NO TIME

Once I was back at Cal for my senior year, I was able to see a therapist at the student hospital as I had during the spring of my sophomore year. Since Dr. Camarer had committed suicide, I was assigned to a new psychiatrist, Dr. F.

In A Patchwork Memoir I wrote:

It was several years after my death despair began that I first told my mother about it. I remember, as a teenager, sleeping downstairs on the sectional in the living room for a time rather than in my bedroom because I was afraid to be alone. When I asked my mother how people came to terms with death, she said when I was an adult, I would know.

Consequently, when I was twenty-two and officially an adult, the conviction took hold of me one day that I had to face my death despair—I couldn’t keep trying to ward it off. Dr. F thought that I was trying to punish myself for something, but I believe I was simply trying to prepare myself for adulthood—as I’d been doing from the time I tried to befriend Britte as a senior in high school. It was the reason I’d sought therapy in the first place, gone to Spain, and started voice lessons. I was trying to extricate myself from my dysfunctional family and prepare to be independent. Because I’d already experienced so much misery since sixth grade, I was determined to turn my life around. If only I were brave enough, I told myself, I could free myself from the depression and anxiety that hampered me. In particular, I imagined that this was the way to free myself as an artist.

So, by degrees, I tried to stay in the anguish longer and longer when it overwhelmed me. I began to go through the stages of a dying person that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross describes but that I didn’t read about until years later—denial, anger, depression, and finally acceptance. (I skipped “bargaining.”) I became so deeply depressed that if I’d been that depressed about anything else, I probably would have killed myself. It seemed to me that my denial of my mortality and my will to live were one and the same thing and that if I gave up the denial, I might actually die. I remember examining my body one evening as I soaked in a warm bath—arms, legs, hands, feet—and crying bitterly, knowing I would have to surrender it. Another day, riding on a bus, I remember saying good-bye to the sky and clouds and April trees, and going to bed that night utterly depleted, not expecting to wake up in the morning. I’d accepted the laws of nature, bowed to the inevitable…and stopped resisting, knowing that if I survived, my life would never be the same.

Then there came an hour when I could rest, finally, in the despair and no longer try to escape it. I didn’t reach any kind of equanimity about dying—only a cold, soul-numbing resignation. I emerged from this passage doubting that I would ever feel carefree or joyful again. Though I went through these stages over the course of many months, it was years before I completely recovered. Throughout my twenties I couldn’t undertake anything long-term because I no longer had the sense that I had any time.

The hour I described above would have happened soon after my twenty-third birthday. So it’s interesting to consider, all these years later, that my grandmother, Marie, also had to face death at age twenty-three, twelve days after giving birth to my father. Do I think there’s a connection? Probably.