My Tortured Beacon

I want to tell you about my friend Robin.  The first thing you should know about her is that she is dead.  She was 38 when she took a scarf, a white scarf that looked like it couldn’t hold a purse, much less a heavy, flailing 38-year-old woman, tied it to her canopy bed frame, and hung herself with it.

Robin killed herself during her most severe battle with the depressed side of manic depression.  At the time, I had no idea why, and it pissed me off.

I turned 40 today.  Robin will never turn 40.  I did not think about Robin’s age when I turned 38, or even 39.  I thought about Robin when Arnold Schwarzenegger became governator of California, and when Sex and the City turned into a movie, and when we re-homed our dog, and when blogs were invented.  She’d freak out over all of those things, and that last thing, the blog?  She would have been the Best Blogger Ever.  But she didn’t get to witness any of that because she was dead.

But I think of Robin now, as I’m turning 40, because if she had turned 40 she would have milked the occasion, 8 full years before I experienced it, for all of its inherent drama and then some.  Robin was dramatic in a way that I had never experienced in a friend, but since she was also generous, and brilliant, and loyal, and steadfast, and incredibly imaginative, I forgave her drama every time but one.

Six months before her death, I broke up with her.  We were so close that we had keys to each other’s homes.  Trusted friends.  Robin had a dog named Daisy, an apricot toy poodle who was like the daemon in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.  Daisy had to be tended if Robin ever went out of town, just as our cat had to be fed and let out when we went out of town.  On this last occasion, Stewart and I had gone to Baja for a week.  When we returned, we found our house filled with the furniture once owned by Robin’s mother, our spare change jars emptied, and our cat locked in the bathroom, bathtub full of feces.  Robin’s Crazy had come out and filled the house I shared with my new husband.  It wasn’t just me it affected anymore.

That same day, I drove to her condo, sat down with her, and broke up with her.  I slid her housekey across the coffee table and asked for mine back.  Stewart sat across from me, somber-faced and silent.  Robin gave me no drama that day.  She was sorry and serious and gave me the key.  She said “You told me you’d help me out if I ever needed it.  I needed it.  I didn’t realize I was taking too much.”

I never saw her again.

In my journal I have pasted the thank-you card Robin sent me after I had flowers delivered to her home on her birthday that April.  I still loved her, but I couldn’t yet have her in my life.  I had known she had issues with depression.  I was with her the day her mother was discovered in her bed, having overdosed on pills.  I remember thinking “She’ll never recover from this.”  I had known that her depression was the manic kind, but I didn’t really know, didn’t really understand.  I had never known anyone like her in my short and normal life.

One evening, when Robin called me and said she couldn’t stop crying, I picked her up and we walked down the street to a Thai restaurant.  I bought her dinner.  She was a screenwriter, an Emmy-award-winning screenwriter, but she hadn’t gotten significant work in ages.  She wouldn’t get a “regular” job because that wouldn’t leave her free for meetings, or those things were beneath her, etc.  So she sold her possessions, or she stayed inside all day, and she lost her insurance, and she went off her meds.  As we sat in the restaurant, she cried into her noodles.  I wanted to smack her and snap her out of it.  I wanted to kick her back into Happy Robin mode, when she clipped coupons for you because she remembered that that was your favorite ice cream, or when she picked up a pair of slippers at TJ Maxx because the color went with your eyes, or when she called you and said “It’s Funny Hat Night!  Let’s wear funny hats and go get pizza!”

Not many people know this but about a year after I started dating Stewart, we broke up.  It was just for a week, but it was incredibly meaningful.  It was The Event that every couple encounters during which you decide if you really are going to make it or not.  We didn’t get engaged until 4 years later but we knew that if we made it through this, we were really going to make it.  I, who am a touch dramatic myself, considered it The End of the World.  Couldn’t eat, sleep, think, dress, or wash myself.  I dragged my heels through life in a haze of worry, that gnawing in my gut threatening to collapse my body in on itself.  Robin drove across town, picked me up, and forced me out of the house.  For one night, don’t sit by the phone waiting for him to call you, she demanded.  We ate dinner, we went to see a movie.  The world didn’t actually end.  I slept.

As I sit here typing this post, telling you about Robin, I want you to know that she was an incredible person.  I loved her dearly.  But I could not handle her depression.  As I remember these events, I wish more than anything that I could have given her the gift of forcing her out of the house and out of her funk.  But nothing that I did, nothing anybody did, could change what was happening in Robin’s mind.  It was controllable only by medication and continued cognitive therapy.  Robin had manic depression, and no amount of love alone can battle that.

Through Robin I met a handful of wonderful people with whom I bonded upon the event of her death.  We are perhaps closer now than we might have been had she remained alive, but I know that all of us wish that she had not left.  She is the through line.  Our appreciation for Robin’s singular nature is what we have in common.  We knew love when we found it, and we appreciate that in each other.

After I discovered Robin’s body, it took several weeks for me to start my own therapy.  I did not know, at first, that I was overcome with anger, and nearly immobilized by it.  Having never actually been in therapy before (I don’t count pre-marital therapy, because that is just homework) I associated it with The Crazy, and obviously, I wasn’t the one who was crazy, right?  The irony is that Robin is the one who needed therapy, but it was all of her surviving friends who wound up seeking it.

It took me a while to find the right person to help me.  Eventually I wound up back at the office of the pre-marital counselor I saw with Stewart.  He knew me, knew my life choices, there was less background to establish, more comfort.  Before that I met with a therapist who did not suit me, but said one thing I’ll never forget.  He told me that of all depressed patients, he had more sympathy for the manic-depressives.  He explained that people who do not have the condition operate at a middle baseline of mood.  People who have depression suffer intense periods in which their mood dives, their thoughts are distorted, and they need to get back up to baseline to function normally.  But people with manic depression experience mania, or periods of intense elation, illumination, energy, inspiration, during which they feel possibly more amazing than I have or ever will feel in my life.  Then, when they cycle into depression, they are much farther from their heights than “normal” people with baseline moods.  They have reached a high that, when their moods are controlled by medication to achieve “normal” status, they will never, ever achieve again.

I compare that idea now to having experienced intense romantic love that is more destructive than anything I’ve otherwise encountered.  Without it, I felt like I would die, but with it, my life was not functional.  To achieve a normal, productive life, I had to let it go.  But I would never be the same.

Imagine if that was what your life was like.  Some of you reading this, it might be what your life is like.  I wish you were Robin.  I wish you were still alive.  I wish I had understood.

I miss you.

 

I have encountered depression in many forms before and since Robin’s death.  As a mother, I am more aware of this issue that affects my loved ones and comrades in parenting than ever.   It is not something you can snap out of.  It’s not your fault.  Get help.  Help others get help.  Help Katherine Stone and Postpartum Progress help others.

*The title of this post is from a song by Alanis Morrissette. Of course.

I have written about Robin before:
Warning: Very Heavy Post! Do Not Attempt To Lift This Post If You Are Weak Or Not In the Mood
Wild Things
Woodstock ’94