On the essays shelf:
Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression
Another essay from Unholy Ghost, a collection with different writers writing about their experience with depression.
I am a bit haunted by this essay. Poet Donald Hall was married for many years to another poet, Jane Kenyon. She suffered from serious clinical depression her entire life. This is another essay in the book, like Russell Banks’, like Rose Styron’s, about partners to those who are mentally ill, and in some degree become caretakers to their own spouse. Donald Hall’s essay is painful to read. Her illness had nothing to do with him. He had to support her, but not enable her. He had to watch as she would spiral down, and do what he could to help her stay on track. But what can you do when your spouse lies in bed weeping all day from an unnamed wordless grief? It’s just horrible. You feel bad for them both. He stuck it out. He loved her.
But his description of their marriage, and the gloom that sometimes surrounded it, is wrenching. She was such a great person, talented, funny, exciting, but she had this other thing she had to contend with, and was helpless in the face of it. She was not undiagnosed. She, like most depressed people, had been on a variety of drugs and cocktails for the majority of her life. Some worked for a while, then stopped working. Some were awful. You have to become your own diagnostician in these cases: you have to somehow monitor yourself and your reaction to drugs. But since the problem is in your brain and your emotional apparatus, it can be so difficult to separate out the Issues from your Personality. Because … you’re inside your own head. It looks normal from where you are. Even though you are miserable, and buried by small things that others can easily brush off … well, that’s just how you are made. It’s one of the most insidious things about depression. It feels like, in trying to fix it, you are tinkering with your own precious personality – and your personality is the only one you’ve got. Trying to fix your own depression can be terrifying because it seems to strike at the heart of your Identity. This is something often unexplored in the literature.
Jane Kenyon had a good support system. She had her husband, she had a good psychiatrist who worked with her to find proper drugs. She saw him for years, until she died in 1995 from leukemia. Like many depressed people, she would often try to fly solo, without pharmaceutical help. You just want to be free of being on drugs! But the result was often a dive in mood. So back on the drugs she would go. Donald Hall details all of this in his beautifully compassionate and loving essay. Jane Kenyon emerges from this essay, a fully realized person: his memories of her are so strong and so acute that you can FEEL her in between the lines. Jane Kenyon also developed mania, to compound the problem. Her mania manifested itself in mystical visions and experiences. It’s not immediately apparent that “mania” is part of the sickness at all. Because it feels good, often, although destabilizing – and you don’t want to take a drug that will somehow flatten out the GOOD things in your life, too. But Jane’s mania was clearly dangerous. She believed in God, and her faith was very important to her. Her mania was often of the common religious variety. So again: the problem is that mania often feels good, it often feels like you are getting in touch with a Universal Truth, that helps you and soothes you. So to admit that this, too, is part of your illness … that you will need to deprive yourself of these beautiful high-flying feelings … is devastating.
As Russell Banks wrote in his essay, comparing his marriage to that of an alcoholic family – where there is always the presence of That Other Thing in the relationship – Donald Hall describes depression as a “third party in our marriage”. Who knows how much worse Jane Kenyon might have been, had she not had support, and a loyal husband who was okay with representing stability for her. Stability is tremendously important.
I had forgotten one aspect of the essay, which I remembered when I re-read it this morning. In a breathtakingly open moment, Donald Hall describes how orgasm would release her from sadness, and make her feel peppy and ready to get to work and do her writing for the day. So they had sex almost every day, “whether we felt like it or not”, because it did Jane so much good, and seemed to make the gloom disappear for a spell. I know sex is great and all that, and that people love it, and it can make you feel better when you do it. This is true for regular people, too. But something about how Donald Hall described that aspect of their marriage was deeply resonant for me. Or, without going into too much detail, I recognized myself in that. Even when things were at their worst in 2009, orgasms were like that old saying about eating an apple a day … I was in deep shit in 2009, but I never lost my desire in that area of my life. I didn’t say to myself consciously, “Have an orgasm every day. You know it’s good for you.” because that would be ridiculous. Or who knows, maybe I did. The clouds would clear for a couple of hours, and it gave me enough space to take a run, or to write something, or to cook something. The body is a beautiful machine. It knows how to survive. And, because I’ve already revealed this, so why stop now, that’s my fear about certain medication. It is a known fact that sexual desire is often affected by antidepressants and other drugs. I fear losing it. It’s such a good part of my life.
