Driving through Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation on our way to Yellowstone on a dreary, rainy morning, I feel the time has come to talk about some rough stuff. I’ve hinted earlier about mom’s struggles with Depression. If you’re reading this and the realities of mental illness are not topics you choose to discuss, trust me I understand if you’d rather stop here and check out later posts where we’ll talk about more positive things. I grew up in a house where we spoke freely and openly about our struggles which some may take as me being casual about sincere struggles; to those I offer the perspective of a life where we were encouraged to discuss it so we could deal with it and to us, it is normal conversation. So here goes.
I was 14 when Granny died. The trauma of the large and sudden loss in my life opened the doors to my experience with Depression. As I continued to spiral into increasing solitude and isolation, mom recognized the signs from her own life and she sat me down to share stories of her own to help me understand what I was feeling. One her first memories as a child is being 12 years old and crawling into a closet to cry, hiding the emotions behind a closed door in a house where “mental illness didn’t exist”. Sometimes she cries without knowing why. Sometimes a memory, a sight, smell, a song, or almost anything can be a trigger taking her back to a painful memory. When those times hit, the only real choice is to accept that, for a moment, this is how you feel. Those feelings are valid, and you’re not wrong for feeling them. Give the moment the attention it demands and then find your reason to dry your eyes, count your blessings, and carry on.
The most important lesson about Depression she taught us was to find coping mechanisms; ways to pull yourself up from the pit and back on the road of something more positive and productive. “Count your blessings” was the mantra that worked for me. Even today, and probably for the rest of my life, taking a moment to acknowledge the blessings in my life helps me reclaim positivity and carry on. For her, however, what has always seemed to be the most effective rope out of the pit has been finding purpose in “projects”. Often times these projects present themselves as people in her life that give her the opportunity to be a caretaker. Her kids, Granny after my grandfather passed, and for many years my Great Aunt before she passed.
Aunt Eunice was 83 years old when she fell outside of her house push-mowing her lawn. She broke a few bones and it was obvious that recovery was going to be difficult and time-consuming. It wasn’t long before she started showing signs of dementia and she and the family decided it was best if she went into a care facility. For the better part of 10 years, at least once a week (often more), mom made the drive to the nursing home (at first an hour from home, then later just 20 minutes or so) to sit with her, gather her laundry to bring home to wash, decorate her room, and do her best to take care of her. She was in her late 90’s when she passed in 2018.
By that time, I had finished my masters degree and moved back home to job hunt, eventually opting to get into web development and start my own business. By this point, Nate had been living with me for a couple of years and when I moved home, he moved back in with his grandfather. Things didn’t go well there and, after hearing some of the stories of the painful past he’d been through, mom decided it was time for him to come live with us as her “adopted son”. He became a project for her to focus on as well, helping him get his G.E.D., a car, and a job. After a couple of years, he decided to move out and try living on his own.
Shortly after Nate moved out, I decided I’d had enough of the insecurity and ups and downs of entrepreneurship, and decided to find something more steady. First a job that didn’t require much time away from home, then eventually a full-time position working about an hour from home 5 days a week. My sister had moved out as well and the house, during the day, was quiet. Soon after starting my job, Aunt Eunice passed away and mom found herself without projects. Even though I still lived there, I was making steady strides toward independence. I loved my job and, I moved up in the company quickly.
Time for me passed quickly during that time as I became increasingly busy with work, working long days with a long commute meant I wasn’t home much. Then one day I caught my mom “purging”. If you don’t know what purging is, in this context, it’s when someone begins to give away, throw away, and get rid of things they don’t want their loved ones to have to deal with when they die. It’s a red flag for Depression as it becomes increasingly obvious how centric the idea of their life ending becomes to their mind. It generally starts small, tossing out old notebooks with revealing thoughts or secrets, and steadily escalates into things they cherish getting passed along to someone they know will care for them the way they would.
I remember sitting at the stop light on the divided highway where I’d make the u-turn to head home when I realized that, if I didn’t act, it wouldn’t be long before I would come home to find my mom; a lost victim of Depression. As I drove home, I knew my choices were to either quit the job I love, or find a way to help my mom. In that moment, I called the one person I knew I could trust to handle this person I cherished the way I would; I called Nate. He’d become unhappy with his living situation, had quit his job, and was struggling trying to find his way. I made him an offer to buy him out of his apartment lease, take over his bills, and pay him to be there for mom. Just, be there. Sit with her, help her with dogs, spend time with her. He agreed and in no time at all, he became her protector, doing his level best to guard her from the darkness of her own emotions and in short order, my mom returned as she began to pull herself out of the pit.
I won’t go into detail for many reasons but suffice to say that, unfortunately, Nate found himself in a very difficult situation in his own life and, after a year of living with us again, was arrested. I’ll never forget the sound my mother made the next morning when his mugshot came on the screen as the news reported on the situation. W hile I view him to be an innocent victim in it all, there was nothing I could do to bring him home. This person I’d come to love as a brother, and to mom a son, had been unceremoniously and abruptly ripped from our lives. It took everything in our power to carry on from that painful loss, burying ourselves in work and distractions until eventually we began talking through, and coping with the pain together.
This story accounts for the gap in time, from the loss of my grandmother, to the night she told me that she didn’t have a retirement plan; that she assumed that she would work grooming dogs until her last day and the inevitable discovery of Virgin River, Jack, and Martin Henderson lead us to where we are today. Dark clouds on a winding road of ups and downs but, as her discovery of Martin progressed and the affirmations that he likely has stories like this of his own, along with an understanding of the strength and endurance it takes to cope and pull yourself out of that pit continued, this dream, this mission, brought hope and light back to life. She started to dream again. He inspires her to canoe, to go on rapids, to see sights, to experience nature the way she did when she was a young Girl Scout; the courage to seek out and take on these adventures, and now here we are, driving across the country hoping that Martin Henderson sees this and responds. I think the true dream, if I were to put it to words, would be to share a meal, or just few minutes to say hello and introduce one another, a hug, and mom would give him her phone number with a message that if he ever needed a friend to help him out of a pit, her phone would always be available. It’s a simple wish to have a conversation that’s bringing us 3000 miles to have. To Martin, if you’re reading this, I hope you’ll help me make this dream come true.