I was sent home on Klonopin, an anti-anxiety drug I’d been on forever, as well as a duet of pills—Remeron and Effexor—that were referred to as “the California rocket blaster” for their presumed igniting effect. As it turned out, the combo didn’t ignite for me—or at least not in the way it was supposed to. At home, I was gripped once again by thoughts of suicide and clung to my bed, afraid to go out even on a walk around the block with my daughter. When I wasn’t asleep, I stared into space, lost in the terrors of the far-off past, which had become the terrors of the present. I was back with Jane, felt her as a scowling presence in the room. It was decided that I shouldn’t be left alone, so my sister and my friend Susan took turns staying with me. But it was clear this arrangement was a short-term one, and by the end of the weekend, after phone calls to various doctors, it was agreed that I would go back into the hospital on Monday to try ECT.
And then, the Sunday afternoon before I planned to return to 4 Center, something shifted ever so slightly in my mind. I’m not clear to this day what was the exact cause of the change—maybe it was the fear of ECT, or maybe the depression had finally run its course and was beginning to lift—but it might have been any one of a number of factors, or some combination of them. For one thing, I had gone off the Remeron and started on a new drug, Abilify, which was an antipsychotic that had been found to facilitate antidepressant medication when taken in small doses. In my desperation I had also gone to see Dr. C., an old psychiatrist of mine—the one who had persuaded me to go into the hospital when Zoë was a little girl—who was doing research on new treatments for intractable depression and had given me some OxyContin on the sly.
The under-the-table aspect of the transaction had to do with OxyContin’s reputation for being addictive and much-abused, and also because there was no official protocol for using an opiate to treat depression. So Dr. C. was going out on a limb in giving it to me, which even in my abject state touched me. As I recall, there was some theoretical basis to his doing so, having to do with the workings of the pineal gland—or maybe it was the amygdala—but in any case I didn’t begin to understand Dr. C.’s explanation of why the OxyContin might work. What I did know was that it made sense to me that a pill that relieved physical pain might also relieve emotional pain: it seemed like an obvious connection that had been overlooked in the rush to deconstruct depression, or to avoid providing false “highs” as an antidote.
Dr. C. had instructed me to take two OxyContins in the morning and two in the evening, like aspirin. By early Sunday afternoon I was feeling a bit calmer, and my bedroom didn’t seem like such an alien place anymore. The ghost of Jane was nowhere in sight. For a brief interval, no one was home, and I decided to get up and go outside. I stopped at the Food Emporium and studied the cereal section, as amazed at the array as if I had just emerged from the gulag. I bought some paper towels and strawberries, and then I walked home and got back into bed. It wasn’t a trip to the Yucatán, but it was a start. I didn’t check into the hospital the next day, or the day after that.
I spent the rest of the summer slowly reinhabiting my life, coaxing myself along. Admittedly, I would often yearn to be back in the hospital—some new hospital, that is, yet to be discovered. There was still a part of me that wondered whether the mistake wasn’t, in fact, mine—whether it was simply a matter of my having chosen the wrong place, like choosing the wrong husband, and that there was still a “right” hospital waiting out there for me, overlooked until now. True, they undoubtedly didn’t offer the sort of mental cleansing I longed for, like a colonic for the psyche, flushing out all that was stale and foul inside you. Yet the fantasy of a formalized cure—one that would take place in some hushed, white-on-white setting—was like a resistant strain of psychological virus, impervious to corrective doses of reality.
Even though I returned to the idea of the hospital as a theoretical refuge when my mood sank, I lasted out the summer. Toward the end of August I went for a few days to the rented Southampton house of my friend Elizabeth. It was just her, me, and her three annoying dachshunds. I had brought a novel along, The Gathering, by Anne Enright, the sort of book about incomplete people and unhappy families that has always spoken to me. It was the first book to absorb me—the first I could read at all—since before I went into the hospital. I came to the last page on the third afternoon of my visit. It was about 4:30, the time of day that, by mid-August, brings with it a whiff of summer’s end. I looked up into the startlingly blue sky; one of the dogs was sitting by my side, her warm body against my leg, drying me off after the swim I had recently taken. I could begin to see the curve of fall up ahead. There would be new books to read, new films to see, and new restaurants to try with friends. I envisioned myself writing again, and it didn’t seem like a totally preposterous idea. I had things I wanted to say.
