June is a wise woman. She’s bright
and educated. She’s a mover and shaker, a talented writer and poet, working all
of her life for one worthy cause or another, and with a strong faith commitment.
Yet she struggled for years in the relationship with her husband. His chronic
depression was as present in their marriage as a mistress. Her faithfulness to
her marriage vows kept her moving through her life with a person that couldn’t
or wouldn’t live his with her.
In that great *Ben E. King hit that
we grew up with, the question is asked, “Won’t you stand by me?” But can you?
At what cost to you?
1If you are an adult aged 45-64, you are more likely than any
other age group to have a diagnosis of depression. If you are a woman, then you
are twice as likely to have depression, and symptoms of depression, as men of
the same age. Depression is a condition that affects 1 in every 10
Americans.
According to 2PsychCentral,
“Depression has a much greater impact on marital life than rheumatoid arthritis
or cardiac disease.” However, aren’t our lives so much better when we share
them with someone we love? So what do you do when the one you love goes into
that dark place and won’t let you in?
I invite you to read June’s poetic
telling of her own experience as she wrote it titled Married for Life. I post it here with her permission.
Married for Life
It came to
her in a dream nearly twenty years after his death. Neither physical abuse nor
infidelity, at least not the kind that involved another person, took the breath
from their marriage. It did not end
with a Big Bang of emotion that skyrocketed both of them into new orbits, into
being new creations. Like the creation
of the Grand Canyon, their marriage eroded from tiny drops of dripping indifference
falling on the bedrock of their life together.
Death came in infinitesimal amounts of unshared moments. Their marriage
died of benign neglect.
There were
moments when she could feel big chunks of her fall away. He would be driving, then begin laughing
softly to himself. She could see from
the light of the dashboard that his lips were curved into a smile. For the moment, his face would light up. How she yearned to be a part of that joyful
interior world.
“Tell me
what is so funny,” she would say.
The smile would
fade, the light disappear from his face, as he re-entered a shared world. All joy, good humor had flown from his face
and the blank, lifelessness of depression returned.
Startled
out of his interior scene, he would take a moment to make the transition from
his world to hers. Upset that
she would interrupt the fleeting moment of escape.
“Nothing,”
he would curtly reply, usually, spoken so softly she could barely hear it.
Other times, he would just look straight ahead and say nothing. His unspoken
resentment hung in the air. She had brought him back to a world he found hard
to endure.
All the
frustration of living with someone who would not or could not help themselves
tore another big piece out of her soul, leaving her helpless, hopeless, and
terribly alone. Such is the price of depression, of mental illness. Without intervention, the erosion continues
until the one who holds the fragments together, gives way. January 15, l992,
she left. She left for good.
The dream had
brought back that all-too-familiar sense of inadequacy, of helplessness, the
futility of living in a marriage alone.
The someone you are traveling with becomes a vapor, a spirit slowly
disappearing, evaporating into non-existence. He was no longer available to her
as a partner, in any sense. She hadn’t
known she could live without love for so long and probably wouldn’t have if it
had not been for her son.
She didn’t remember or record the day it
finally happened. That momentous day
when the eroded rock of despair fell away and a new self began to form. She had been at it so long, numbed by it,
that at first, she did not recognized that she was changing. After all, she married for life. Then, one day, she knew. She knew that if she were to live, she would
have to leave.
Twenty years later, the dream visited
upon her, came to her clearly. Which was a surprise since she remembered those
days as days she lived in an uncertain mist and unmapped fog. As she looked back, she could clearly
pinpoint events the two events that led her down the road. Her father had died and roads were muddy. If that had not been so, she was sure she
would not have had the strength or felt the rightness of it. She might never have left, but her father did
die and the roads were muddy. On
reflection, she could see that those two events had been the tunnel of
opportunity through which she propelled herself into a new life. She re-birthed herself.
If you know someone who may benefit
from this article, please forward to them. They and you are welcome to join the
conversation at wisewomenofage.blogspot.com . You can also enter your email address above and you will
receive an email each time I post a new topic on this blog.
You can
learn more about depression and marriage at:
Through
compassion, you will find that all human beings are just like you. - Dalai Lama
