Recently, I lost someone very dear to me. To depression and fatal hopelessness. And this relative, a spontaneous optimist was not given to melancholy. He was someone to whom everyone gravitated. Animals. Children. Old people. Relatives who needed a hospitable home for a holiday or to recuperate from a family problem. He was not given to verbal flourishes. He never said, ‘‘I am there for you.” He just was.
Some of my most beautiful childhood memories belong to him and to his hill side cottage in Dalhousie where he looked after his widowed mother, a younger sister, welcomed his extended family during summer, took the children in the family out for dhaba meals and to the movies and played chess with them with his favourite songs playing in the background.
He never got irritable when guests filled his home, children fiddled with his things or made demands on his time. Or when a stray he had adopted gave birth to a few puppies in his fireplace. I only remember a radiantly healthy soul. Someone who did not need much to be happy. Was the easiest person to get along with and totally malice free and non judgemental. Someone who never belittled anyone, collected old records, read voraciously, loved Francis Ford Coppola and Arthur Hailey. Laughed a lot and saw potential and promise in everyone and everything. And was generous to a fault.
And yet sometime last month, he ended his life. It did not happen overnight, this depletion of joy. It was a painfully long process when one professional problem after another isolated him from his relatives, some of whom tried to help him financially and emotionally but then could do no more because his issues had tainted the idea of middle class respectability. In the end, no one wanted to be associated with him.
In the final years of his life, he was alone in a megapolis with his wife and kids, trying to make ends meet, keeping in touch with only one member of his family. It must have been hard and when things did not change for the better even after a struggle of over 15-16 years, he gave up and ended it all.
I cannot hope to understand it all. I never will. Speaking to a grief counsellor, I learnt a little more though. That depression begins to hem in people who may even be of perfectly sound mental health, one brick at a time. It saps an individual’s will to fight back and seduces the mind to believe that it is safer to hide from life than to put on one’s walking boots and go out and meet it.
Depression, said the counsellor, is like an unwanted dark enemy who creeps into your thoughts when you leave a small crack in the door for it to enter. It promises comfort under a dark quilt. It tells you to crouch in an unlit corner of the mind and to give up because to go on would be impossible.
It drains the will to get up, to part the window curtains and look at the world and say, ‘‘I am going to be fine.” Not many people recognise that what beats them in the end are not the external circumstances but the breakdown of inner resources. You are defeated when you can’t find the energy within to hope, pray, seek help, express your pain and share your fears and your problems.
Yes, help is not always forthcoming when it is sought sometimes even within the family. That is why it is so important to recognise that there are medically trained people out there who can throw a life jacket to us when we are struggling to keep afloat and slowly losing the will to swim.
No matter how difficult life maybe, there is always a way out and it is not death. Many of us live with an idea of what our life should be and who we are. When these ideas are challenged, self-esteem based on social perceptions crumbles, leaving behind shame and defeatism. Those who end their lives do so because they feel unworthy, alone, unloved and lost.
Life challenges us all..sometimes more than we deserve. And like a wise writer friend told me recently, the cult of success has made the world heedlessly disdainful towards those who fail. Suicide statistics show that the collective mental health in these times has degenerated because the pressure to succeed is extreme on children, teens and adults.
The lack of emotional connectedness in a busy, harried world isolates people in shells of silence because psychological therapy and counselling of families and individuals is an exception than a norm. No one wants to acknowledge that they or those close to them maybe suffering from mild or chronic depression.
Depression takes a long time to inhabit the mind but just a minute of blind hopelessness is enough to push someone over the edge. I will always live with the regret that someone who helped so many people with his goodwill, could not in the end find enough emotional sustenance to get through a dark night. We failed as a family to help and to reach out.
This piece is being written with the hope that those who are going through depression or know someone who is facing a personal crisis, will reach out and will seek help and extend it. We are not designed to do everything alone. We need others and others need us. Clinical depression needs medical attention and yet so many of us go on for years, neglecting the signs till a break-down occurs. And even if the lack of hope is not clinical but circumstantial, just a validating word or gesture we extend towards ourselves and those who are struggling can mean the difference between life and death.
If you are grappling with darkness within, seek light. Go for a long walk. Meditate. Listen to music. Cry. Call a friend. A relative. Pray. Speak to a therapist. Remind yourself that the sun rises everyday for a reason and that you maybe just a day away from the breakthrough you need. That no defeat is final. That you are worthy. That your life matters and must be valued most of all by you. That you can give to your family and to this planet what no one else can.
If you know someone who is struggling…listen to them with empathy and without judgement. Sometimes, just that much is enough. Be available unconditionally. And reach out. By showing up when you are needed.
It will be hard for me to reconcile to the fact that someone I know destroyed what was left of his life because none of us were there to say, ‘‘It is going be alright.” But if anyone out there needs to hear these words right now, let me say them again, ‘‘It is going to be alright. Hang in there till you find the strength to go on. You will survive whatever it is that you are going through. And you will be the stronger for it. You are not alone. Even though it feels like that at times. Sometimes the person you need most to stand up for you, is you so don’t give up on yourself. Choose life. Because when you make that choice, everything will fall into place. Sooner or later.”
Hope is an open window. Stand next to it and look out. Your whole life is out there. Waiting to be lived.
Reema Moudgil is the author of Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/b/books/perfect-eight-reema-moudgil-book-9380032870?affid=unboxedwri )
i’m sorry for your loss. nice article
Can relate to whatever you are going through, Reema. The least we can do is to reach out, listen, and just be there for others, when they need us the most.
Reema, one thing I always wanted to share with you but refrained from doing so as I thought it wd be out of the line of context is that when u write about people, trees,animals in distress. It is good to be there with them, extend your hand, be compassionate. At the same time it is also necessary to remain aloof emotionally, not to give your heart out, not to feel miserable with them or show empathy. Depression is very very infectious. There are million of thoughts that can depress u. Help them out, extend your hand, share thoughts with them, be compassionate but don’t feel miserable or sad with them., don’t open doors of your heart to them, don’t let ur emotions affected by them, by not doing so u may catch infecion yourself, u may feel depressed, sad, miserable yourself. You must have seen a doctor treating a patient. He puts mask on his face and a white coat to cover his cloths. He treats patient and at the same time protect himself from catching an infection.
I may sound absurd, but i’ve written what i felt.
Beautifully written…very beautifully, and incisively. Will read it again, not just for the writing, but for the preventive way out…many thanks!