1. Wee Wee Wee All the Way Home
It turns out that if you work for a government agency, and it’s only four and a half months after terrorists flew airplanes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, you shouldn’t use the word “postal” in a conversation.
Okay, I know that now. I should have known it then, too. But I was under the influence of that nasty little recurring nightmare called depression. And I was having a little crisis with my job, and was trying to explain to my most trusted co-worker just how I was feeling.
I wouldn’t even know how to work a gun, much less have the emotional strength to actually pull the trigger. But if you work for a government agency, post-9/11, and your co-worker tells you she might go postal, what else are you supposed to do?
Having confessed my emotions that Friday morning without feeling any better, I decided it just might be good for me to take the rest of the day off, go home, relax. I’d get the job done Monday, no problem, and the whole work crisis would be behind me.
Right. Here’s how it went down on day morning: I get to my desk, hang up my coat, put my kettle on, pour boiling water over my first Celestial Seasonings tea bag of the day. Maybe I water my plants, smile at Mr. Potato Head who watches over me from the shelf above my desk.
Manager comes out of his office and says, “Hey, want to take a walk?”
What am I supposed to say, no?
He suggests a little trip down the corridor to his boss’s office. “How was your weekend?” he asks as we walk.
“Okay,” I say. Liar. I was miserable all weekend, dreaded the idea of coming back into the office.
Manager ushers me into Boss’s office and we wait. And I’m thinking, here it comes.
Boss comes into the office. “Are you feeling okay?” he asks me.
“No.”
“Do you think you should be here?”
“Probably not.”
We discuss the situation. Am I seeing a doctor? Yes. Am I on medication? Yes. Should they call my husband to take me home? Yes, please.
I’m thinking it’s all over but the healing. Then Manager says, Columbo-sequence, “One more thing.” He wants to know what I meant by “postal.”
Government agencies. Metaphors not allowed. I know that now. I tell them I would never harm my co-workers, that it was the farthest thing from my mind. They bring my husband, who works in the same building but a different area, up to the office, and they supervise as I pack up Mr. Potato Head and dump out the tea I never got to drink. My most trusted co-worker is nowhere to be seen, even though I need to ask her to water my plants and tell her where on my desk she can find all my work. I write her a note.
Manager escorts me and my husband to the front door and asks for my security tag. Then we’re off into the cold, trudging through the snow to the bus stop, and my husband says, “What happened?”
“Lamb to the slaughter,” I tell him.
When we get home we watch “Jewel of the Nile” on video, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. The Michael Douglas character is astounded to discover that the Jewel is not a jewel after all; it’s a man, valued by his people more highly than any gem ever could be.
Imagine that. A person more valuable than a gem.
2. Falling Down
The first thing I do while I’m waiting to see my doctor is go to a day class at the karate dojo where I train. While I was working I was only ever able to go to the night classes; this is a great opportunity. The instructor does a double-take when he sees me: “Did you forget your gear?”
“No,” I tell him, “it’s in my locker. I’ll be right back.”
“You mean you’re coming into class?”
“If that’s okay.”
The Sensei in question has just turned sixty, and what hair he has left is going grey. He has a reputation: tough, difficult to please. In the next few months he will have a snowboarding accident, followed by a skiing accident in which he’ll do a lot of damage to his knee. Neither incident prevents him from teaching for longer than a week or so.
I dive into the training, seeing the mental aspect of karate as a way to help conquer my depression. But depression always fights back. I don’t learn as quickly as I used to. I don’t have the same amount of patience with myself or with anyone else. And Sensei has a grating voice that reminds me of my father, and one day is so critical that I start to cry. After class I beg him not to yell at me, because I just can’t cope. I tell him that I’m sad and angry all the time, that I can’t work, that I’m doing the best that I can.
From that day on we both change our styles. He figures out how to teach me so that he can pull my best from me without frightening me. I figure out how to learn from him without being afraid. In karate you learn how to fall down. You learn how to hit the floor and get up again. No matter how hard you fall, you always get back up.
3. As Ye Sew
When I was seven my mother tried to teach me how to sew. She sat me down in front of an unthreaded machine and had me “sew” a straight line across a piece of paper.
I was not interested in learning the basics. I never have been. Perforating a piece of paper was not enough for me. I wanted fabric. I wanted thread.
