This is a rather long entry...but I think it is worth it...and since I make books of my blogs (yet another cry for self-discipline) I want to keep it. It is a reply to a posting from someone I knew in high school who wrote of depression and suicide on Facebook and I just couldn't ignore him.

David, it’s Pat...

I’m terrible at Facebook...as you may see and so I don’t really know how to share or really post or anything, but I talk with friends about depression and I have been in therapy...I didn’t know why at the time except that my dad had died and I realized at the end that I didn’t know who I was...I was fortunate to have a therapist who chose to help me find my strengths rather than my weaknesses...(She said I was all too aware of them and perhaps saw more than were actually there!) We are taught in this society to work on our weaknesses rather than our strengths...I think...I don’t know if you knew that my father suffered from very bad depression...he was hospitalized several times...and when I read the passage from Black Dog I identified with it...in the sense of being the person outside the depression... and the words Black Dog rang true...there was little I could do for my dad save for not sweep his  condition under the carpet...and he taught me that...he taught me how to listen because he was a listener. And he taught me a sense of the absurd which confused my poor mother no end because she just didn’t get it! But most of all he taught me that the words - I don’t understand. You have so much going for you. Why don’t you just get over it? – are ridiculous words to use or think when someone is suffering from mental illness.

And perhaps most importantly he taught me compassion or not to judge although the pragmatic side of my Irish grandmother sometimes interferes! But I have to admit both of them taught me laughter...

I sort books with a very earnest friend at the local library for the annual book sale. We are buried in books. In the midst of sorting yesterday I got the hiccups. My friend said to me,  “Turn your back because what I’m going to tell you to do will be hard to do facing me.”  Did I say he was very earnest? So I did. And then he said, “Stick out your tongue as far as it will go.” And I did...but I broke up in amusement. And then I did it again and it worked. It evidently is an East Indian remedy. And as I write, I think of my dad because if I had told him that story, he would have loved to use it in a sermon or a children’s story.

It’s the kind of story I tell via email to my friend who admitted to suffering from depression so she knows I am there...and she knows I’m walking with her but not telling her to get over it!

Oh and my dad taught me to be obsessed with children’s stuff! At the age of 77 (I’m younger than most the class because Auntie Gertrude was teaching grade one and wanted me in the class because she was best friends with my mother and she thought Barbara Joan and I could be best friends so she got me into grade one early...Barbara Joan and I never were best friends!) I still do origami when in doubt...

I don’t really do Facebook but I did do a blog which I should be keeping up except that I have the attention span of a fly with a lobotomy (one of my students pointed that out!) but it might make you smile to putter through it...