Villanelle: Kenyon; Update on Depression

Kenyon

My dog limps, so I wrap his leg with tape
His aging has accelerated now.
It’s months, not years, until his great escape.

My wife, she weeps to see him in such shape;
I miss the playfulness he used to show.
My dog limps, so I wrap his leg with tape.

When he sleeps I don’t know if he will wake.
To die asleep might be the kindest blow.
It’s months, not years, until his great escape.

Sometimes he stares out into the landscape
And stops as if confused, and I allow.
My dog limps so I wrap his leg with tape.

When he squats to poop, his hips will shake
Making it difficult for him to do.
It’s months, not years, until his great escape.

Is it too soon or late for God to take
This creature we so loved from here below?
My dog limps, so I wrap his leg with tape.
It’s months, not years, until his great escape.


Not much to report today. It’s raining here. After the rain a mist will rise among the redwoods like the forest’s breath. The smell of wet trees and earth is the smell of life as much as the ocean’s, though I have long favored the ocean.

My medications have numbed me to a degree, but I can still feel the pit that is my heart under the mist. I try to be useful each day, though there is no pleasure in it. When I prepare to take up a new task, however mundane, my anxiety rises and the chatter of self-denigrating voices begins. I wish I had a nickel for every time my brain told me I’m worthless.
My psychiatrist talks about self-worth as if I only had to inhale it. He has no gift for those with severe affective disorders; talk therapy does no good, however skillful the practitioner. When my mood flips I don’t need it. When I’m in a down cycle, I’ll listen to nearly any suggestion out of desperation, even though I know only time, medication, or ECT will work in my case. Luckily I have a tentative appointment next week with a psychiatrist better versed in managing medications. Perhaps he can make the adjustments I need.

This sputtering depression is now seven months long, my longest since 1996. How I wish I could feel hope again! At least I have, in this most recent dip, been able to feel love for my wife. She is my anchor. If it were in me, I’d get well for her tomorrow, because she sees both me and Kenyon suffering and sometimes she can’t bear it. I’m tearing up as I write this, because one symptom of depression is sorrow over one’s effect on loved ones. You want to spare them the pain. This is a frequent justification for suicide in the depressive: “You’d all be better off without me.” In actuality this constitutes a narcissistic lie, and the act of suicide, outside of a terminal illness, is the most selfish act one can commit. Yet in the deepest of depressions it takes a powerful moral core not to give in to the option. I’m not troubled by thoughts of suicide as much as I was when I was younger and depressed; back then I had to wrestle with the question daily. Now, by long practice, it rarely enters my mind with any force. I have foresworn that option, one benefit of a lifelong struggle with this disease, which has over a 30% lifetime mortality if not properly treated.

Happy thoughts for a Friday, right? But I doubt people don’t come here for happy thoughts. I think they come to read the truth as best I can tell it, or possibly to sample a poem (though in my exercise in form I may at times be writing only verse).


At 3 Kilorats,

CE