32
As is appropriate for someone obsessed with the past, the end of the year often has me looking nostalgically backward rather than making shiny resolutions for the year to come. Frequently this habit has been legitimized by writing up one of the dead luminaries being memorialized in The New York Times’s annual “The Lives They Lived” issue (also called the Death Issue by those on the inside). What do the departed figures I’ve written about have in common, aside from the relative noteworthiness of their passing? I suppose it could be said that they all, in their way, suffered from intermittent depression, a depression unsuccessfully kept at bay with drugs and food and drink and the analgesic of fame. The year my mother died, it was Patricia Lawford; the year before, it was Sandra Dee; before that, Marlon Brando; and before that, Linda Lovelace.
For someone like me who has a soft spot for all wounded birds, it is, in its way, the perfect assignment—a last-ditch chance to salvage these misunderstood and abused figures and make them sympathetic to the wider world—and in a mere eight hundred to one thousand words! I dove into this quixotic endeavor with haphazard zeal, reading dozens of articles and books, gathering enough information on Patricia Lawford, say, for a dissertation, hoping to find a path through what looked to be an occluded life: not precisely tragic but not soaring, either, a life that hovered mostly in the wings of larger lives. “But as is true of many powerful families,” I wrote, “the house of Kennedy was as much gilded prison as swanky enclave … Indeed, you could ask whether Patricia, who had considerable gifts beside her patrician good looks and her dedication to the Kennedy legend, might have carved out an identity more definably her own had she been born into a family that valued its female members for something other than their procreative potential and skill at facilitating male ambition.” I was speaking for the silenced part of Patricia Lawford, but undoubtedly I had other women in mind, as well—not least my own mother.
This particular December, however, a few years after my mother died, writing anything at any length is impossible. It has all come hurtling back at me. The sudden descent of the black season, the maximum darkness of it, just when you think you might be free at last, is one of its worst aspects. All the incriminating, scrambling thoughts pour back in, chasing each other, ruthless in their sniping insistence. You’re a failure. A burden. Useless. Objectionable. Your shit smells worse than other people’s. Self-extinction: the black light at the end of the tunnel of depression, a ghastly glow winking every bit as seductively as the green light at the end of Jay Gatsby’s pier. Come here and rest a while with me, it says. Abandon all struggle.
Always, for me, it comes back to this question: Where do you go when you’re depressed? That’s the heart of the problem, isn’t it? You can’t disappear inside your own skin, although that would be ideal. Nor can you lie low and hole up in your room forever, like Henry James’s sister, Alice. Once upon a time people went on months-long ocean voyages for just such reasons—or at least they did in movies and novels—but nowadays the only form of legitimate convalescence on offer is by way of psychiatric hospitals, which, as I’ve learned, come with their own horrors and limitations. I end up by seeking out the sanct
uary of my bed, where I have wandering, wistful dreams in which I move to another country with a brood of children and spend my spare time gardening, an activity I have never attempted in real life. Sometimes I simply lie with my eyes closed, like a person recuperating from a grave shock.
On the day leading up to New Year’s Eve, I sleep until two in the afternoon instead of four. It is dark before I know it and somehow or other I put on a dab or two of makeup, pull on clothes, affix pearl earrings, slip on festive pumps rather than my usual worn-out sneakers or loafers. For a minute earlier in the afternoon, I thought I would try to hurl myself into print once again, begin work on a profile I owe and thereby hitch my faltering wagon to the star of someone more determined, of adamantine will, calling on my skills to give shape to someone else’s existence. Except that I no longer believe in these skills other than in the most theoretical of ways. My writerly self slides so easily off the page when I’m not actually hovering over the keyboard; it is a professional identity I still inhabit only fleetingly when I am feeling good, no matter how often I appear in print, and at times like these not at all.
