Making It Work

I have been spiraling downward for the last week, steadily slumping into a depressive state. It's this damn disease. Just when you think it's going to leave you alone for a while, just when you think it's done taking and destroying, at least for the moment, it comes along and takes some more, destroys some more, leaves more damage and human debris in its wake.

The blood clot thing threw me for a loop; it took me by surprise. I know that you can get blood clots even without ALS. My son-in-law, Lewis, has had his life threatened by the very same thing. This health challenge has affected his life and emotions in much the same way it is affecting mine. The drug protocol, the needles, the limitations to travel, the loss of freedom, all of this has thundered into me and fractured my now very weakened spirit. The damage to relationships and challenge to activity is daunting.

Yet even this shall pass away. That's what the poet says. It was a poem my Dad loved, one that we read at his funeral. All things must pass, not just my life but this moment of depression too. It is not in my nature to sit and wallow, at least not for more than a few days. I love self-pity as a treat but not as a steady diet. After a while the mud pit of misery is just too much; this emotional slop ad nauseum becomes simply a dark, unremitting hole out of which I must climb. So climb I do; climb I must.

Ultimately I am a man of action, the guy who makes stuff work. Ultimately I am not a depressed person, it is not in my nature; it is not who I am. What to do is more the question. In a great many cases the best thing to do is watch and wait; it's often not the easiest thing to do, but I can do it. To steal a quote from Desiderata and Pierre Trudeau, "to everything there is a season". These last few days have simply been my season of self-pity. Now I will see how things go and take it from there.

I can take it from here. I can handle this. If you don't believe then I will steal another quote from Pierre; "just watch me". I will figure this out too. I will come up with a solution. I will make this work. After all, that is really who I am.