How do I get through my bouts of depression?
With the help of friends and lovers.
A special welcome to anyone who is new to The Grieving Room. We meet every Monday evening. Whether your loss is recent or many years ago, whether you have lost a person or a pet, or even if the person you are mourning is still alive ("pre-grief" can be a very lonely and confusing time) you can come to this diary and process your grieving in whatever way works for you. Share whatever you need to share. We can't solve each other's problems, but we can be a sounding board and a place of connection.
Here is the link to all the previous Grieving Room diaries: The Grieving Room Diaries
Join me below the fold for examples of the help I get from my friends and lovers.
I have a short list of friends:
My sister-in-law, Shelly
my co-worker, Donna
my would-be girlfriend, Karen
an old friend of an old friend, Lori
and my girlfriend, Beverly.
On my Mondays and Wednesdays, my two days off, when I need help avoiding loneliness and depression, this has become my routine:
Lori bangs on my door, and I drag out of bed. She comes in and waits for me to get dressed. She asks me for a ride to the store, for some minor item, or she wants a ride to her daughter's house, or to get her flu shot.
The challenge then is to avoid eating out. Last time, I invited Lori to come back to my place, to eat some of my leftovers. She did not like my leftovers. It was a stew of:
lentils
cabbage
turnips
onions
celery
water
salt
oil
brown sugar
It had been in my cast iron dutch oven in my refrigerator for a few days. It had turned black, from the cast iron. She ate a little bit of it, and turned down the rest. I also served turnip greens, with salt and oil. It was a little oversalted, but it tastes nasty with too little salt. I have no children, but I felt like a parent urging a small child to eat her stew and vegetables:
"It looks bad, it looks so black!"
"It is just the iron. It is good for you. Just eat it."
"The greens are too salty!"
"It tastes worse if it is undersalted. Just eat it."
Oh well.
You may wonder why I am writing about such a mundane and boring little meal. But consider: For thirty years, I would sit down beside my very disabled wife, and feed her a meal that she had chosen, and eat some myself, side by side, husband and wife, day after day, for thirty years. This silly interaction with Lori is one little sample of how I am trying to build a new life. You may notice, that even though I was not happy with lori's reaction to the meal I served her, I was not crying. And I was not eating alone. And, an interesting note, Lori is not even my girlfriend. Before I sat down to eat, I called my girlfriend. It was a few minutes after 8pm. My girlfriend, who lives right next door, did not answer. I was angry, that she apparently had gone to sleep before 8pm, and was sleeping so soundly that she could not wake up and answer the phone. Keep in mind, she is disabled, and she has no job outside her home. So, she has no one outside her home imposing any particular bedtime on her. She knows that I am a night owl. But she failed to stay up past 8pm. Oh well.
All this may seem incredibly petty, but I am trying to paint a picture of how I am struggling to balance the needs and desires of my friend, Lori, with the needs and desires of my girlfriend, Beverly, and the needs and desires of myself. I never made friends in my high school years. So, I never had a circle of friends, with one of them as my girlfriend, until now. Most of you probably know how to balance the needs of friends and girlfriends and self. I am struggling with that. But, the most important point, is that I am keeping up the good fight, rather than giving in to despair and loneliness.
My girlfriend, Beverly, likes to get together with me at about 3 or 4 am. It is a sexist joke to say that she is the ideal girlfriend: She only wants me for sex. But it is a bad joke, because I want friendhip with my girlfriend, not just sex. What I miss about my wife is the deep, powerful friendship we had together.
But, for now, I am getting a great deal of my friendship with Lori and Donna, and my sex, along with a smaller, but growing, friendship, with Beverly. It seems very strange to me. But in an hour or so from writing these words, I will call Beverly, and get her to come over to my place. I better get off the computer, and take a shower, and get ready.
Update.
I am writing this on Monday night, Tuesday morning, the 16th of December. A few hours ago, I spent an hour or so visiting my brother. The last time I had talked with him before that was the 11th of March, the day my wife died.
My brother lives in the same city as myself, but I find it very hard to contact him. He never returns my calls, but he explained that he gets too many messages on his voicemail, and only the ten most recent are there when he looks, and he gets so many calls about business, that mine are never there. So, the only way to contact him is to go to his house, and hope to catch him at home. And that is what I did.
So, I got a chance to spend an hour or so with my brother, and his son-in-law, and his granddaughter, my great niece. She is three years old, and as cute as they come.
The conversation with my brother was great. He lets me ramble, saying what has been on my mind lately. I got some details about his son's new house, a house that he and his son, my nephew, built themselves, in Oklahoma City. I forgot to ask how many people they had helping them. I do not suppose they built the whole thing, just the two of them. The house is a ranch style, with full basement. Three bedrooms on the ground floor. Full finished basement. Three full bathrooms. That means all three bathrooms have tubs and showers. A half bath is just a toilet and sink.
Toward the last part of the visit, I broke down and cried. I cried as I told him that this coming Christmas would be the first Christmas with none of our family, and none of my wife's family. Since our parents are dead and gone, and since I cannot afford a trip to Hays to see my wife's family at this time.
It felt good to cry on my brother's shoulder. It felt good.
Update:
Christmas Eve.
