Thoughts on Depression & Togetherness Go Awry

I have a question I’d like to ask someone who suffers from depression and who’s been both single and not through depressive episodes, but I’m not sure who to ask.

I wonder if it is easier to get through the little daily things if there is someone else kind of going through it with you. Oh, I don’t mean that there’s someone doing everything for you or taking care of you. My grandmother is bipolar and yet managed to raise three kids, have a husband, and manage a farm alongisde my grandfather who also had a day job. How she did it, I have no idea, and, yes perhaps I could work up the courage to ask her about it but it just isn’t something you discuss with her.

I just wonder if it didn’t help her to have my grandfather and my dad and aunt and uncle about to keep things going so things didn’t slip into great decline and irreparable chaos.
Since her kids grew up, moved out, and got on with their lives and since my grandfather died, she slipped further and further into an oddly familiar hermit-like life. She was always a packrat but apparently my grandfather kept that in check. After he died, treasures from thrift stores, antique shops and garage stores filled that 1800’s two-story home and it’s basement from wall to wall till there was barely a walkway or anywhere to sit. She slept in her lazyboy recliner with her cockateel napping on her shoulder. A great cook in her day, she just gave up cooking in favor of take-out and microwave dinners. She took to leaving the television on all the time just to have the noise and not answering her phone just because she didn’t feel like it. She never remembered about mailing bills or birthday cars or calling relatives. She developed an extreme fear of flying.

Eventually she had to be hospitalized because she had forgotten to eat of take her bipolar medication far too often. She now lives in a senior community where someone daily ensures she eats and takes her medications but she’s also surrounded by people her own age and she seems to be doing much better. She has not returned to the old house. She doesn’t want to.

Funny, i started to write this post because I wanted to aske someone if they thought it was easier to get through the every day parts of live while suffering with depression when someone is around, but I’ve just stumbled on something far more frightening, I think.

I think I’ll finish that point first though. My theory is that I wake up every day as a single person suffering from depression and I look around and I see that I have let myself and my apartment seriously go for well over a year and I really would like to just take the cats and Pugly and just start anew somewhere else — except for that damn obsession about not being able to leave behind my things. I think it might have been easier if someone had been around to help me keep things “up” so to speak in the meantime while I was in my major depressive episode so that now that I’m ready to try to crawl back out and try to face the world, it wouldn’t seem like such an overwhelming hole I’ve dug myslef into. It would be easier to face the world with a clean house, for example, or even a clean bathroom.

So, now the scary part I stumbled on…one of the things that keeps annoying me about my mother is that she keeps pointing out similarities between my grandmother and myself. I keep grumpily pointing out that in order for me to be bipolar, wouldn’t I have to have manic episodes?

However, I think it’s quite clear from the paragraph above that in the last year or so, I’ve been living my grandmother’s life. Granted, I don’t have her eye for antiques and I have cats not cockateels. I refuse to sleep in my rocker; I will always sleep in my bed. But…

And I wonder if what really pangs me about the idea that I could be just like her is that by my age, she had been married, had three children and had a fullfilling life despite her illness, but for me this sort of news seems like just another forty or fifty years of heart-breaking agony. She had happiness. She gets to look back on her life and relive those memories and know she was loved and I’m jealous.

tags: depression, bipolar

2 comments

1. on April 3, 2006 at 6:40 pm

   clickchic said:

   I would suggest that your worries about becoming like your grandmother are coming from the depression, rather than the slim possibility of having inherited the depression from your grandmother. The depression tempts you to stay in, which makes you more depressed, which makes you stay in… I know it’s hard, but do go out, and dont worry about the housework - not all at once anyway! Just clearing up one area in one room will lift your spirits a bit.

   Love the descriptive way you write, can really conjure up the pictures you paint, really good to read.

2. on April 9, 2006 at 12:30 pm

   J. Wallace said:

   I think it is easier if there is someone there for you when you are going through ephisodes. I’ve suffered from major depressive ephisodes several times in my life. A couple of times it has been really, really bad. (What you said about just letting the house go and letting yourself go. I think it’s just part of a wish to not have to exist or do anything anymore.)

   Anyway, at my worst points, I was lucky to have someone in my life who loved me, who saw the illness for what it was and helped me through it. I did not magically get better, but I did not completely lose it either.

   It can work against you too, I suppose. The reason I think I cannot have a family is because I feel that I could not handle a family and the depressive ephisodes. I would be scared for my children to see me like that, scared that I would neglect them. So, in that sense, I think it would be much, much harder.

   Right now, I am having a hard time again. Thank you for writing….at least I do not feel so alone in my fears.

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.