Kicking the Black Dog

Meet our guest columnist, RICHARD ROE. Richard created a stir in Good Weekend magazine a few months ago when he wrote about coping with living in an aged care hostel. Now, exclusively for Curmudgeon readers, he shares his thoughts on battling depression.

It creeps up on you like swamp fog; it’s up to your knees, you can handle that, then suddenly you’re enveloped — and frightened. This is for real. You’ve been down some slippery tracks before; this isn’t going to be a walk in the park.

I’ve been in the aged care hostel about nine months now and it’s hit me — this is a serious test of my inner resources, of myself, whether I’m as resilient as I thought I was, whether I’m as tough as I’m cracked up to be. Whether I can last the distance, which may be 10 years or more. I look around at some of the residents stretched out on recliner chairs, not moving for hours, rarely speaking, rarely smiling. Am I looking at myself somewhere down the track?

Can’t be. Not me. I’ve survived two marriages, two divorces; I’ve lived through the gut-wrenching pain of seeing a beloved son tortured by mental illness and watched, helpless, his journey to a premature death.

I’ve survived. I’ve come back tougher, probably a nastier human being, but a survivor.

But, what about now? What I’m shaping up for is more a siege than a battle, a siege in which Death can take his time and mock my puerile resistance. He’s the only possible winner and the longer I take the more he might enjoy it. Death holds all the aces and is very practised in his dealings.

Why has this dark cloud of honesty suddenly cast its shadow over me? Why now, when I had been shaping up to an old-age future with such bravado?

Alfredo had something to do with it, I’m pretty sure of that. Alfredo was here when I first moved in; he was a calming influence in a place where the black dog of depression roams at will. He is an Italian, in his 80s, who came to Australia when he was 12, but he might just as well have stayed on the Rialto. He shook hands with everyone morning and evening; he bent his snowy white head at meal-times, mumbling grace with multiple signs of the cross.

He didn’t turn up for breakfast one morning. When he was helped in by a staff member for lunch, it was as if he’d been earmarked by the evil eye. He was distracted, unable to communicate, confused about his food; he kept getting up from his chair, dazed, wandering about the room. No friendly hand-shakes now, his hands shaking uncontrollably. No prayers. He had turned overnight into some other, deeply saddened, version of himself. Something dramatic, unknown, had befallen Alfredo and changed him into a different person. He was there, at our table, in body — just the husk of a body — and not in mind.

And then he was gone. An ambulance had taken him away to a psychiatric ward in a distant hospital. I don’t know if he will ever come back.

I do know that his metamorphosis has scared the bejesus out of me. If radical transformation can happen overnight to someone as solid and stable as Alfredo, what are my chances? Someone who’s been a bit of a ratbag?

I know something about dealing with the black dog. I learnt it in the dark days of my son’s troubled years and his death. You have to tie the hound up; you can’t let him roam at will, otherwise he’ll turn on you again, come bounding up snarling. He’ll tear you apart just when you think you’re getting it all together again. You need to let him know who is boss.

I quietly tell him the facts. Listen, mate, I’m one of the luckiest bastards alive. I have a group of friends who have stuck with me through thick and thin, who have been all the more steadfast in troubled times and when I have made an idiot of myself; I have a son and his family in Brisbane who throw down the welcome mat for me whenever I can get there; I have a beautiful young daughter who keeps a loving eye on me and who is about to give me another grandchild. You can snap at my heels all you like, you won’t bring me down.

Fighting words, but are words enough to get me over the hump? We’ll see, we’ll see.

Keeping fit is part of the fight-back. I do weight training twice a week. Weight training is like life — you’re pitted in an endless battle against the machines. As soon as you get anywhere near comfortable with any of these mechanical monsters, the trainers put up the weight. You can never win.

Back in the hostel, I have given up taking the lift. I use the stairs, 29 steps down and 29 steps up. I average eight round trips a day. I’m physically fit for an 83-year-old, ready to fight.

A fierce thunderstorm shatters the calm, heavy rain with chunks of ice battering our building, laying a white carpet over our quadrangle and out on the road. Is it Zeus’s fury at the state of the world? Maybe. He has a lot to be angry about … Trump. Brexit, starving refugees, a soulless society, race-hatred across the globe, terrorist mass murders and out there, in the heartland of my country, a growing disenchantment with politics, with our leaders, our way of life. We seldom think about “out there” in here. Here, we watch world events through an inverted telescope; the outside world is getting smaller, further away. We have more immediate things to worry about. … meals arriving slightly late, disturbing noises from the elevator, fellow residents who make you sick, a corn growing back on my right foot.

Theresa wanders past looking for Cat. She knows the animal will be frightened by the storm. Cat is a cat with no other name. She generally sits on the landing between flights of the stairs, shunning all overtures to friendship, thinking feline thoughts which are as mysterious as Theresa’s. She’s a lost person; aged about 50, European; she’s suffered some trauma that disconnects her brain from reality. In the time I’ve been here I’ve become Theresa’s minder — I cut up the hard bits of her meal, spread the jam on her sliced bread, guide her hand, when necessary, to the right utensil, otherwise she’ll try drinking her tea from a fork. I’m a bit wary of her today, or more accurately, embarrassed. Yesterday, before I’d had it out with the black dog, I took out a fit of ill-temper on Theresa. I ate the last tab of marmalade instead of saving it for Theresa and her bread. It was a mean streak I didn’t recognise in myself.

