A Story of Hope for Those Who Struggle with Depression

A few weeks ago Stuart and I were visited by a former student of mine, now a wife and mother who spent many years living in Indonesia, which is her husband’s home. Karin will soon move to Bangladesh, where her husband will be working for Habitat for Humanity, and she hopes to continue online work for her master’s degree in education. Karin told me that one of her life-changing experiences came in 1995, when she took a course called Women and U.S. Cultures with me during a semester when I was clinically depressed. “Why did that class matter so much to you?” I asked. “Because you had the courage to ask for our help,” she said.

 After 15 years, I still remember what hell that semester was. I operated on only one cylinder — sleeping little, unable to focus my thoughts. I sometimes took an hour to get out of bed; at meals I tasted nothing and could hardly lift the fork. I gazed at my image in the mirror one Sunday morning and did not recognize the face.

After Karin left my house, I rummaged in the basement to find the packet of letters students and colleagues sent me that dark semester. The folder is about two inches thick, and the letters, now beginning to yellow after 15 years, still move me to tears.

Each week of that class, I felt the eyes of about 30 beautiful young women and a few beautiful young men on me, as I opened my mouth and began to speak. I thanked them for their prayers and invited them into the course content. I was afraid, I told them, but they gave me strength to keep putting one step in front of the other. They studied hard, carried out group projects, entered into deep conversation about what they were reading and writing. At the end of the course, having returned almost to my normal high level of energy and joy, I wrote those students a four-page single-spaced love letter. We wept and cried together.

I am grateful to Karin for reminding me of that class. One of my fears in 1995 was that if I showed my students my weakness, I would be a poor role model. It turned out that the opposite was true. It could have been otherwise.

Amazingly, a year after I wrote that letter, I accepted an invitation to the Goshen College presidency, a role I enjoyed for eight years and which led to my present work at the Fetzer Institute. I could never have imagined as I struggled to move my heavy carcass out of bed, that these words of my therapist would actually come true: “If you go through this lonesome valley step by step, not only will you be a better role model than if you try to evade or deny your weakness, but you may discover that, instead of an obstacle, your depression will be a teacher whose humbling lesson you need before you can hear a greater call to a fuller life.”

She was a wise one, that therapist. And I will always love the students whose devotion to literature and cultural study was a form of healing. Now that they are walking their own lonesome valleys, I pray for each one and remember the poem sent to me by my dear student Katie, who sent me a water color painting and whose tender spirit reached me through these words of Emily Dickinson,

How many flowers fail in Wood–

Or perish from the Hill

Without the privilege to know

That they are Beautiful–

Parker Palmer on Bill Moyers Journal: Ground On Which It’s Safe to Stand

If you missed Parker Palmer’s appearance on Bill Moyers Journal last Friday, cheer up.  Here it is.

Apparently, the broadcast about illusion and reality in our current economic crisis, which included Parker talking about depression in his own life, cheered many people.  Funny how truth does that–in just the paradoxical way that Parker himself explains better than anyone I know.

Here is a Parker Palmer story from the transcript of the Bill Moyers Journal broadcast that has helped many people who, like myself, have known depression:

Parker: “I got tremendous help from a therapist at one point, in one of my depressions, who said to me, “Parker, you seem to keep treating this experience as if depression were the hand of an enemy trying to crush you. Would it be possible to re-image depression as the hand of a friend trying to press you down to ground on which it’s safe to stand?”

The exchange between Bill and Parker that follows is one of the most honest depictions of the dark side of the inner life that you are ever likely to see on television. Be sure to check out the blog posts after you watch the video.  Notice how many of them appreciate this short segment about depression.

I have written about Parker’s important book, The Courage to Teach here before, when I was preparing to teach a workshop on reflective writing, but I have not written about him as a memoir writer.  His books all contain philosophical and social reflection, but they ring most true in their many personal narratives–often moments of self-deprecation, doubt, and fear.

