I’ll See You in My Dreams

I thought my grief was ‘over’ but it just went underground

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

A few days before I was hit full on with the flu, I felt odd. My thinking was slippery. I felt sad and I didn’t know why. But when fever smacked me in the middle of the night, I was revisited by someone whose loss I thought I had put to rest.

Not buried or erased. I knew that was impossible. I understood that for the rest of my life he will figure as one of the most significant people. An ebullient, creative man, he was snatched by serious depression.

I wish I didn’t understand

As a depression sufferer myself, as someone for whom that wretched storm has attacked repeatedly, it was not only his suicide that demolished me. It was knowing the neighborhood of Hell he inhabited in the end.

I could feel myself implode when I said “Goodnight” at the end of our long late-night calls. At the end of each call, I wondered when “Goodnight” would become “Goodbye.”

For most of my years as a psychologist, I believed that with the right intervention everyone could be saved.

But then I became a sufferer who trudged through the same trails — therapy, a rainbow of meds, hospitalizations, ECT, and the love and care of countless people. I became more impressed by the irrepressible power of some depressions and humbled by the impotence of treatments.

What I lost

When he died, I lost my editor, my mentor, my cheerleader and one of my best friends. Piles of e-mails, letters, voicemails and the articles we shared passed between us over the years decorating my room.

They became his unintentional legacy to me. Anything could have been scribbled on a wrinkled yellow Post- it, begging to be discarded at the time, but refusing to be released.

For some reason, I never threw them away. They were teasing, or editorially specific, or profound, or affectionate. I finally tossed them all together into a folder.

And now, every few months, I pull out that folder and take my time with its raggedy contents. It’s especially important when I need the magic of him as a writer I so admired.