There's something comforting in knowing that the older I get, the greater risk I run of being my own cause of death.
The idea used to terrify me, but after experiencing death in close quarters in my personal life, the reality - physically, truly, not just figuratively - that no one knows when they could pass away, sunk in. Even during a struggle with chronic illness, degenerative disease, or just old age, the best you can get is an estimate. Four months. Two months. A year. And everyone around the one dying is constantly in limbo, constantly waiting for that terrible finality, even though nothing can prepare you for it when it, at last, happens.
I watched my grandmother, a woman I'm told I'm very similar to, slowly leave us, as she was crushed by the ever-increasing weight of lifelong problems with severe chronic depression and melancholy; dementia, I think, must have been some sort of a relief, because it blurred the horrifying realities and truths of her life, past and present, into an unrecognizable mess that none of us could make sense of.
She admitted to things we'd only suspected, abuse we'd only speculated that she had suffered. She was seized by moments of spontaneity, sometimes, of total honesty, a kind of forthrightness I'd never seen in her when she was completely healthy.
The problems got worse over time, as problems tend to do. I can still remember the cool shock of surprise when the day she couldn't recognize me finally came. Her long-term memory was excellent, and highly pronounced. But the present became a distant place for her, and eventually, a dream.
She died in bed, in her sleep, in her own room, surrounded by family, as peacefully as one can hope to be able to die. She no longer talked, or was mentally present. Toward the end, she would sleep with her mouth completely open. Her breath rattled with disuse and fluid. Almost four years later, the picture of her skeletal face, jaw slack, haunts the blackness that surrounds me when I close my eyes. It often keeps me from sleep.
Living with crippling depression and anxiety (and the compounded troubles they come with) is a strange mix of contradictions, ones that shouldn't even be possible. There is lachesism in abundance, but also pervasive, persistent paranoia. What if I die? Who cares if I do?
You are restless. Perhaps you can't stop fidgeting, but you haven't moved from your seat in over twelve hours, too bound there by listlessness to be concerned whether it's good for you or not. Failure scares you on a level nothing else does, but you don't have enough inside you to try in the first place. Maybe you're one of the unluckier ones, who, like me, suffer from an excess of empathy and sensitivity. Plain sympathy does not exist when you feel every struggle personally, pick up every emotion effortlessly, when you're wandering through your daily existence with what seems like exposed nerves.
When it becomes too much, your mind shuts down as a failsafe. Days of apathy follow. You may become short on words and comfort, becoming what seems to others another person entirely. These are the days during which friendships and relationships are made or broken. You've probably had the words 'conceited' and 'self-centered' directed at you, before, in a funny display of projection. People are bizarrely averse to anyone who so much as acknowledges their difficulties, as though talking about them makes them realer than they already are.
It takes a certain kind of selflessness to sit by one depressed, to be willing to remain beside them until the worst of the storm has passed. It's not something everyone can do. Unconditional love (and stubbornness) helps. Most of the time.
After my grandmother's passing, we experienced another two family deaths, in quick succession, both from undiagnosed medical problems, both brutally, savagely sudden. Years have passed since these deaths, too, and yet I can catch myself thinking about either of them as though they're still with us - and then I remember. The depression, among other things, makes sure I hold onto every devastating event with frightening clarity. I'm told it's a survival mechanism, much like many other processes I perform, consciously or not.
That's what I am, two decades and nearly two years later: a patchwork of reflexes and coping methods and trauma reaction. I'm not quite sure if there's a person left, anymore. If there is, she's buried deep.
I write to escape. I'm all about living vicariously through your characters, in positive or negative ways. Fantasy? Good. Romance? Great. Happy endings? Love them. This, then, is a type of reflection I avoid putting to words. A change in modus operandi, if you will. In the time I've spent existing in my own head, entire books about depression and self-realization have come and gone, slipping through the net of my neurons before disappearing into the vastness of my absolutely abysmal memory.
My sails are tattered. I've been stranded in the doldrums for a while now, and though the lack of wind is disheartening (dooming, to some), the silence has given me time to think. Still waters are a good mirror.
As I grow in age, the knowledge that I'm half the chances of my dying becomes less of an unsettling nightmare and more of a quiet truth. A private, if unconventional, gift. The departures of those around me, so unpredictable and arrhythmic, helped me realize that. It may happen. It may not.
But if it does, I will, at least, know it's coming.
