Confessions

1. I worry that my father was secretly ashamed of me because of my depression. I know he didn't understand the disease, but he tried to support me the best he could. I hope I didn't disappoint him. This is, I'm sure, pretty typical grieving stuff, but the pangs are acute - hoping that I wasn't the cause of pain to him, but also the less attractive hope that he thought well of me, that he approved of me, that he was proud of me in some way. The unattractive need of a child.

2. It seems clear to me that my ex doesn't miss me, doesn't mourn or miss the relationship. I don't have any evidence of this, but it just seems that way. There hasn't been any contact or communication between us at all for two months and it still hurts, and I still miss her. It got ugly, so ugly, in a way I would not have thought possible, that communication had to cease.

The missing her...it's not like that every day. I don't sit around obsessing about the relationship - it's more a matter of these sudden moments that crop up. Some days it's a keening sense of loss, when there's something that would be so natural to share with her, or something that we used to do together...and then this thought immediately shoots through my head, unbidden: she probably isn't having any feelings about you.

I had my first day at work at my new job today. When I came home, I was alone. I had a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator, one I'd bought with her over a year ago (we drank a fair amount of champagne - it was a special thing we shared). So I opened it, alone, and poured a single glass. And it just felt wrong. That was one of the times when the loss-thought went shooting through my head. She probably doesn't miss you. And that just hurts. It hurts to feel like you could suddenly become so utterly unimportant to someone so important to you.

3. Which brings me back to my dad...who I'll never again be able to be important to, who I'll never be able to say "I love you" to, with whom I won't have any more chances to clarify what I really meant. He's just...gone. The totality, the irrevocability of it...my descent into cliche marks the universality of the loss - it's not like my loss is unique among all the other losses, it's just special to me. Every death can be an individual apocalypse for those left behind, or just a sad occasion. So I suppose my confession is that I wonder whether I'm just genetically/physiologically predisposed to these apocalypses. And if I am, does that somehow invalidate or delegitimate them? "Reason not the need," goes the line from King Lear, and I read it as meaning that different people have different needs and that there is no measuring stick against which the appropriateness or seemliness of one's need can or ought to be compared.

4. So my apocalypses: if they're genetic/physiologic in origin (as research into depression is continuing to show), can we still say "reason not the need" if the modern translation/implication of that phrase would be "medicate not the need"? But then, I'm medicated, quite thoroughly. I feel remarkably stable, considering what I've gone through and what's just happened with my dad's death. The meds are working. But the holes in the fabric of my days still exist and these sharp thorns still poke through relatively unimpeded.

I miss him. I miss her. Totally different kinds of loss. I keep taking my meds.