Depression As A Way Of Life, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #229

June 27, 2011 Mike Gold 7 Comments

“I wish god would take me,” my mother said on the phone Saturday morning.

That’s one of those moments that tell you that no matter how shitty a day you’re having – and it just so happens I was having a particularly shitty day – it is not going to get any better. You might as well go back to bed.

And that’s how depression starts. In my mother’s case, her depression started when she was orphaned the year before The Great Depression of 1929. That Depression didn’t help her situation any, even though as a teenager she found work at the Siegel Catalog plant on Chicago’s west side. She met the man who would become my father in the early 1930s, got engaged in 1934 and waited out my older paternal aunt for two years before getting married. Such was the tradition at the time. The Depression continued until World War II came along, which is the truest definition of “life sucks.”

Mom wasn’t emotionally equipped to raise children, and in all honesty she was not a good mother to my sister and to me. I won’t bore you with the details, or frighten you with them as the case may be. I got my taste for politics from her. She was no political activist, but was a loyal and well-informed slightly progressive Chicago Democrat. I dare say she shared some of her smarts with me; I got my pragmatism and common sense from my dad.

My parents had 70 years of a loving and completely devoted marriage, and when my dad died five years ago nobody thought she’d last six months, least of all her doctor. Despite her chronic depression and mammoth insecurities, my mother is a trained survivor. Not that she wants to be; my earliest memories are of her constant threats to commit suicide.

So when we talk and she gives me the “I wish god would take me” line, I find myself sympathizing. She lives in an assisted living center; I’m told one of the better ones in Detroit. There’s not much going on there, and walking into the joint is like going to a George Romero movie without the popcorn. The inmates are passive about building friendships as they don’t last long and do not end well.

I’d like to say there must be a better way to treat our very elderly, but let’s get real: there isn’t. There’s nothing we can do for them, no real way to give them their lives back. They just drone on in expensive, unproductive oblivion, waiting to die, having outlived life itself.

So as frightening and as discouraging as it sounds, “I wish god would take me” is a logical response from a sad but exceptionally intelligent person. The only terminal disease from which she suffers is life itself, and at age 95 there’s no cure for that. Watches stop before our aged loved ones do.

With all due respect, I don’t feel sorry for her. This is how the system works, and thus far it’s the one system we can’t beat. I don’t feel sorry for myself either, for exactly the same reason.

That’s life.