have been hanging out all the way to New Haven. But you know what? I'm not dead!"
My father still has a long way to go. He must tackle the hundreds of baby steps that will restore to him most of those things he never thought he could lose. My road back is also long, requiring similar patience. tenacity and courage. We will speak to each other in a new voice--one born of shared suffering in the past and uncertainly
in the future.
We are still not out of our woods. But I believe that together, we will make our way through the dense cover of trees and negotiate the ancient roots beneath our feet. We will finally stumble into a clearing. And as our eyes adjust to the sunlight, our hospital gowns will flap in the breeze, revealing two big bare butts. But we're out of the woods. And we're definitely not dead.
