Remembering the heavy toll of depression, but also the very real possibilities of a new life and new beginnings in Daydreaming on the Porch

Flash back to the end of summer, 2017, one of those fatefully significant years in my life. I had retired only a few months before, and I was having a hard time feeling connected with people since my job and career of 21 years had ended.

The 5 1/2 years since then now seem like an eternity: I lost my mother, and then came the nightmarish years of the pandemic when I was a afraid to go anywhere indoors and avoided contact with people, isolating myself, a loner to begin with, now of necessity even more so than in the past.

For seven years before I retired, I was the primary caregiver as my mother gradually declined with dementia. I had worked full time as well, with the help of part-time home aides. I didn’t have any time at all to dwell on the larger existential questions of life. But all of a sudden when I retired, I had to get up each day and carry on with my duties of caregiving, having no job or social life to give me other purposes for living. Sometime I wonder how I coped and managed to be a caregiver for so long. But I know for certain it was all possible because of the love and devotion I had for my mother, who gave me life, and loved me and my siblings more than anything in the world.

Then, in the Fall of 2017, I started slipping into depression, and it caught me off guard because I thought I was coping so well. By December I hardly wanted to come out of my room, but I did continue to fulfill my responsibilities to my mother, who by that time depended on me for everything.

I have experienced the very worst effects depression can have on a person, going back 45 years to when I was in my late 20s. With my earlier-in life-episodes of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), I could at least partially discern the situational and environmental causes, even if they seemed horrifically bizarre and totally inexplicable. But this was different.

I wrote this in my Dementia Journal, November 9, 2017:

…I now wake up most mornings feeling depressed and wondering when I will free from the anguish and tribulations of seeing a loved deal with dementia. I steel myself for another day of being at home helping the caregivers with Mom as the dementia progresses and I lose a little bit more of her week by week and month by month. I keep hoping it won’t get too much worse for her, that things will level out. But each morning also as I get up up for the day and see her beautiful smile, I feel hopeful, even if I’ve gotten up with her three or four times that night and early morning. All the dementia agony and confusion recedes for a time during the morning when there’s lucidity and awareness.

Once I finally get up and fix breakfast and coffee (it seems like such a burdensome chore when you are fighting off depression) the dark clouds lift a bit as I look out on our back yard flooded with sunlight…

And I recorded this Dementia Journal, dated December 17, 2017:

…One has to look at depression as not only a medical or biological condition (and I’ve always struggled with this idea), but also as a spiritual and religious experience. In periods of depression throughout my life I have had to confront the most urgent questions about life’s purpose, good and evil, and the nature of mental anguish, whatever the cause, and why some of us must go through such terrible suffering. In years past, after long months of struggle and then slow healing and awakening as from a deep sleep, I have come out into the light transformed — hopeful, optimistic, and happy than I had ever been. It seems paradoxical, but it isn’t. It makes perfect sense.

I hope and pray a new path in life awaits, this time during my final years when my life’s work is done and I realize there will come a time when I see everything clearly…

A finally a month later, this:month later, this:

Dementia Journal, Jan. 18, 2018 — the hope of new beginnings

Mornings are more bearable in this new year, and as the days unfold, I feel a certain level of confidence returning as long as I dwell on, and live primarily in, the multitude of present moments that make up each day…

Now it’s late summer 2023, a summer full of terrifying foreshadowings of human-caused climate change as wildfires destroy huge areas of Canada; heat waves persist in the hottest summer the planet has experienced in 120,000 years; extreme floods wreak havoc all over the globe; the oceans are overheating; and a heat wave is reported in the middle of winter in the southern part of South America. Unprecedented.

I live alone now. No job or caregiving responsibilities. But this summer has changed what might have been a carefree season of good memories, into a time of anxiety and foreboding.

And in the past week, I have been dealing with the awful and unexpected news of a loved one’s own battle with the most frightening kind of depression. My mental and emotional foundations are shaking and quivering with dread of the unknown and what’s ahead for her. I am having flashbacks to my own terrible battles with depression. But, as when I was for years caring for my mother and keeping depression at bay, so, too, must I be strong now and have hope that this precious loved one will emerge from her dark tunnel and be whole again. Depression fragments and attacks the very core of one’s being and sense of self. But she is a very strong person, and I will be there for her any way I can. She will overcome this.

Last updated August 10, 2023