Recognizing something and changing something are not the same thing

I’ve discussed my depression before with regards to events in my life that contributed to my depression, I mentioned that I was going through a depression in one of tam’s recent posts (an awesome post and discussion by the way) but this will still be a first for me.  I am going to describe some of what goes on in my mind and my heart when I am in a depression.  Please be gentle.

A deep well of sadness has erupted inside me.  There is no real connection between my feelings and what is happening to me.  For no reason at all I feel as though I’m about to burst into tears.  At random times throughout the day I’ll feel my heart constrict and next thing I know I’m blinking away tears.

Am I depressed?  Yes

Do I have the big “D” Depression?  Yup, never officially diagnosed but for this I don’t need a doctor to tell me what I already know and given my familial history it’s not a shock.  I can pretty much trace the rises and dips of my moods, a continuing roller coaster of ups and downs with the occassional corkscrew.  I can pretty much predict how it will go – on the upswing it’s fairly normal, my responses are normal, my reactions to people are normal, things are blessedly normal then I hit the top.  And I have to work at holding on to myself.  My heart hammers away with ecstasy and I feel as though my soul will leak through my skin in white-hot joy.  I walk around with my hands clenched for fear that I’ll float away.  I feel like Johnny Depp’s character Captain Jack Sparrow – touched or fay, if you prefer.  Then *boom* I hit the bottom.  Anger, sadness, deep depression, exhaustion, lack of interest or passion, at it’s worst, thoughts of death-dying.  Everything is cause for despair, panic and rage.  Nothing can go right, I have small moments of faux peace – sort of a surface quiet, a peace which is dark in a bad way and hurts deep down in my soul.  It tears me.

Sometimes the ups and downs are gentle.  And sometimes it’s like scaling and then leaping off of a pyramid without climbing equipment or a parachute.  I prefer the gentle ups and downs.  Those I can handle.  It’s the others that damage my soul, my friendships and my relationships with my family.  I know I should probably have some chemical “help” but I’m more scared of that.  I went on anti-depressants once – n.g. (no good), if I can help it I will never do that again.  It made me feel like an alien in human skin, I would find myself staring at my hand trying to convince myself that it did in fact belong to me.  But worse than that it actually caused me to have suicidal thoughts – I spent a whole day keeping myself from leaping into traffic.  I stopped taking them after that.

It’s not always so bad.  Most of the time I do okay it’s just sometimes it goes beyond my ability to control.  I have times where I recognize a certain turn of my thoughts or my emotions and I can stop it from going down that road.  Sometimes, sickeningly, I don’t want to stop it.  I’ve had moments where I realize the road my thoughts are leading me down and I can hear His warning or His attempt to knock me out of it and my response is “Leave me alone,” “I can’t help it,” or “I’m aware, thank you.”  Why?  Because sometimes I don’t want help, I don’t want to feel normal – I want to wallow in anger or self-pity and not be responsible.  I hate that about me and have been working at putting a stop to this behavior.  I don’t talk about feeling convicted on things much, mostly because it isn’t the language I want to use, but on this I can tell you that when I allow myself this course of action I feel convicted.  I know it’s wrong and I know that He knows that I know it’s wrong.

Then there are the times I can’t control it, it spirals away from me and all I can do is hang on.  I have moments that tip me off, I see it happen and I think to myself “here we go.”  I can’t get the bag of cereal open so I explode into a rage and scream curse words and punch walls, I drop my mac&cheese on the floor and suddenly I feel like the universe is against me and I want to dissolve into tears, I’m driving in traffic and I make it through the yellow light just in time and suddenly I feel invincible and untouchable and drunk-giddy, I wake up and experience a moment of disorientation and suddenly I feel one step removed from the world for the rest of the day, I get a rude customer at work and suddenly I’d love nothing better than to go home and sleep for several days.  I don’t like it.