My girlfriend is waiting for me next door. I thought about going to Midnight Mass. I went to Midnight Mass nearly every Christmas for about 35 years, because my wife was a Catholic, and I was a Catholic for about twenty years, from about 1979 until about 1999. So, I was thinking that might be a good idea. But I asked my girlfriend if she would go with me. She said no, and also, she wants us to exchange gifts tonight. I bought some egg nog from the liquor store. I want to share some egg nog with Beverly, and give her the Christmas bouqet I bought for her, and the $100 gift card. We may watch the Midnight Mass on TV.
Update:
I am writing this on Christmas night.
We did not watch midnight Mass last night. We enjoyed each other last night in the way that we like to do.
On Christmas Day, we went to her son's house, ate turkey and everything that goes with it. Then, we went to her daughter's house, in a small town just outside Wichita. There I got to meet and visit with most of my girlfriend's family. Her three children, her seven grandchildren, the two husbands of her daughters, and the parents of one of the husbands. We had ham and every kind of food and snack I could think of, including little smokies sausages simmering in a crock pot with some kind of sauce. The hostess, the lady of the house, my girlfriend's oldest daughter, was extra friendly with me, tolerating my long winded stories, including my limerick about my dog:
I have a young doggie named Joe,
who loves going out in the snow;
he trots and he runs,
and has so much fun,
my furry red doggie named Joe.
I had a moment of crying, missing my wife. Somebody gave me a Black Suede gift set. That is an Avon product. When I saw the Avon logo on the box, I started crying. Because my wife tried so hard for so many years, to sell Avon products. I tried to help her, but she never made any money to speak of.
It felt good to cry.
I am back home now. I am tired. I may play one game of Scrabble on my computer, then go to bed.
Update:
Happy New Year!
I had a small party at my place. It was odd, because my usual companion, Lori, decided to go to bed earlier, and did not come to my place. My girlfriend next door, Beverly, had promised earlier to come over, but she did not answer her phone. She was too deeply asleep. So, my old, would-be girlfriend, Karen, and a friend of hers, Tim, came over to my place. I served them red wine, and fed them chicken and rice:
oil
salt
water
two cans chicken
rice
carrots
onion
celery
garlic powder
They loved it.
They left just before midnight to set off fireworks. I called Beverly, woke her up, and went next door for a New Year's kiss. When I hold Beverly in my arms, she melts in my arms. She seems to feel she cannot get enough of me, when I am holding her.
All in all, I am feeling good. I feel a little awkward even posting at The Grieving Room. But then I think back to 2005, the first Thanksgiving I ever spent alone. I had moved out, into a motel room on the bad side of town, to reduce the stress of working hard full time, then coming home to demanding duties of caring for my wife. That idea backfired badly. I was so incredibly lonely and afraid, I went to the emergency room, thinking I was physically, terribly ill. I took months to get stable. Then, I had some setbacks in the last month before my wife died. I remember calling the suicide hotline. I have been gradually battling back from feeling suicidal for nearly a year. So, I have paid my dues to sing the blues.
The great diary last week by exmearden had such a great metaphor, I must revisit that metaphor. She wrote of a wooden bed she built. She did not have enough money to buy the lumber big enough to hold up, and the bed broke down. That is a metaphor for having unwise expectations for life. Exme can come here and correct me if I am way off.
Anyway I also built a homemade wooden platform bed, a king sized platfrom bed. I used scrap lumber, lumber that was left at our place by one of the workers who used to take care of my disabled wife. It was lumber that Larry, Pam's gay worker, had used to make huge signs for a gay pride parade and rally that Pam and I had marched in and attended.
I used ring shank nails that we bought 14 years ago to build a four feet by twenty feet ramp and a four feet by twelve feet porch for my wife, to make it easy for me to get her in and out of our mobile home in Houston, Texas, that was set up three feet off the ground.
The meaning behind the wooden bed metaphor, in my case, is that my wife gave me the solid foundation I needed to build my current relationships with my friends and lovers.
Thank you for reading.
One last update:
I cried last night, Sunday night. By the way, when I cry, I really screw up my face and let it loose. I cry like a baby. Sometimes, in the middle of the crying, I shout, like, "Hah!" When I see myself in the mirror, while crying, my face looks really hideous. If you want to know what I look like when not crying, watch the movie, The Bucket List. I look like Jack Nicholson with no hair and no makeup, as he looked in the scenes after he was told he had a brain tumor, in the hospital room. I look similar to that because I give myself a buzz cut, rather than paying someone to give me a normal haircut.
So, the reason I cried is that I was cooking, and the TV was on, and the plot of the TV show caused me to cry. I was cooking:
lentils
water
salt
oil
a whole head of cabbage
celery
carrots
onions
a little brown sugar
chili powder
peas
corn
While I was slicing the carrots, angle slicing, the TV show, Lost was on. They are showing reruns from 2005. The episode that was showing was the one about the Korean couple. The Korean man, with his square jaw and chiseled good looks, was suffering terrible anguish.
If you are not familiar with the TV show, Lost, it has a cast of about 50, and each character has a dramatic back story, of what they were, the lives they lived, before they crashed on the island. The back story of Jin, the Korean man is that in order to make a good living for himself and his incredibly beautiful wife, he found himself forced to do things he did not want to do. He was participating in an execution of a man who was not pushing his factory workers hard enough. He brutally beat the man, as a way of saving his life.
I suppose the thing that made me cry was that, just as Jin had tried so hard to do what he felt he needed to do for his wife, who was so beautiful, and who he loved so much, and he was so afraid of failing...now I am crying again. I, also, tried so hard to take care of my wife. I suppose it is a guy thing. I connected so well with Jin and his struggles.
Alright, time to click publish.