So, weirdly, I thank Donald Hall for expressing that very intimate part of his wife’s life, and their life together. Because it helps to recognize yourself in the wilderness of this literature. So much of it doesn’t resonate, and that’s fine: one size does not fit all. But when something clicks, when you read something that you have experienced, too, the sense of relief can be overwhelming. I’m not the only one! Feeling like you are “the only one” is one of the worst parts of depression. You can know intellectually that you are not “the only one”, but somehow you don’t KNOW it. Or knowing it makes no difference in how you FEEL about it.
Here’s an excerpt from Donald Hall’s essay. It’s a roller coaster.
Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression
Of her 1984 mania I remember most clearly two or three months, spring and summer of that year. During this first extended elation, I did not know what I confronted. I thought: I must learn to live with an entirely changed woman; I was married to a woman I had never known. Frugal Jane had to buy a peridot ring; indecisive Jane, who always asked me to make choices – what restaurant to go to, which night to see the play, what book to read aloud – knew exactly what we should do, when and where. In her superabundant energy she was bossy: before, she had hidden in my shadow; now she charged forward as bright as the sun of June. She was consumed by desire; on her thirty-seventh birthday we seemed to make love all day long.
The radical change confused and upset me. When Jane went manic I fell into depression. She soared up and I plunged down – a moody seesaw. I felt “suicidal ideation without intent”. Then I understood, with shame, that for years I had used her depression to think well of myself: I was the rock, unchanging in all weathers; I was the protector. Now her manic elation and her certainty cast me down. After this first episode of her mania and my response, I put away my complacent self-congratulation.
She fell into depression after mania ceased. Six months later she turned manic again, weeks not months, and spoke carelessly, hurtfully, without malicious intent – in ways she would not have done without mania. By this time I knew what was happening. Thereafter, mania was brief.
Her friends sympathized entirely with her depression but also suffered. Although we were relatively reclusive, we had friends at our church, poet friends who came for weekends, old friends from Ann Arbor, our families. Jane when she was well spent more time in company than I did, lunching with women friends in New London twelve miles away. Her closest friends were two other writers, Alice Mattison and Joyce Peseroff. They saw each other when they could, and workshopped together several times a year. The excitement of their meetings exhausted and elevated Jane. Depression never canceled a workshop, but once she asked Alice not to come calling from a summer place in Vermont. Every month Jane and I drove to Connecticut to see my mother, in her eighties, to shop for her and to visit. (Jane used the opportunity to see Alice, who lived nearby.) Several times, when she was depressed, I had to drive down alone. Sometimes I put visitors off at Jane’s urging. I telephoned a dying friend to tell him he could not visit. I canceled a skiing visit from my son and friends because Jane could not see anyone. Every summer Jane’s brother, sister-in-law, and niece visited from Ann Arbor. Once I had to telephone them and ask them not to come. It was generally I who telephoned, at Jane’s request, because she herself could not make the call. On occasion when acquaintances made briefer visits, Jane remained in the bedroom with the door closed while I sat talking with them elsewhere.
One of the hardest things, if you are depressed, is to try to hold yourself up in the presence of others, especially others whom you love. I remember a birthday for granddaughters at my daughter’s house. Jane stood looking on, wretched, hardly able to speak. She was quiet, there were many people, and she practiced invisibility. My daughter looked at her and said, “You’re miserable, aren’t you?” When Jane nodded Philippa spoke with sympathy and left her alone. You do not try to cheer up depressives: the worst thing you can do is to count their blessings for them.
