Depression Hates a Moving Target. Nita Sweeney
and sitting by his bedside when he and my mother moved in with me and Ed during Dad’s final months. I grieved his death, but that loss did little to prepare me for 2007.
I was at a writing retreat with Natalie Goldberg in New Mexico when Amy called to say our seventy-seven-year-old mother had been admitted to a central Ohio hospital with a bowel obstruction. “But she was just dog-sitting Morgan!” I protested. She had seemed fine when I left town.
Illness plagued Mom her entire life. She spent hours in bed, behind the closed bedroom door. I would pull a wooden chair up to the kitchen counter near the toaster and put in the bread. When I had buttered the toast perfectly, the way Dad taught me, I would take it to her in exchange for a smile. Many of her illnesses were real, but others remained a mystery, as doctor after doctor couldn’t find the cause of her symptoms. I grew up worried she was on the verge of death.
And her mood swings were legend. Undiagnosed bipolar disorder aggravated by drinking compounded her hypochondria. She alternated between clinging possessiveness and near-abandonment. I never knew which mother to expect. When I came home from school, she might be pounding out tunes on the organ at a volume that rattled the windows, aiming to throw a potholder at me, or in bed, paralyzed by negative thoughts and alcohol. She stopped drinking after I was an adult, and we healed many of our wounds, but I still found her confusing and unpredictable.
After Dad died, I spent countless hours with her in medical waiting rooms as they treated her for diabetes, C.O.P.D., and a chronic cough. I lived closest and didn’t have a day job. Despite my protests that I wasn’t her “primary caretaker,” when she asked, I packed my laptop and headphones and did my best to write in the lobby. Every crisis seemed fatal, but each time she survived. She’d even been hospitalized for a bowel obstruction before, but it resolved without surgery. When Amy called, part of me rolled my eyes wondering if this was another imaginary illness. Regardless, I got on the next plane.
When the obstruction hadn’t cleared after five days, they took her to surgery. Ed, Amy, Jim, Deanna, and I sat in the gray hospital waiting room. I tried to read but couldn’t. We talked about things I can’t remember. I ate a lot of snacks. After many hours, the surgeon greeted us, smiling. Adhesions had strangled her small intestine and shut off blood flow to one area. He had freed her intestines from the tangle of scar tissue and that section had “pinked back up.” Confident it would heal, he decided against resecting it. “He’s the doctor” I told myself. I would not want to second-guess him.
The days in the hospital wore on and on. Still in graduate school, I wrote annotations by her bedside. Day after day, she remained in her bed, while other patients who’d had the same surgery were up and walking the halls. When the doctors or nurses visited, we advocated for her, but frankly, the deaths that year had worn me down.
One night, when I came home from another long day at the hospital, Ed asked me to come into his office. He pointed to his computer. On the screen was an article about adhesions. “Her prognosis isn’t good,” he said. I shook my head, cried “She will be fine!” then stomped off to bed, sobbing.
After she had been in the hospital twenty-four days, her intestines remained blocked and became infected. The doctor called for a second surgery. As her medical power of attorney, I again signed the forms warning about the dangers of surgery. As a lawyer, I’d seen many releases, but my hands shook as I signed this one.
Before the hospital staff wheeled her back, Amy, Jim, Deanna, and I stood around her bed. Her tiny frame, now thin from so many days on a liquid diet, lay in a mass of tangled sheets. With speech slurred from pain and anxiety medications, she called out, “I know you all think I’m a pain!” We laughed and groaned, “Oh, Mom!” She was right, but we still loved her. I remembered how she had encouraged me to learn to play the flute despite my anxiety. I could see her at the kitchen table, cutting fabric I’d chosen for a top. I could hear her singing “Happy Birthday” in her sweet soprano. I couldn’t let her go into surgery thinking we hated her. I went to her side. “You gave me my creativity,” I said. “Thank you.” I kissed her and they took her away.
Back in that gray waiting room, we sat again, hour after hour. When the doctor finally came out, I stood. Nervous, I made an awkward joke about how much faster this surgery had been. He glared, his face a stone.
“She’s not going to survive this,” he said.
My knees buckled and I stumbled backward into the gray chair where moments before I’d had hope. Deanna gripped my arm. I covered my face with my hands and tried to listen, but the doctor’s words spun through my mind on repeat:
She’s not going to survive this.
She’s not going to survive this.
She’s not going to survive.
He had not expected to find Mom’s small intestine disintegrated. “It was like wet tissue paper,” he said. Nothing to salvage. Jim, Amy, Deanna, and Ed all asked questions as I stared at the gray wall. Surely the doctor was wrong.
As it turns out, you can’t live without your small intestine. If it’s not there to absorb the nutrients, you starve of malnutrition. None of us had any medical training. None of us knew that.
The surgeon’s face softened as he asked, “What do you want me to do?” If they treated her infection, she would remain alive, but die of malnutrition in weeks. If they let it go, the fever would kill her more quickly.
Regardless of the questions everyone asked, we knew the only humane answer. Mom, still heavily sedated, was transferred to the hospice wing. The next afternoon, December 30, 2007, we surrounded her while she died peacefully.
As irrational as even I knew it was, I felt responsible for “letting” her die. I hadn’t made the toast properly. I hadn’t gone to medical school. I hadn’t seen it coming. This insane belief, combined with all the previous deaths and the notion that I was now “next in line” for the mortuary, sent me into a spiral. I ate, slept, and cried.
***
I remained stuck for nearly a year after Mom’s death and almost two years after we’d lost Jamey. Finally, in November 2008, Morgan and I began to take slow walks around the block. Throughout my years of mood disorders, my long-time friend Lora had used vigorous exercise to treat the depression from her fibromyalgia. Another friend, Pat, had taken up tennis to treat her depression. “You need to break a sweat,” they each said. I was skeptical. I’d tried and abandoned so many forms of movement. Plus, when fatigued, the last thing I wanted to do was sweat. I thought about Nia dance classes, but the instructor I loved had stopped teaching, and I didn’t have the energy to drive somewhere. I needed something at home. Those long, slow dog walks in the fresh air, along with therapy and recovery groups, started to bring me back to life. When I saw Kim and Fiona’s posts, I secretly hoped running would speed the healing.
Shortly after I met Ed, he asked if I wanted to learn to meditate. He’d learned at ten-day Zen retreats before we met. He also did Tai Chi.
Ed set the microwave timer for five minutes. We sat on the stiff dining room chairs I rarely used, and I did my best to focus on my breath.
“My mind races,” I said, fidgeting.
“Sit still and focus. It will slow down on its own.”
Over the next two decades, I built up to long periods of sitting, in much the same way as I was now acclimating to running. I’d been a regular meditator for nearly twenty years and experienced much of the calm and concentration Ed had promised.
After I began running, a colleague told me about ChiRunning. The word “chi” means “life force.” ChiRunning founder Danny Dreyer used Tai Chi principles to create the technique “to reduce injury and improve personal performance…to help you love running forever.” The Eastern philosophy interwoven in