I go to witness the fireworks in Central Park, near Seventy-second Street, thanks to A.’s invitation, after a civilized old-New-York type of dinner where I talk about civilized concerns—children and schools and plays to see—with a group of people I barely know. Reasons to live, as opposed to reasons to die. Now, shortly past midnight, I stare into the exploding bursts of color: red-white-blue, squiggles of green, streaks of purple, balls of silver, sparks of champagne. Zoë is standing nearby, with my friend B., and as I look into the fireworks I send out entreaties into the sky. Make me better. Make me remember this moment of absorption in fireworks, the energy of the thing. Stop listening for drum rolls. Pay attention to the ordinary calls to engage, messages on your answering machine telling you to buck up, it’s not so bad—from the ex, siblings, friends who care. Make me go forward.
33
As I write this, it is 2011, and my mother has been dead for five years. The globe spins on and on, a tsunami devastates Japan, governments topple in far off-places, elections are held somewhere else. A woman in her seventies, a writer of delicate yet searing novels, sits perfectly still in her living room on Central Park West, CNN or Al Jazeera on in the background, unable to envision life without her husband of many years, who died over a year ago after a long illness. This woman is a good friend of mine, whose sadness I willingly enter into. “I can’t believe it,” she says, “I can’t believe he’s not here.” I sympathize with her confusion in the face of the absoluteness of death, the irretrievable gone-ness of dead people.
Who’s to say how long mourning should last? We live in speeded-up times but our limbic systems, where our feelings reside, operate as they always have, largely unaffected by the passage of days, months, even years. No matter that my mother’s body must be dust at this point, I’m still having it out with her in my head, dodging her criticisms, her sharp-eyed and mostly disapproving scrutiny—when I’m not thinking that I can’t go on living without her.
I remember a May fifteen or so years ago, when I was in my early forties and heading downward into another bad period. After my father’s death, my mother had started spending months at a time in her apartment in Jerusalem. Now I fled my city for hers, looking for my mother, looking for a mother who was not my mother, looking to save myself from being caught in the eye of the storm once again. What had kicked it off this time? Some admixture of rage and loneliness, something gone wrong in the world both inside and out. I had stopped eating, pretty much stopped speaking, and the inner voice that popped up at times like these telling me to kill myself was operating at full volume once again.
I left my daughter in the care of my ex-husband and a devoted housekeeper and somehow propelled myself onto a plane. I trusted El Al to keep me safe, at least temporarily, even if I couldn’t do the same on my own behalf. Upon arrival, I decided, I would either jump out a window—the window of my mother’s apartment on a high floor in an apartment-hotel on King George Street, with a balcony overlooking the Old City—or I’d make her make me better. Sometimes she could make me feel better merely by admitting she’d done some things wrong, even though contrition certainly wasn’t her long suit. And sometimes she could make me feel better just by being there, even now, when I was no longer a child.
I arrive in Israel in the evening and find myself unable to sleep for more than an hour or two that night, despite having gulped down enough sleeping pills to stun a horse for days. Now I am awake at 5:00 a.m., the sun not yet risen, standing over my mother’s bed.
Who in God’s name was she? I have spent decades trying to put the jigsaw of her maddeningly self-contradictory personality together, but there is something intrinsically elusive about her. Why did she have so many children, especially with a husband who needed so much caretaking himself? Why wasn’t she concerned about any of us in an ordinary, motherly fashion? She never worried that we weren’t dressed warmly enough, for instance, or cared how we did in school. Why had no one stopped her in time, forcibly separated her from the children she failed to protect from her own predatory instinct? She has imbued me with a savagery toward myself that no external source can match.