So we gave up on that idea. It must have broken my mother’s heart. A long line of sewing women broken by a child who thought sewing on paper was for babies. I took up other pursuits over the years: bowling, though I refused to bowl “granny style,” which meant holding the ball with both hands and throwing from the foul line — I had to bowl like a grownup, or not at all; and playing the bagpipes, though I hated to practice.
Twenty-two years after my first sewing lesson I was with my mother in her sewing room, watching her sort through scraps of fabric. She wanted to throw out pieces of purple polar fleece, but I rescued them. To me, they looked like a teddy bear waiting to be born. “I’ve waited twenty-two years for this,” my mother tells her friends when she talks about my sewing projects. I made that purple teddy bear, and then I made others, different sizes and colours. I bought my own sewing machine. I made dolls, most of a quilt, stuffed hippopotami, a reversible dress.
My mother has a needlepoint sampler on her sewing room wall: “As Ye Sew, So Shall Ye Rip.” There was a time when if I’d made a mistake, I would have thrown a project down in frustration, refusing to pick it up again unless someone else could sort the mistake out for me. Last week, when I got my threads in a tangle while making a pair of pants, I calmly looked up and asked my mother to hand me a seam ripper.
It’s been a very hard lesson for me. This idea that I don’t have to do something perfectly on my very first try. That if I make a mistake, I can undo it and try again. That what I thought during all those years of depression was wrong: I do not have to live at the extremes of perfection and failure. If I’m human, that’s enough.
4. Good Housekeeping
No one will ever mistake me for Martha Stewart. I only know one fancy napkin fold by heart, and most of our furniture is protected by a fine covering of dust. There is nothing breathtaking or original about any of our rooms; they are functional. They do what we need them to.
In the summer of my sick leave I decide to clean up and reorganize the house, and by extension, my head. I enlist my mother to help with logistics and moral support. We start in the basement, where lurk the boxes that my my husband and I didn’t unpack when we moved in, and the wedding presents we received a year later.
It’s time to get rid of the things I don’t use and don’t need, the things that have been in boxes even since the move before this one. I am almost strong enough to be ruthless. Almost. And then the memories flood back, and the grief that comes at the thought of losing the things you think of as yours, even though they haven’t crossed your mind or your line of sight for years.
In the end I resort to photography. I take pictures of the things I am giving away so I can still have the memory of the objects even when the objects themselves are long gone. I take pictures of:
i) The stand-up record player. The record slides into the player vertically, and there’s a needle on each side so you can listen to the entire album without having to flip it over. There’s also a neat tracking feature that lets you skip to the next track at the touch of a button.
ii) The metal knife, fork and spoon set that snap together ad come with their own carrying case for camping. I won them as a prize in Grade 2, but I can’t say I ever took them on a camping trip. The knife’s blade was too dull to cut anything properly.
iii) The automatic cat-watering device that my grandfather’s wife once bought when she was thinking about me. My cats never liked to drink from it. My grandfather’s wife hates cats.
iv) ??
I don’t know what I’ve done with the pictures. Who knew cleaning could be this easy?
The only drawback comes when I go to the thrift store to find some old neckties for a sewing project. All my old earrings are laid out on a tray, each pair tied together and tagged at fifty cents apiece. The grief hits me again as I survey these pieces of costume jewellery that I used to value. I wonder who will come along and buy them. Whoever it is, they will never know the earrings’ histories. They will never know me.
5. The Garden of Earthly Delights
When we bought the house from my husband’s parents the back yard was a garden paradise. Roses, tulips, lilacs, lilies, raspberries, gooseberries, currants black and red. I told myself that I wanted that garden, that I could take care of it the way my mother-in-law had. But I never did learn how to care for it. I didn’t weed the garden like I should have. I let the wild take over, let the plants do what they needed to do. There were no chemicals, no cutting, no watering unless it rained. The flowers ran wild, raspberry bushes sprang up out of bounds. The day after my wedding I found cherry tomatoes growing there, perfectly ripened, like a dowry from God.
This year the grass grew too tall, choking the raspberry bushes. During dandelion season the yard was a perfect field of gold. The roses wilted, suffering under the weight of dead branches I never cut off. The peonies bowed their heads to the ground. I tried, once or twice, to dig around the bushes, pull away some of the suffocating weeds.
