Depression Hates a Moving Target. Nita Sweeney

My friend’s was the first 26.2 sticker I’d noticed on the car of someone I knew.

      I caught my young friend and asked about his running. Tall and lean, he looked the way I thought a marathoner should. Standing outside the building where we both attended a recovery group, I confided, “I’d like to earn my own 26.2 sticker someday.” I looked at the ground, waiting for the, “You’ve got to be kidding” look. Instead, he smiled. “Keep running, and in time you’ll do it.” My throat closed. I was easily twice his age, much heavier, and hadn’t even run a 5k. I was probably manic. No matter. This kind man believed in me.

      I didn’t tell my sister, but planned for the 5k.

Chapter 4

A Perfect Storm

      Weight loss and the looming prospect of the “Big Five-Oh!” would have been enough reason for me to take up running again. There was also that wacky recurring dream. But these were surface factors. In fact, the seeds of Kim and Fiona’s posts landed on ground made fertile by difficulties starting five years before. A perfect storm of life events had created the critical mass necessary to get me off the sofa.

      Still, I wanted to lose weight.

      In high school and my twenties, I might gain five pounds during the winter, but easily lost that in the spring. By my early thirties, I looked anorexic. For the six months before I met Ed, I coped with the stress of practicing law with stringent diets. Chunks of my hair fell out, and I was frequently lightheaded, while my period stopped completely. The first time Ed opened the refrigerator in my house, it contained only an expired bottle of ketchup, a bag of apples, and a sleeve of bagels. By that time, I was only eating one bagel and one apple, cut into thirds, each day.

      After my nervous breakdown, I could no longer summon the effort required to control my food. When I began taking antidepressants, the obsession transformed into overeating and yo-yo dieting, which packed on the weight. By my early forties, the scale hit two hundred pounds. I joined a recovery group for food issues and lost nearly forty pounds, but when I saw Kim’s posts about running, I was far from happy with my size.

      I’d gone off antidepressants several times to lose weight. The weight came off, but the depression, anxiety, and panic attacks came back so viciously that, within a few months, I was back at the psychiatrist’s, begging for a prescription. My most recent experiment with quitting meds, just a year before I took up running, had also failed. I went back on the drugs, but it takes several months for my antidepressant to take effect, so once again, I missed nine months of well-being for the sake of twenty pounds.

      I knew from my previous exercise stints that depression hates a moving target. I’d taken Nia dance classes in 2004 and 2005. I would ease in, but before class ended, I was jumping, kicking, and panting like a fiend. Happy at accomplishing something, I left the class hypomanic, which felt like an improvement.

      But when our golden retriever Bodhi died, I couldn’t bring myself to dance. I took long, slow, dogless walks, mourning my canine friend, or escaped the silent house to write in coffee shops. The solace of summer air, wind in the trees, and the swing of my arms was the best medicine. Happily, when Morgan joined our family, he became my walking companion and canine therapist.

      ***

      On a September day, just a month after we adopted Mr. Dawg, Mom called to say Jamey was being admitted to Children’s Hospital.

      At the hospital, my twenty-one-year-old niece lay on the bed in a “spica” cast that covered all of one leg and half her body up to her waist. The room purred with the hushed voices of her friends. They were students at Ohio State University, coworkers, and high school classmates. More than a dozen of them filled all the chairs, every inch of floor space, and the windowsill. My sister and the rest of our family sat in stunned silence in a meeting room across the hall.

      The young people took turns signing her cast. When a young man offered me a package of markers, Jamey brushed a blonde hair away from her eyes and said, “Write something, Aunt Nita.” I pulled out the purple one and, just beneath where her toes peeked out, scrawled, “Here. Now.”

      The pain meds hadn’t knocked her out the way the medical staff thought they should. Her tolerance would also prove too high to dull the pain to come.

      I pointed at her toes and said, “When you get scared, remember there’s only this moment and I’m with you.” I felt so helpless and pathetic trying to apply mindfulness techniques to her situation, but she smiled.

      When Mom had called, I’d asked, “Why Children’s? She’s twenty-one.”

      The cancer she had, osteosarcoma, usually strikes teens. The doctors at Children’s were the experts. The tumor in Jamey’s thigh had likely been growing for months. By the time an MRI found it that morning, it had broken her femur, the largest and strongest bone in the body. Ultimately, that tumor and the lesions already in her lungs would also break our hearts.

      Jamey had been five when her parents divorced, and, because funds were short, I’d taken her shopping. We’d walked the aisles of the big-box store hand in hand, choosing first a frilly, pink, impractical dress that made her eyes shine. Then we filled the cart with underwear, socks, T-shirts, pants, shoes, and a warm coat, all the things she needed to start school. This shopping trip and the few birthday parties I attended had been the best I could do. I spent the precious time I now wished I had devoted to her, and the rest of my family, drafting legal documents and priding myself on the number of hours I billed. I had never wanted children of my own, but thought of her as the next best thing to a daughter. I vowed to be there when she or Amy needed me.

      ***

      In 2006, while Jamey was sick, I enrolled in Goddard College’s non-residential Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in Creative Writing. I chose Goddard because they could accommodate my mental health issues. Between residencies, and when I wasn’t at Jamey’s, I lived at my desk or on the sofa reading and writing. I drank large decaf soy lattes every day. While completing the assignments gave me a sense of accomplishment, I gained weight and lost touch with the positive body sensations exercise had brought.

      During the July 2006 residency, Amy called. I had to excuse myself from the classroom at Fort Worden to go outside to get phone reception. As I stood on the grassy lawn, I listened as my sister wept into her phone back in Ohio. “It’s in her spine!” she shrieked. I sank to the grassy lawn and sobbed, unable to maintain the composure I wished I could keep to calm my sister.

      By November, the tumor in Jamey’s leg had stopped the circulation to her foot. She had to have her leg amputated. After the surgery, she called from the ICU in agony. Because of her high tolerance for medications, normal doses weren’t blocking the excruciating pain. “Tell me how to meditate,” she begged. I guided her through a basic body scan. As I talked, possibly from the drugs finally working, she went to sleep. My sister took the phone and thanked me.

      In February 2007, Jamey died. She was twenty-four. Her death turned the natural order of the world on its ear and plummeted me into despair. I began having panic attacks again and took to my bed.

      ***

      For the rest of 2007, grief blasted Ed and me as if from a fire hose.

      In July, one of Ed’s good friends and former coworkers died.

      In August, Ed’s ninety-six-year-old father died.

      In September, the man my mother had dated after my father’s death died.

      In October, both Jamey’s cat and Jamey’s father died.

      In November, Mom’s best friend died.

      With each death, I thought, “This is it for a while.” I imagined burning my black dress.

      But 2007 wasn’t finished with us yet.

      ***

      In 1996, when he was sixty-seven,