Now it’s true that I’ve used the gentler ups and downs as creative outlets.  I’ve given my characters some of my rage and despair or I’ve used those feelings to charge the language I use to describe them and their surroundings.  And yes, sometimes I allow myself a bit of melancholia in pursuit of my writing, but again it’s something that I exert great control and caution over.  I know when it’s enough and I know how to shake myself out of those small moments of melancholia.

It’s when it comes on unexpectedly, without warning, with no external stimuli and with no control that I am afraid and desire to feel normal or some semblance of normalcy.  I don’t like the way I react to things or the way I treat people or the direction my thoughts go.  It isn’t pleasant.  Frankly, it terrifies me deeply.

The depression is the worst.  The anger explodes like a flash but doesn’t last, the ecstasy vibrates like a tuning fork and eventually settles down but the depression hammers down relentlessly taking all that I have, all that I am until there’s nothing left but me bleeding on the floor, gasping for air and pleading for it to stop.  In moments like that I know how easy it would be for me to take my life in my hands.  But I have made promises to certain people to not do that and I hold myself to keep those promises forever.  No matter what happens I can’t break those promises.

I am such a mass of contradictions.

And a mess of emotions.

But I try – to maintain equilibrium, control and if I can’t do that then I just maintain.  And try to hold on to some emotion because the only times I’ve seriously considered suicide are the times when I felt hollow and numb.  “I’d rather feel pain than nothing at all.” ~ Three Days Grace “Pain.”

Gram’s story

Yes this is a reprint for those of you who read my blog by way of The NorEaster’s but I felt this was the right thing to do.  Here is my Gram’s story with (hope he doesn’t mind) The NorEaster’s intro as well as mine.  Twice, so really there are three into’s.  :)  But anyway here you go.

Oftentimes, we mistakenly limit miracles to extraordinary, eye-popping occurances–a winning lottery ticket, a medical recovery, a car starting on a cold winter morning.  Perhaps a house that sells for half a million dollars just before the market dries up–which, of course, only means that we benefit while someone else loses out.  Yes, often we relate miracles to what we want, instead of glimpsing God in the details of this decaying world.  We might see the suffering of others and wonder, “How could God allow that?”  But when suffering hits home hard, as it has for this Storm StoryTeller, we eventyually realize that the wind and the rain and the cold is so great that only the dawn of a new world, without our loved one, alleviates our suffering.  But through it all, God gives us the spiritual strength and stamina to run our own enduring race, the marathon of survival to our promised Crown of Life.  Survival is the miracle of life.

INTRODUCTION

When I first signed up for Nor’s Storm Stories, I thought long and hard about what I should write about.  I decided against writing on my struggle with depression since I covered that pretty well already so I asked God what I should write and His answer was this: “Write about Gram.”  I said ok and started.  Then stopped.  And cried and said, “no way, I’m not doing this…I’ll write about the ‘church’, [the one that burned me].”  God was quiet.  I didn’t do anything for a while then I found myself sitting down and writing about Gram.  I stopped again and cried.  I kept thinking how this wasn’t going to work; I should pick another topic, blah, blah, blah.  I asked God if He was sure I should write about this, just in case you are wondering He said yes.  So I wrote it.  Madre, Padre if you read this I apologize for any facts I may have gotten wrong or anything I might not have remembered accurately.  Everyone else, here’s my Gram’s story and my family’s storm story.