It was like fighting physical depression. Conquer a small area, while in another area the weeds are gathering strength, waiting for you. If you don’t work fast enough you are overwhelmed, pulled down.
This year when the snow melts my back yard will be barren. Most of the bushes are dead now, and will need to be uprooted. We’ll need to level everything and plant new seed if we want a place of beauty again. But it’s okay. Sometimes you have to cut back. Sometimes you need to clear away all the old growth and start fresh, beginning with the ground under your feet.
6. Charles and the Princess of Wales
My grandfather is getting ready for a wedding. Plaid tie, his best dinner jacket. What shoes should he wear? His wife tells him it doesn’t matter as long as he’s comfortable, but some part of him must still know that it’s not done to wear slippers ringed with rabbit fur with your best dinner jacket and plaid tie.
“I’m going to be late,” he says.
How wife rolls her eyes and fastens his bib behind his neck. “Whose wedding did you say you were going to?” she asks.
“You should know,” he snaps. “You got an invitation!”
“I misplaced it,” she says. “Tell me again.”
He gives a beleaguered sigh. “Charles and the Princess of Wales, of course.”
“Oh, that’s right. I forgot.”
“You better get dressed,” he says.
“In a minute,” she says, wheeling his chair into the dining room.
“But they’ll be here in a minute!” he says, worried. “You’re going to miss them!”
This is the second wedding he’s mentioned in the last two weeks. The first was in Scotland. I asked if he was going to wear a kilt, but he laughed.
“You’d look real cute with your knees sticking out,” I told him. His legs are skinny, knees bony. One calf is smaller than the other, as though it has shrunken from lack of use. But if he could imagine a kilt, I bet he could imagine strong legs.
He feels the back of his neck as he sits at the table, the other hand fidgeting in his lap. One thumb travels hesitantly across the smooth tie of the bib. His mouth twists into a frown.
“What’s wrong, Grampa?”
“It must not have a band,” he says.
“What doesn’t?”
He feels behind his neck again. “This necktie,” he says.
“I think it’s one of those clip-ones,” I tell him. “Real fancy.”
He nods, looking satisfied, and smooths the bib down over his chest.
Supper comes, but he won’t eat. He’s too excited. “They’ll be here soon,” he says. His wife stands up suddenly and makes her way to one of the attendants at the other end of the dining room, circling the other residents. When she comes back, Grampa’s twisted around in his wheelchair, looking down the hallway behind him.
“Everything okay, Elmer?” the attendant says. He is standing beside Grampa’s chair, one hand on his shoulder.
“They must be late,” Grampa says.
“Who?”
“The wedding party!”
“They must have forgotten to tell you, Elmer.”
“Tell me what?”
“Wouldn’t you know it?” the attendant says. “The damn wedding’s been cancelled.”
Grampa looks down at his lap, lower lip trembling in time to the hand still twitching there. Crestfallen, I think. Like a child Christmas morning who has discovered that the toy he has prayed for all year is not under the tree.
The next time I see my grandfather his nose is bruised, black tendrils reaching up and around his eyes. No use telling him the wedding was cancelled, or that Diana has been dead for years. He had his invitation; he was going to see Charles and the Princess of Wales married. And so he imagined himself strong legs, lifted himself out of that wheelchair, and took a step. His wife tells me they found him face-down in the hallway, face covered in blood.
There’s no wedding for him to go to today. He’s lying quietly under the Navaho blanket my mother gave him, eyelids like butterflies, fluttering. He is half dreaming, half awake. What does he see when he opens his eyes? Is it the world that I’m standing in, the world of a woman watching her grandfather fade away? Or is it a world that he can be happy in, where he is strong again, where the rules aren’t nearly so complicated?
Sometimes I wish for that world again, the time when Charles and the Princess of Wales were together and happy, a fairy tale. I remember how excited I was, watching on TV as Diana walked down the aisle to her prince. There is a hint of a smile on my grandfather’s face. I let him sleep.
7. My Best Friend’s Wedding
I really only have one friendship left that predates the onset of my depression. There were a couple that lasted into my very early twenties, but only one that stayed the course. This isn’t anybody’s fault but mine; I find I’m not comfortable with myself when I’m around people who remember me from before.
But he’s different, maybe because we were only in high school together for two years, and we’ve only seen each other a handful of times since. He’s never judged me for the things I’ve gone through. He never looked at me differently after compared to before.
