3. Half-Life
Following my mother’s death, once again, I failed to help the people around me. I retreated into myself—looking forward, looking backward, but not being present. The anxious mind frets over the future. The melancholic mind is governed by the past. To have a mind that is both anxious and melancholy makes the present inaccessible.
I am prone to melancholy. That is part of who I am. But this was different, like falling off a ledge. As each day began, I would start to climb back up, but the weight of my own mind kept me down. It was dark and uncomfortable, but I was basically ok. And I could try again tomorrow to pull myself out of this.
Time, however, did not behave. A single morning would drag on for what seemed like ages—the slow gray of morning. I might revisit my entire childhood by lunchtime, but each scene from my past moved me inexorably back to that dark place where I was. By the end of each day, I had made no progress. There was no exit in that direction.
A month or two could pass by without me realizing. Yes, I got up each day and did things. I did my job. I took the kids to school. I talked to people on the phone. I listened to music, walked the dog. Objectively, I cared about all those things. But caring about them and enjoying them were not the same thing. I struggled to get going in the morning while the world was pressing heavily on me with a force much stronger than gravity. Each action met resistance. It was the drag of an undertow, an oceanic current too strong to swim against. Move with it. Don’t exhaust yourself. Wait for the moment when it releases you, and then make for shore.
I lived this half-life for too long, much too long. I am not going to say how long. I did what no one should do. I pushed my way through this difficult period without help. It was a selfish thing to do. I have asked myself, “Why would I do that”? Only after discarding all other reasons as invalid, I was left with the only explanation that remained: somehow, I didn’t entirely want things to improve. Maybe, I concluded, this was what I deserved. When you live like that, in your own head, for an extended period of time, it breaks connections you have with the rest of the world. And not all those broken connections can be fixed.
And while I was stuck in my own personal nocturnal landscape, America too was slipping, without me noticing, into a darkness all its own. We were becoming an angry place, unwelcoming to those we labeled outsiders, petty and small in our jealousies of one another’s well-being, and scared that someone else would get ahead of us. Sure, I know these insecurities had always been there, simmering, but now they were the official policy of the United States.
Nothing I was experiencing was unique. Loss and hardship are common in the American experience. So are hope and hard work—walking out into the landscape and giving shape to a wilderness. My family had been doing just that for a dozen generations, creating, out of nothing, something to believe in, something to sustain them. What did they know that I didn’t? What pushed them on?