An Odd Epitaph

 The thing about depression is that usually it’s portable, something heavy, like an extra book in my bag, that I lug around with me.  But sometimes it morphs, liquefies and soaks me, and then sets into a thick, impenetrable coat of cement.  The natural inclination of cement is immobility, which is fine if you can stand in a sculpture garden growing mossy over centuries, but I still have all the responsibilities of the busy, bustling world.

 

The cats, who spend their days making detailed observations and the calculating the correlations between human behavior and the food in their bowls, know something is wrong when the ringing alarm gets no response.  The deploy a level one response, Marley staring intensely at me from her perch on my chest.  Then they escalate, Connor joining her on my chest, not just doubling the stare power but also adding bulk that skinny Marley can’t   achieve on her own. Finally, as a last step to stave off starvation, someone finds some plastic.  “Crinkle, crinkle.”  “Humans can’t stand that, do it again!” “Crinkle, crinkle.”

 

It's a struggle to break free of gravity and sit up, get into motion but I do it and reach for the cans.  I get ready in  a slow motion, lackadaisical manner  - if the cats have spilled their chow, I just leave it for them to eat off the floor.  Human food seems incomprehensible so I down my handful of pills and go, trudging down the sidewalk to the subway like a recently reanimated zombie.

 

At work,  I sit at my desk doing my best to look like I am there.  I take a call from the doctor treating our Very Sick client, who is on strike – refusing to cooperate with any medical procedures until they switch him from the pills to the IV Dilaudid he has had in the past.  I explain to the young resident that this isn’t about addiction – he has been sober for a long time and when he did use drugs, it was crack, he was never interested in downers.  I tell him it’s a combination of wanting the immediate relief of the IV med and also an attempt to assert some control in a situation where he has very little.  

 

The resident brings me into the client’s room on speaker phone, and I can tell he is in full resistance mode.  He refuses various things, the resident tries to convince him, and then there’s nothing to do but level with him.  “You’re playing chicken,” I tell him, “and you need to think about how far you’re willing to take it, because at a certain point, there will be irreversible damage to your body.”  It's no use, he is fully committed.  “I know I could die,” he says, “just tell them I went through a lot of shit and I was OK with it.”  I’m not sure exactly who he wants me to tell this to, and I have a sudden flash of it inscribed on a tombstone, an odd epitaph.

 

Even the new resident can tell there’s no point in continuing, so he brings me out in the hall and I tell him I will keep trying and I will send one of our staff over to visit.  I hang up and look up at the clock.  There’s still a whole day to go.