“You blighted my life. I didn’t have a chance.” I tell my mother this, half yelling, half crying, lacking all dignity, crazed by some pain eating me up, by the angry dogs barking at me from inside. “You blighted my life,” I repeat.
My mother has recently had a quintuple bypass but she will outlive me, I am convinced of it, coming from tough German-Jewish stock as she does. I know that the same renowned psychoanalyst who had described my mother as “phallic” had also compared her to a type of mythic bird that eats its young, but, as always, I can’t see how someone else’s recognition of my mother’s acute destructiveness is of any help, especially after the fact. She is too tough—she’s always been too tough—and in return I am too soft, a creature without inner resources, without a spine.
“You destroyed me, all of us.” I am screaming at her now, in the darkness of her bedroom where we sleep next to each other, side by side on twin beds, just as she and my father once did. The light is slowly beginning to break through, bringing with it another relentlessly sunny Jerusalem day.
I feel that I have lost everything; I have gotten myself this far and now it is over. There is no future beyond now, and in the now that is forever I am useless. Worse than useless: worthless. I face my mother with my pent-up grief and rage: Why have I had to live with this darkness for so long, since I was a child, this debilitating dragon that hurls itself at me although no one can see it? It is she who has arranged it this way, she who blights me.
My mother, who is in her mid-seventies, is wearing a lightly flowered cotton nightgown that stops somewhere in the vicinity of her knees. She has gotten out of bed and stands before me with a cup of tea, telling me everything will be all right, that I’ve felt this way before and always come out of it. There is something strangely comforting in her recognition of the emotions that roil me even as she remains unflustered by the accusations I fling at her. Perhaps I am too easily mollified, but the fact is that she is not as unaware of my turmoil as she acts—or as I choose to believe. There is nothing she doesn’t know, nothing that will undo her. Perhaps this resilience is what she offers instead of a more recognizable form of love, a stoic willingness to stand guard and see me through the depths. I feared the day when she’d be gone and I’d have no one left to catch my tears as they spilled, wild amounts coming out of me, a fountain of sorrow.
* * *
Meanwhile, I’m trying hard, really I am. What, you may ask, does “trying” consist of? Primarily it involves separating myself from the me that is depressed—flying above it, so to speak, like a plane that has lifted off the tarmac. Trying is going on, is forced engagement with the trivial and less trivial forces of my everyday life. I answer the phone, return emails, shower, set myself to writing a magazine piece on a new noni
nvasive form of plastic surgery, a face-lift done without the aid of a scalpel. The minutiae of things, unless I am flat on the floor, good for nothing but hospitalization, arouse my curiosity, take me momentarily away from this ongoing, obsessive monologue: Do I live or do I die? (I fear I am getting old for this, in any case. “For interest passes,” Philip Larkin observed in his poem “Neurotics,” “Always toward the young and more insistent.” It’s one thing to want to do away with yourself in your twenties, when life dangles tantalizingly before you; another thing entirely to consider suicide in middle age, when life has settled in, for better and worse, and what was it you were expecting, anyway?)
Details absorb me, act like a balm on my festering psyche, details that I will then put back into circulation by writing a piece around them: it might be an article on looking for a girdle or a review of a new novel on the Lodz ghetto or a profile of Tom Stoppard or Cate Blanchett or Alice Munro for The New York Times Magazine, someone or something sufficiently intriguing to distract me from my own innards.
My hope being, I think, that I will concern myself with said subject long enough to put distance between me and the darkness. Just the other week, for instance, while I was talking on the phone with Diane Keaton for a story, I felt myself caught up in her excitement about the visual world, her love of everything from houses to Navajo blankets to the shapes of certain letters, the way images speak so profoundly to her. For a moment I felt her energy rub off on me; I saw myself chasing around for the perfect basket, dashing downtown for a piece of curtain fabric. For a moment, that is, I was all motion, a figure streaking across the landscape. But, of course, I hadn’t moved an inch, I was sitting at my desk, in front of my computer, not about to go anywhere, not even dressed to go outside.
This Close to Happy Page 21
