/karen/

Living with depression

Friday, 10 October, 2003

It's hard to blog about this because it's a shifting thing. Some days I'm okay and I think I can manage. Other days I feel like going to pieces. I can feel completely different about it, hour to hour, day to day. That Ben has depression often makes me feel incredibly sad. I am tempted to ask, “Why him? Why now?” but I think I know the answers. “Treat him as though he's got the flu,” is the advice I've been given. Why? Because it's not my fault that he's down; he's just down. Because he needs time to recover and let the disease work itself out. Because he needs some good medicine prescribed by a professonal, not by an amateur quack like myself. I can't solve his problems. I can't help him to feel better. I can do all the things that I'd do if he had the flu—cook him meals, do his laundry, pick up after him, bring him a glass of water—but I can't fight the flu itself. It's frustrating.

These days he's taken to haunting secondhand CD shops and picking up bargains which he promptly burns to MP3. I expressed my concerns about him listening to such depressing music and he said that it gives expression to how he feels. I listen to them for clues. He does not talk to me about it because he's afraid he'll hurt me but he forgets that he hurts me by not talking about it and shutting himself away. I pick up more on how he's going by listening to him talk to other people or by reading his blog.

That he is sad makes me sad. There's no way around that. It's only natural, after all. Depression is grieving, someone once said to me. “Grief. Grief beyond imagining!“ says Charles Guiteau in Assassins (all right, he wasn't talking about depression). I can't help but worry about him. When this is going on, I can't be happy all the time. Stop telling me to cheer up. Stop telling me to smile. Stop giving me advice; I've had plenty of advice. People give advice because they feel helpless. Perhaps the best way to help is to listen.

If you really know your stuff, then you'll know that suffering is to be expected in this fallen world. The best thing we can do is prepare for it, says Don Carson in How Long, O Lord?—by getting our thinking about God right before it happens. And I know I have; I trust in him who has power and authority even over this fallen world. What keeps me going is that I know that this is all temporary—that, even if Ben does not recover in this lifetime, all his cares and burdens will be gone in the next.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

Revelation 21:1-4 (ESV)

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