So when he told me he was finally going to marry the gorgeous, intelligent woman he’d been dating for years, I was ecstatic. We went to his city for the wedding, and I got to introduce him to my husband for the first time.
The only other person there that I knew was someone I’d known since I was five years old. My first memory of him is of being on our school bus on the way to kindergarten. I looked him right in the eye and said, “Do you ever clean your ears?” And he said, “Yes, every day.” We haven’t had any contact since high school, but I think of him often. Sometimes I dream that we are friends, that he cares what I am doing with my life, and then I wake up sad. He writes for a national newspaper now. He’s got his own life. I bet our mutual friend’s wedding was the first time he’d thought of me in a very long while. He too was with a gorgeous, intelligent woman, and I froze when it came time to talk to him.
I wanted to say to him, “I wish we had connected, back then.”
I wanted to say to him, “I wish you well.”
And all I could say was, “Have you got a minute?”
And he looked back at me as he was heading out the door with his girlfriend and said, “Sorry, I have to go.”
I’m not the person anymore that I was back then, back in high school. But how do you compress ten years of learning into a minute of conversation? How do you convey your regret about a life you never allowed yourself to live?
8. Visible Effects
By the end of summer my creativity is starting to come back. I’m writing again, something I haven’t been able to do for months. The karate helps, the sewing helps, but it’s the writing that lets me know I’m on the right track.
I write a story called “The Effects of Invisible Movement.” It’s about my grandmother who died a year ago, but I never mention her in the story. Instead I amalgamate my father and Gramma into a brother, a brother I never had. The story wins second place in a contest sponsored by the local newspaper, and for weeks afterward people are asking me whether the story is true.
I’m starting to feel like a part of the world again, even though I’m having anxiety attacks in the grocery store, having trouble looking people in the eye. And I keep writing, and it’s getting better and better. I learn that I can use the power of story to help myself heal.
What’s more, I can use the power of story to reach out to the rest of the world. I thought I was cut off, but now I can step into the current of conversation , feel other minds and souls as their words brush by me. I can answer them, toss my own words into the stream.
I am beginning to learn my own story.
9. Mind Over Mood
The insurance company has agreed to pay for ten sessions with a psychologist. The doctor has said it’s okay for me to go back to work, but after all this time off I’m not sure I know how to deal with people anymore. What if I go in there and piss people off? What if I say the wrong thing again?
The psychologist is teaching me how to use my mind to change my mood, to think my way out of trouble spots. First I have to identify my moods, and then I have to identify the automatic thoughts that attach themselves to the moods. The whole thing makes me think of Heisenberg, the idea that the very act of observing something changes it. I will be observing my moods in order to change them.
What I’ve learned so far:
i) Not everyone is out to get me. If they’re looking at me strangely, it may simply be that I have something caught between my teeth. Or they’re wondering whether that story I wrote is true.
ii) My husband loves me. This fact does not change when I forget to put the scissors back where they normally are and he can’t find them to open the milk bag.
iii) I’m a good person. Even when I make a mistake.
10. A Programmed Return
I’ll be going back to work one year less a day from the day they sent me home. It won’t be full time right away. The plan is to start slowly, mornings every second day for two weeks, then mornings every day for two weeks after that. By week nine I’ll be back to working 37.5 hours, and we should all be used to each other again. There will be meetings every couple of weeks to see how I’m doing.
I imagine that Manager and Boss will be keeping an eye on me long after week nine, looking for signs of relapse. They’ll do what they need to do. That’s their job. My job will be to reintegrate, to rediscover how to spend hours every day in the company of other people. I’ll be keeping an eye on me too, watching my moods, trying to keep them under control. I’ll be starting fresh, with just the desk I’m assigned to, the carpet under my feet. This time Mr. Potato Head stays home. It’s time for reinvention. Time for new symbols.
I will reclaim my plants though. They’ve been passed from caretaker to caretaker for the last year, adapting to change in ways I’ve never learned. Will they grow for me again? Will they forgive my absence? Will they understand that I’m doing the best that I can?
I got to see them a few weeks ago when I went into the office to meet with Manager and make a plan. The Christmas cactus is blooming for the first time, despite everything it’s been through. The future looks hopeful.
– 30 –
A Year Less a Day: How I Spent My Sick Leave was originally published in the Fall 2003 volume of Open Minds Quarterly.