As the storm rages outside. Theresa wanders distractedly about, calling for Cat. She has a special bond with the animal. She has to be restrained from going outside where the big balls of hail would knock her to the ground.

Later, storm over, I pass her in the hallway. Cat is in her clutches, perfectly dry. Theresa has the animal, held under its front legs, suspended and helpless, wide-eyed with anxiety, like a cartoon creature in Looney Tunes.

“Cat,” Theresa says, summing up the situation.

The storm has forced Chief inside. I don’t know his real name but to me he is Chief from Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He is a huge, lumbering man who sits on the front veranda most days, staring into the passing traffic, or into space, or into his past life. He is always dressed in shorts and a shapeless worn jacket which must be hell in the fierce summer heat. He rarely speaks, never laughs or smiles. “Man, when you lose your laugh, you lose your footing,” McMurphy, the anti-hero, says in Cuckoo’s Nest. Chief has lost his footing. In the novel, the fictional Chief finally breaks out of the institution and runs off. He finds his footing. I’m silently willing our Chief to follow him.

The hallway leading to the front door has become a jungle of walking frames and people. We sign ourselves out and back in on a register lying on a table beneath a big clock. The nurses also trap the old folk here to test their blood pressure. Today is more cluttered than usual. Honey, a bright-eyed Thai nurse has decided that my eyebrows need trimming. They sag like the hanging gardens of Babylon over my eyes, restricting clear vision. She is half-way through harvesting the hairy crop when a distressed voice cuts across her work. “Disgusting,” it says, “absolutely disgusting!”

Honey and I both look up, mystified. Yes, the woman is talking to us. A few strands of white hair have fallen to the floor. This woman has a low threshold for disgust.

As we carry on with the trimming, our critic announces she is too unsettled to proceed with her outing; she will return to her room. I’ve forgotten her name. On my first day here, she came to my door, chattering, wanting to set the two of us up as an exclusive couple for afternoon drinks in a little nook near her quarters. I suspect her disgust is in counterpoint to my failure to take up her offer.

Another rumble in the dining room this morning, the herd instinct: a single bellow from table six, swelling and multiplying just as it does on the farm, paddock to paddock, table to table, until the whole herd is voicing a symphony of fright, protest and dejection.

A strangulated cry silences the wounded beast. It’s a poignant moment, like when that sad bloke on the tele whispers “I don’t like beer any more” and fellow drinkers are struck dumb. Or reminiscent of the Tarzan of my boyhood, how his mighty bellow echoing through the jungle demands universal attention

Our Tarzan is a wizened little man with a teapot beanie on his head and a gleam in his eye. One of the nurses is trying to hush him as she pushes his chair into place. She knows she’s got Buckley’s, this ancient Tarzan’s got form. He’s brought the room to a standstill before. He looks about twice my age but he’s not going down without a fight.

Janette ranges up beside me, bearing toast. She knows what I want but asks, “Two brown slices?” for the hell of it. She’s a tall woman with a comical face, an amused twist to her lips which often wear a demonic smile. She comes from the kitchen to the dining room, spreading toast and good cheer. Janette and I have mysterious thing going on. It had a kick-along a while back when we discussed the impending arrival of her grandchild. What would the kid call her? Not Grandma, and certainly not Nana. My grandkids call me Grand-Rick, I tell her, so why not Jan-Ma. She says something cheerful in Arabic. I think she likes the idea.

Janette has been at the aged care place quite a while. There’s no way she has lost her footing. I believe we’ve both learned one thing from life. You can’t afford to give ground. Don’t accommodate the black dog for an instant. Don’t indulge yourself with a fit of the miseries and think you’ll pull out of it tomorrow. The deeper you sink, the deeper you will sink.

I call up my reserves to help me. I mean the staff at this home. I summon them silently, a ghost force who don’t know they are my foot soldiers. Pretty, prancing nurse Katy, who bounds down the stairs like a fleet-footed gazelle, laughing at my amusement; Donna, the handsome older lady, who’s been trying to teach me a Tibetan peace mantra; and all the others — mostly Asian helpers — who put compassionate care above their own comfort in their efforts to lead the old to a comfortable exit.

Aged care and nursing homes have come under a brutal spotlight in the past year in the royal commission, which exposed systematic callous, criminal, barbaric behaviour by staff in some homes. Not where I’m resident, fortunately.

Still, the black dog is tugging at my sleeve. I look across the dinner table at Alice. We’ve all known an Alice; she’s someone who’s world has shrunk to a tiny circle occupied only by herself. Alice launches into her never-ending refrain … “I’ve finished eating, Ruby, where are my pills”, “I don’t eat that soup, it’s horrible”, “I was here first, why am I the last?” “Where’s the milk, we need more milk.”

She could be one of the crones gathered around the guillotine, counting the heads as they roll. Wake up to yourself, an inner voice tells me; if you don’t stop worrying about yourself, you’ll end up like Alice.

And, as the old comics used to say — in one bound, he was free.