The Night

That night still haunts me.  She walked into my room and demanded she be allowed to get into my bed.  I told her she needed to go back to her own bed and stop being so mad.  When she refused, I locked the door to my room and hid inside.  She yelled my name for a while and pounded on the door.  Then I heard a noise like she fell.  I came out of my room and noticed she was laying on the floor, her eyes closed.  I went over and asked if she was okay.  She didn't answer.  I grabbed my phone and said I was calling 911. She suddenly opened her eyes and said "No, don't call them."  I propped her up and told her to get back in bed, and she did.  I went back into my room and closed the door.  Over the next three hours, she would bang on my door and yell my name to let her in.  I yelled back "get back in bed and go to sleep!"  Eventually, she stopped banging on my door and yelling died down to a plea of "Brian, please help me" before I heard silence.  Those were her last words.

  

Maryssa had a long battle with depression and alcohol.  She had lived with me for only three months, but she told me that she spent most of her adult life in a state of depression and cycle of alcohol abuse as the only thing that worked for her.  Depression was something that we both shared and we talked about a lot, but hers was of a type that would not relent for a moment.  In Maryssa's world, depression was the default mental state, a perpetual mental storm that you could see in her eyes, churning constantly as she suffered silently.  The days the clouds would lift were few and far between, but when they did, you could see her inner beauty shining bright as a full moon in the clear night sky.  She was a beautiful person, and everyone she came into contact with knew that immediately when she talked to them.  The disease had prevented her from seeing that about herself as it slowly consumed who she was until only pain and frustration remained. 

Maryssa and I shared our frustrations with the meaningless cruelties of life.  We shared the lack of belief that any one thing or anyone was in control of how much suffering was in the world.  We talked about how when you read the pages of history, millions of people have been born without the faintest hope of ever having a better life.  From the concentration camps of Auschwitz, to the modern wars of today where countless children and adults aspire to nothing more than the stability and sweet release of death when daily life becomes unbearably hard and miserable, for whatever reason.    

For Maryssa, staus quo, much less joy wasn't possible for very long.  I remember walking on the beach with her on a beautiful warm afternoon, there was a sea breeze we and we were walking across the beach to the lighthouse.  I was concerned about her depression and I wanted to show her life could be beautiful.  

In moments like these you wouldn't see the smile.  I don't think she found the outside world very interesting anymore. Maryssa got the most joy from making sure others were happy. She told me about her friends who were going through rough times and she tried to cheer them up.  I think in a weird way she was trying to compensate for what she couldn't do herself. This is how I knew Maryssa was someone worth loving and it's why I tried to save her.  

Sometimes love is not enough, or at least the love I had for her wasn't enough. But the truth is many other people loved and tried to love her.  There was a deep part of Maryssa who wanted that love. She just couldn't find a way to receive it and connect it with who she was in the end.  That's what depression does.  I had a very misplaced belief that I could convince her life was worth living where psychiatrists had failed.   Where her family and professional help had failed, I thought I was going to succeed. Only in retrospect do I realize how ignorant and foolish this thought was.  Only in this moment do I realize I was in love with her more than I admitted to myself in that moment.  But I knew one thing for sure. I was going to try my god damn hardest to keep her alive. 

Even though I am not religious, I can see why being religious is the norm rather than the exception.  Our own awareness of the fragility of life, and the knowledge and fear that our lives can end at any point presents a clear and present danger to immediate survival.  It is an existential problem that must be dealt with at some point, or it becomes a feedback loop of anxiety and worry that can lead to suicide.  Nietzsche neatly summed up this fear in a sentence: 

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

I could imagine the very first of humans must have struggled with their own meaning and what it all meant, and why they were able to think of such questions as they stared into night, with only their camp fire to keep the wolves at bay.  Like fighting a war on two fronts, the existential internal darkness of the question of "why?" is always there, waiting like an internal predator watching its prey for any sign of weakness.  I think those who struggle with depression (at least from my own experience) have a louder than average voice of doubt and existential fear that our lives don't really matter.  But I think this fear exists in everyone to some degree and we all have different coping mechanisms for how to deal with it.   

I don't know and I don't think anyone can know, but I think this is the reason we began telling stories. Stories provide continuity and provide a deep connection to the foundations of those who came before us, holding some degree of wisdom for how to wrestle with these types of questions for which there are no clear answers.  It's so much easier to believe from a very early age that we were created by a loving maker, or at least an all knowing one, and that everything is working out exactly as it should.  While I admit that this is always a logical possibility that some greater force or intelligence explains all this, for many of us who are limited by the faculties of reason and standards of evidence of what our own internal feelings say about the world and the people in it, this story fails to deliver on both a practical and emotional level. 

We're not children anymore.

In short, there are those of us who cannot live their life based on what we know, or think is not true.  Survival depends very much on the individual's ability to psychologically persevere in the face of hardship and absolute horror at what this world can throw at you.

For those of us who create and give our own lives meaning, this is an ongoing process that never really stops.  We are a bit like sharks, always moving forward as a matter of survival, swimming through oceans of baited hooks just to process the oxygen of meaning. Even when unencumbered by mental illness, this is not an easy task. Just keep breathing.  

Severe mental illness makes mental breathing impossible.  It is no different than a disease that robs your ability to process oxygen.  In the case of depression, it lessens or entirely robs your ability to feel satisfaction, joy, love and happiness when you should.  Even though mental illness has been around for probably as long as people, we have barely scratched the surface in terms of its effective treatment or even knowing what's really going on in the mind of someone who is in the deepest pit of depression. Modern psychiatry, even at its best, can be entirely ineffective in the most severe cases. The hardest part is when when you watch someone slowly suffer, knowing that nothing in the known world can change what they're feeling, and knowing there's nothing you can do to help them. 

What do you do when you've exhausted the options of mental health facilities, family, friends and finally telling the person to leave because it's too painful?  Nobody likes to talk about incurable mental illness because on some level, a part of us believes we might fall into the same mental trap they have, if only by being around them.  Conventional wisdom is not far off the mark here, as modern studies have shown that who we are and how we feel is a function of the people we surround ourselves with.  When someone is constantly depressed, that impacts everyone around them negatively, especially over increasingly longer periods of time.  They might become intolerable to live with, and the non-affected have to begin bargaining with themselves over how much they're willing to put up with until their loved one gets better.  The sad truth is for many, there is no end in sight and they may not ever get better.  The stigma that families and friends have to face is what to do with loved ones for whom all conventional and possibly non-conventional therapy has failed, and the only recourse is to let them go. 

The hardest part of letting someone go is knowing that maybe 5, 10, or 100 years from now, we could have cured them with a pill or with a routine procedure.  I keep thinking of how frustrated people must have been 200 years ago, when their loved ones might have developed an infection from a common wound.  Instead of taking some antibiotics and getting better, they had to sit there and wait for their husband, wife or child, and watch their loved ones slowly watch them as they faded into the the embrace of death.     

You can blame the gods.  You can blame Man. Or you can blame nature. My money is on the completely impersonal nature of the universe and its lack of giving a shit.  Sometimes shit just happens and there's no good answer to the question of why, other than a purely mechanical and entirely meaningless chain of events happened a long time ago that led to the current situation.  This is the same explanation that would serve if an asteroid took us out tomorrow.  There are some things we have completely no control over. 

Rest in peace, Maryssa.  You were loved.  

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

The purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.