MY GRANDMOTHER NEYSA

I was in the fourth grade when Gram got sick; at least that’s what my Madre tells me.  My personal memories of when exactly Gram got sick are fuzzy.  I remember hearing about an incident which I think got the whole crazy train started where Mall Security in California had to call my dad to get the license plate number of my Gram’s vehicle because she had forgotten where she parked it and had left my 90-some-odd-year-old great-grandmother in the van in the middle of summer.  But I don’t remember how old I was.  It had to have been around fourth or fifth grade because my bro and I were still being home-schooled and were still living in Mountain City, Nevada.  And then I remember hearing something about how Gram and Granny had been surviving off of grilled-cheese sandwiches and that Gram had been spending all of her money on useless pointless things.  The next thing I remember is driving up to California and moving her and Granny out of their house.  I remember how at the time I thought that was the worst thing ever because I loved Gram’s house and was so disappointed that we had to sell it.  Turns out that wasn’t the worst thing ever.  So we moved her and Granny to Mountain City with us.  It was a tiny town about a day from good medical facilities and any sort of civilization.  I don’t remember when Gram was officially diagnosed but I remember it was difficult to get someone to definitively diagnose her.  All the freaking doctors wouldn’t commit or couldn’t agree on what was wrong with her or if there was even anything wrong with her.  Even when it was obvious they kept saying oh it’s nothing to worry about its just old age.  Finally one of the doctors gave us a name for the thing that was killing my Gram: Alzheimer’s.  We had no idea what to expect.  I mean you always hear people joke about having Alzheimer’s when they get a little forgetful, but it doesn’t come close to the actual nightmare of the disease.  It eats away a person’s mind.  They forget in sort of a timeline.  The earliest or most present stuff goes first and then the latest or past stuff goes.  It’s painful to watch and I’m sure it must be terrifying to go through.  And then there are all these nice little side-effects that no one ever warns you about.  Gram became paranoid; we had to keep her from watching the television because she couldn’t distinguish reality from fantasy and would try and call the cops, she hallucinated and worst of all, in my opinion, her personality changed.  We had to lock the house up at night because she’d wake up, not remember or recognize where she was and wander around the streets.  We moved from Mountain City to Spring Creek (which is a suburb of Elko, Nevada) after a few months so that we could be closer to medical facilities and nursing homes when the time came.  Granny moved in with relatives in New Mexico. At the time I didn’t understand why she did that but thinking back on it now I don’t blame her.  Can you imagine watching your child lose their mind, their memories until nothing is left?  Anyway so Granny moved to New Mexico and Gram was with us.  My memories of this entire thing are kind of fractured.  I believe that I separated school and friends into a different space from home, family and Gram.  So even though I remember them all happening in the same place I’ve segregated the time period it all happened in.  It was easier for me to deal with it that way.

There are a number of small incidents that I remember most clearly.  Little snapshots in my mind that show what Alzheimer’s did to my Gram.  She used to be the sort of Grandmother that’s the cause for all those T-shirts saying “spoiled by Grandma” and stuff like that.  Gram always had these little jars of candy around her house that my bro and I had full, free access to.  She would let us eat breakfast in front of the television on weekends and watch cartoons.  During the weekday (we lived with her for a time) when it was just me and her and Granny after I had finished my bowl of cereal she would pour some more milk in my bowl because I loved drinking the milk that was leftover and there was never enough.  She used to take me with her to her Salon appointments and the ladies would let me sit on the floor and play with my toy horse, Beauty.  My bro and I pretty much owned her backyard and she would let us use her bathtub sometimes which was like getting chocolate for dinner.  She was the one I remember telling me that scabs were God’s band-aid.  And then she got sick.  I remember watching her walk down our hallway with her walker tilted up one side and when my mom tried to get her to put the walker down so she wouldn’t fall she got mad and insisted that she was walking on a hill.  Our house was level.  I remember one particularly bad afternoon she stood in the kitchen and put her head between her knees because she said there were bugs in her head and that was the only way to stop them.  My brother yelled at her.  Told her it wasn’t bugs that she had Alzheimer’s and was forgetting everything.  I think he was angry, whether it was at her or God I don’t know.  I don’t remember being mad, just heartbroken.  I don’t think it was until years later that I realized I was angry.  But not at God or Gram, I think I was angry at my parents for taking her in, for not putting her in a nursing home sooner, for always being responsible and not taking the easy way out.  I remember her walking out of her room with her shirt unbuttoned and when we tried to tell her she got mad, told us her shirt was buttoned and wouldn’t let my mom help her so instead we convinced her to change her shirt and to let me and mom help pick out a new one.  I remember her and my mom arguing a lot.  I remember her walking into my room once, I was in bed and she asked me what I was doing in her room.  I tried telling her it wasn’t her room but she didn’t believe me and kept asking me why I was in her room.  It wasn’t until mom and dad came over and confirmed what I was saying that she finally remembered and then she tried playing it off saying something like “I knew this wasn’t my room I was just checking on her (me).”  We all pretended we knew that.  I remember her getting sick more than once and taking her to the hospital where she hallucinated a little boy sitting on her plate “helping her eat” her meat and another visit where she punched my mom.  I remember the last straw the incident that prompted my parents to finally put her in a nursing home.  There was this huge fight between her, dad and mom.  I sat in the bathroom the whole time crying and just praying it would stop.  Mom found me and her and dad talked and decided it was time to put Gram in the nursing home.  None of this was helped by her paranoia at several points over the course of the year or so she was living with us she became convinced that we were trying to kill her and in turn convinced one of my uncles who then turned around and told us we were, not only gold-digging murderers, but damned and non-existent in God’s eyes.  She was in the nursing home for I think it was two years.

