Sadness is different from depression.

Sadness is worn, like a cloak. It surrounds the body in dark velvet, holds the arms to one's sides and makes breathing slow and labored. Lots of heavy sighs.

Sadness decends, like night, or wells up, like a spring and overflows.

So much unlike depression, which seems to start from a place within the brain and from a lack of necessary cascading chemicals. Outside circumstances can trigger it, but the trigger can be de-fused with other chemicals--happy pills.

Sadness can come from outside. It falls, sometimes like dead weight. It is difficult to escape. There are no pills to alleviate it.

Sadness is never like the hot, searing futility of depression. Never like the rat-in-a-trap feeling of anxiety.

Sadness is what it is.

We all are pretty sad right now, and the sadness comes out in different ways. My need is always to protect the vulnerable and to try to make peace between people who realize that Sadness makes fighting worthless.

I had some time to think about my father and my sister on my way home yesterday. My father is beside himself with grief. He is losing his life partner. And even though they fought through most of their partnership, they grew old together.
My parents have been married for 57 years. Long enough to have two daughters in two different generations. Long enough to have grandchildren in another generation. Long enough to go thru several wars, massive changes in society, mores, art, music, literature, everything. Long enough to have loved, hated, despised, and loved again, in their own way.

Watching my father's grief and loneliness, I see how his spirit is crushed and his mind swirls in confusion. What is the right care decision? Take her home when she is able to swallow or keep her in the hospital as long as Medicare or Medicade will allow? He wants to care for her, but I know that he cannont comprehend the realities of what that will entail. Her care is a complicated process, one best undertaken by those trained to do so. Social services personell came to visit while he was with her, and that was not the time. My father's functionally illterate, and needs things explained to him in a quiet, confidential, slow, detailed, manner. Not on the fly and not in front of his dying wife.

My sister's grief is angry. I think she wants to protect, but she is consumed with fear; and fear often makes one lash out at others. She and my mother had a bond I do not understand--then again, I was a late arrival in the family, the one who usurped mom's attention. She lashes out at me for many reasons, I guess. Reasons past and reasons present. My calm now, in this situation, can be mistaken for indiffereance. My grief is quiet and my anger vented when alone. She likes to shoot her mouth off about the inadequacies and life mistakes of others. I prefer to live and let live--Lord knows my life is not perfect and people living in glass domiciles, even if greenhouses, shouldn't throw stones.

She sent me an e-card. I haven't opened it yet. I'm not at the point where I can deal with it.

When I said goodbye to my mother yesterday, and told her I was going back to Massachusetts, she took my hand and pressed it against her cheek. I did not want to go. Part of me couldn't leave her alone there any more than I could abandon a child. I want to spend my days sitting by her side, crocheting or reading, talking to her about the world outside and about when she's going to make a big pot of coffee and I'll bring the blueberry muffins.

All I can do now really is the little mumbo-jumbo stuff I learned years ago--prayers and lighting candles. And the prayers, strangely, aren't just for my mother but for my father and sister as well. Someone needs to help them lighten their loads.

I rarely pray for myself. It doesn't seem right. Prayer is a selfless act.

And the cloak of sadness I wear doesn't seem all that heavy to me. It just is.