Despite the fact that I have been a fan and then a friend of Parker’s for many years, I never placed him in the category of memoir writer until I began to notice–duh!– that even his most highly evolved political and social discourse finds its roots in questions and experiences from his own life.  Interestingly, Parker is seldom described as a memoir writer.  He is called author, spiritual teacher, educator, and activist.  It’s time to explore what he contributes to the field of memoir writing.

I will write more in future posts about several of Parker’s memoirs.  Until then, you can find more video, speeches, and interviews at the Center for Courage and Renewal website.

Little Heathens–Perfect Memoir for a New Depression?

“Ralph Waldo Emerson could have learned a thing or two about self reliance from my great-great-grandparents,” asserts Mildred Armstrong Kalish near the beginning of her book Little Heathens:  Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm in the Great Depression. I knew I would love this book when I read those lines, and I was not disappointed.  This book is a love song for childhood in general and for a certain kind of youth almost extinct in American now–a childhood without television, videogames, play dates, nursery schools, organized sports, allowance, sex education, or fast food.  If it were just about hard times, it would have been depressing or boring.  The high spirits that flow through this book, however, also infect the reader.

The title of the book comes from Mildred’s grandmother who once saw her daughter’s brood cavorting naked on the lawn, washing down the stubbles from a day in the hay fields with water from a hose. 

“‘A body’d think you had had no upbringing,’” she proclaimed.  “‘They’d think that you’d been peed on a stump and hatched by the sun.’”

When even the verbal lashings a child receives are this colorful, no time can be hard enough to repress high spirits.  Combined with a decent literary education from aphorisms, hymns, memorized poetry, books, and classroom, a child could grow up to join the Coast Guard in WWII, use the GI Bill to go to college, become a college professor, mother, grandmother, and write a memoir that was reviewed by the hottest memoir writer of the moment–Elizabeth Gilbert–right there on the front cover of the book review section of The New York Times, July 1, 2007. That’s what happened to Mildred.

Mildred Armstrong grew up without knowing her own father, who apparently was banished for some impropriety early in her childhood.  Elizabeth Gilbert points out that a lot of memoirists would have made this story the center, perhaps even painting themselves as victims. But Mildred chooses what to forget and what to remember, discarding the negative in favor of gratitude for the positive.  She had a loving mother who allowed lots of freedom as well as strict (and loving) grandparents who offered structure and an uncommon measure of common sense.  She had siblings, teachers, and a maiden aunt who challenged her and believed in her.  And she must have had (and has!) an incredible memory and organizing system for her remembered past.

My own childhood has many things in common with Kalish’s, and my mother, who is just a few years younger than Mildred, has told me stories from her own girlhood in the Depression that resonate even better with these.  The descriptions of food, church, family, pranks, and creative, frugal celebrations all hit home, but here is my very favorite, the description of going down the pasture to fetch the cows:

“You can’t commune with Mother Earth with shoes on your feet.  I follow the deeply rutted, dusty path worn by the cows down to the end of the narrow lane where I first encounter the tender, cool grasses of the pasture.  A dozen locust trees adorned with their clusters of ivory-colored blossoms are all abuzz with a congregation of honey and bumblebees.  The rich sweet fragrance is almost overwhelming.”

Kalish follows Wordsworth’s maxim about poetry and recollects emotion in tranquility here.  She first lived her experience, then recognized her experience in the words of poets and authors, and now condenses both for us in word pictures that stir the soul.

I thought of this book when Barack Obama’s primary victory in Iowa launched him as a serious contender for the presidency in the face of Hillary Clinton’s formidable advantages at the time.  Those hearty midwesterners were seeing past the color of Barack Obama’s skin to the content of his character–a character shaped by his midwestern grandparents about the same age as Mildred Kalish.

I thought of this book again during the last month as stock prices tumbled and the whole globe trembled with fear of a deep, world-wide Depression.  If we are, indeed, headed for such a time, we could find a lot of hope by reading how material poverty produced in Mildred Armstrong Kalish and her “greatest” generation the kind of values, skills, and yes–high spirits–that we always need and may need now more than ever.

Check out the book from your local library.  Frugal Mildred won’t mind.