There were a few good things that happened during this time.  There was this one time we went out to eat at a local restaurant, it was one of her good days.  We had almost finished eating; my mom had a piece of steak left over and had given to my brother (the bottomless pit).  Well he had to go to the restroom so he left the table and my grandmother reached over and oh so innocently took the leftover piece of mom’s steak off of my bro’s plate and set it in her lap.  My brother came back and sat down and looked down at his plate.  The steak was gone.  He looked over at my mom with this look like “what did you do?  Why would you do that?”  And then my Gram held up the piece of steak and went “Na-na-na-na,” tauntingly.  We cracked up.  It was hilarious.  The only other good memory of have of her during all that time is after she went into a nursing home down in Colorado.  We spent Christmas that year with her and family members from my dad’s side of the family.  It was the last time I saw not only Gram but one of my uncles and his family (he was the one that thought we were of the devil).  It was both the best and worst Christmas.  It started badly in my opinion; firstly she didn’t recognize us you could tell because she’d smile at you with this sort of vacant expression.  And then she opened a present from someone that was a picture frame with pictures of family in it.  Seemed like a good idea until she saw a picture of my uncle E who had died a year or so earlier from a heart-attack and she looked up and asked us where he was.  We had to tell her that he had passed away.  The look on her face made me want to hit someone, her heart broke all over again.  But then we went to my other uncles’ house (uncle R) to open the presents from him and my family.  Gram was still confused.  She kept asking how we were going to get everything back to Nevada.  We just kept saying don’t worry, we’ll manage it.  And then there was this one point in the evening Gram had just finished opening one of the presents we were just kind of milling around, I was sitting next to Gram.  At that point I had pretty much checked out mentally and was just floating.  Gram put her hand on my arm and clear as a bell said “(my name) can you get me a glass of water?”  I checked back in pretty quickly and said, “Sure Gram,” walked into the kitchen and cried.  I remember telling my mom and I think she hugged me.  I remember thanking God, just telling Him thank you.  That was the last time I saw Gram alive.  I know she got progressively worse.  She forgot how to use a phone, forgot that she’d been married twice and then she forgot how to chew.  After that I began ignoring the constant updates, or at least pretending I was ignoring them.  But I heard it all, she developed Parkinson’s and her muscles atrophied, she stopped dyeing her hair, she lost a lot of weight and then she died.  I didn’t even cry.  I was relieved, maybe even glad.  It was the second time during this whole ordeal that I thanked God.  It sounds horrible but I just wanted it to be over, I wanted her to be at peace and for all of this to be done.  I was happy that she had gone home, she was whole again and I knew God would take care of her now.  Just like He had taken care of me and my family, I count it among one of the miracles of my life that we managed to survive as a family through Gram’s illness.  God managed to keep us together and keep us strong, that wasn’t the first (or last) storm we went through as a family.  But we survived (and continue to do so).  Thank God.