Here & There September 2008
By James Kullander
So there I was driving to the office the other day when I saw the tips of a few sugar maples beginning to turn, which means summer is coming to an end just when I thought the party was getting started. I found myself feeling suddenly and unaccountably sad about the passage of time, life. Feeling, too, a “damp, drizzly November in my soul,” like Herman Melville’s Ishmael, even though it was a bright mid-August morning, the road dappled with quick bursts of sun that skated across my car.
The mood had come on so quickly I thought it would go away just as quickly, like around the next corner. No such luck. I felt stuck on the same rough, muddy road going nowhere for more than two weeks, my former self—a more or less affable guy, my moods usually not so highly-calibrated—nowhere in sight, a hitcher I dropped off miles back. I did not know when it first struck that I’d made a turn into the dark belly of the whale. Had I known this was going to happen, I would have taken a different route to the office.
I tried to pull myself out of it, but my wheels just spun. Although this does not happen to me often, it was not the first time, so I resorted to my usual arsenal of antidotes. Writing sometimes helps. But every time I tried to work on something, I felt about as inspired as a brick. Struck dumb. Reading didn’t help, either, because the books I like to read are written by people more creative and brilliant than I am even when I am being completely delusional, and setting my eyes on their beautiful words and perfect sentences made me feel the paralyzing loss of never being able to measure up to what I want to be. I suppose a drink or two would have helped get me through the day. A lovely glass of wine always puts me in a good mood. But I thought that substituting my cup of coffee for a generous pour of Côtes du Rhône with my morning eggs and toast seemed like a really, really bad idea.
Of course, there are good reasons for being sad and withdrawn. Grief is probably the best and most excusable reason I can think of. One winter a few years ago when I came back to the office after being away while my former wife died of cancer, I didn’t really want talk to anyone about anything if I could help it. I think I must have been radioactive with pain and confusion because hardly anyone came near me. Who could blame them? I was even avoiding eye contact. But then for no explicable reason, I’d soften up from time to time, and feel like such a hateful lout for being so cold, especially when my colleagues dared to tiptoe into my office and offer me some of their lunch or Christmas sweets. My eye contact friendly fire now, aimed at something beyond them, some dark menacing force that makes you feel you’ve been unspeakably betrayed.
Maybe I have been grieving. And maybe it was not just the turning of the leaves that got me down. Relationship quandaries. Writer’s block. Aging parents. My own aging. Perhaps the turning leaves just set things off like a finger pulled from a dike. It seemed like I was living with a constant low-grade anxiety, like there was a television always on in another room that I couldn’t turn off. But what I really heard were the wires of poignant disquiet humming inside my own head. And I knew that the place I wanted to get back to—that former self—was not somewhere outside of me. It was inside me. I just wished I could have changed the channel and gotten back there. Immediately. No one came to my office door with chocolates because there was nothing so plainly obvious going on in my life—like a death in the family—that could have possibly served as a cue to the others for the way I was behaving. No distress signal beaming from a lifejacket while I floated in some oceanic grief. I couldn’t even figure it out.
What I sometimes thought would have done the trick was for me to volunteer to help someone in far worse shape than me—the sick, the dying, the poor, or whomever else of God’s children needed some sort of assistance that I might have been able to offer. But what I also knew would have helped was even simpler than that: I just needed to flow with whatever I was feeling and not get so caught up in a frenzy of trying to make anything better, pull out of it, change the channel. And just by doing that I knew could help others, too.
When I was in seminary I interned as a chaplain in a psychiatric ward at a hospital in New York City. One afternoon each week my fellow interns and the director of the chaplaincy program met to discuss not only how we handled particular patients, but also why we did what we did, said what we said, felt what we felt. The fundamental lesson always came down to this: the more clearly and honestly we acknowledge our own pain, suffering, and fears, the better we can help others deal with their own.
No one I met recovering from a suicide attempt, a bout of hard drinking, post-partum depression, or a convulsive, eye-crossing shock treatment wanted to talk to a statue quoting from the 23rd Psalm or anything else, for that matter, someone somehow exempt from human frailty and all the faltering that happens in the course of a human life. Neither did the people I saw in their dying days, all pretense removed from their fading consciousness. The sick and dying know when a poser walks into the room. They want to talk to someone who knows that life is wonderful and difficult, that pain is horrible, that death is scary—but sometimes better than life. That you, like them, have regrets, moments of doubt, and bad days. That you have taken roads that led nowhere, gotten stuck, lost your way.
The way out is in. And I did pull out of my funk. For now. Until the brooding with its contemplative and sometimes incomprehensible hymns to the vagaries of life comes again and changes my plans for the day. Or for several days, for that matter. When it does, I’d love a piece of chocolate. But please don’t offer me the stern rebuke of the modern age to cheer up. I’ll be okay.