BARBARA ABERCROMBIE
When I was eight years old, I threatened to throw myself off my bedroom balcony into the backyard where my parents were gardening. They were nonchalant about this, which was unlike them. I was used to a lot of drama in my family—my mother’s moods, my father’s temper—but as I leaned over the balcony rail, they were calm about the possibility of my leaping off into thin air. I could envision my crumbled body below. The attention that would be paid. How sorry they’d be for ignoring me. The tears they’d cry. “Snap out of it,” my mother called up to me.
I was a strange child, scrawny, with white blond hair, both shy and a show-off. All I wanted to do was to grow up so I could be in charge. I wanted to be an actress. I wanted to write stories. My favorite game was to make drawings of people, cut them out, then turn our living room into a town and act out dramas with my paper people.
Years later when I was in my early twenties, I attempted to throw myself off the balcony for real. However, I did it in the safest way possible: I took twelve over-the-counter Sleep-Eaze pills, then called a friend who lived around the corner. She came immediately and called a doctor. The doctor, who astonishingly made a midnight house call, was less than sympathetic. He said he found the paintings on my walls (my new hobby) disturbing and suggested that the looming black figures influenced by Munch might be my family members.
My friends rallied around me. The next day, I moved briefly into a friend’s apartment so I wouldn’t be alone. This was a friend who had made her own suicide attempt, one that was far better planned and more serious than mine. She had collected and then taped prescription sleeping pills behind photographs and artwork in her apartment, but I’d saved her life by dropping in on her unexpectedly shortly after she had un-taped and swallowed all the pills. And now it was her turn. She made sure I ate proper meals, and every day she’d see me off in a taxi as I went to visit my new shrink. All dressed up, I’d sail down to 62nd Street and Park, and to this day I can’t remember one word that doctor said to me. All I remember is how fragile I felt, how important it was to dress carefully for my session; I remember that my head was buzzy and the feeling of being near the edge of a cliff—how easy it would be to fall over into an abyss and go completely nuts.
I held my breath a lot.
Here’s what was really nuts: I was a working actress in New York, getting jobs on television and Broadway. It was the 1960s. I was healthy, I was pretty, and I had friends and family. But I was depressed and the word depression wasn’t used or discussed in those days. I’m not even sure what set off my failed suicide. A boyfriend had left? Which one? Or was I simply sad? My feelings didn’t make sense.
When I look back, I think of gray waves of loneliness, a kind of agoraphobia that would overtake me. I lived alone. I remember evenings in my apartment on East 90th Street, hearing people coming home from work, doors slamming, voices calling to each other. When I had an acting job, which actually was quite often—often enough to support myself—things were okay. I felt joy and excitement. When you’re in a play you have a family, a posse, but then the play closes and you start from scratch again. Find a new job, a new play, a new family of friends—support, a new meaning to your life.
When I think of that depression, I think of paralysis. Which is odd, because I also took so much action in those days. I had dropped out of college at nineteen to make daily rounds as an actress, went to casting calls, never giving up until I finally got an agent and steady work. I was out there; I was brave.
But then this other thing—sadness, loneliness, and fear crept in like fog.
Depression felt like failure, a horrible character flaw rising up that had to be kept secret. I couldn’t “snap out of it” on demand. It didn’t make sense, yet it felt natural; many of my friends were in the same boat. I hung out with a lot of depressed people—not only my friend with the taped prescription pills, but a boyfriend who kept hitching rides on freight trains to get away from his life, and a friend who swore he had these mood swings because his mother threw him on the floor as a baby. In the late fifties and early sixties we all wanted to be cool, we wanted to be like James Dean who had died a few years earlier. We smoked endless cigarettes, we slouched, we drank scotch, we read depressed French intellectuals, and took Dexadrine pills—which we didn’t really think of as a drug, just a little something to keep us awake.
What I finally learned was that the worst thing about depression is that it doesn’t make sense, you can have it all and still feel hollowed out; still feel as if your mother threw you on the floor as a baby.
There was one more time in my life when I felt I could fall over the edge, into an abyss. I was married by then, with two babies. I remember standing in the shower instructing myself to breathe. I had given birth two months earlier, had given birth in fact twice in the same year; my girls were born eleven months apart. I adored my babies, and I was thrilled to have them. I don’t think I had postpartum depression, but my hormones must have been on overdrive, and then a close friend’s little boy died of an infection—suddenly, on his third birthday. He was sick, they took him to the hospital, and then he was dead. When he died, nothing made sense for a long time. Life was terrifying and dangerous. I was twenty-seven years old. My husband was in the Navy and got orders to move from Washington, D.C., where we had lived for two years, to Vallejo, California. We moved. We lived in a small apartment. All my energy went into trying to appear normal and taking care of my two babies who were both in diapers, one not yet walking. I was three thousand miles from my family and friends.
We had a small sports car, an Austin Healey, and I was afraid to drive it. Years went by on a roller coaster of emotions, the highs and lows of what I considered normal life. If my husband ignored me, I’d make dramatic announcements about leaving. We’d have huge fights, followed by lovely make-ups with sex and bouquets of flowers. We adored our girls, our large extended family, our dogs and cats. Though moody, my husband was the most honest and trustworthy person I knew. We fought a lot, but I was sure this was healthy. Things got aired out.
When I turned fifty, my mother and I were going through a difficult patch, not speaking. She lived in New York, and I was in California. When my father dragged her to the phone to wish me a happy birthday, she said, “Well, happy fiftieth. Maybe now you’ll grow up.”
I had believed that if my husband were ever unfaithful to me, broke the trust I had in him, I’d never again be able to trust anything in life, that I’d go right over that edge into the abyss I had managed to avoid for all these years. But when I did discover his infidelity, I went over a different edge—into fury. No woman on this planet was ever angrier than I was, dumped at age fifty-one for a younger woman. This was not some gray paralysis of angst: there was absolutely no slouching around in despair. If it’s true that depression is anger turned inward, I was home free. I knew exactly who my target was, and it wasn’t me.
Granted, I had spent a few previous years moping, weeping, and trying to get my husband into therapy, realizing I was in the middle of a marital car crash—but I hadn’t admitted to myself that my marriage could really ever end, because there was only one way to end it, infidelity: which of course he’d never do. I simply hadn’t realized how desperate he was to get out of our marriage.
Though crying a lot, I sprang into manic action. I hired a lawyer, bought a house of my own, and made plans to remodel it. I upped my teaching schedule because I now had to support myself, and found a therapist. I was a mess, but I was okay. I ran six miles every morning, I took tai chi classes, I joined a gym, I had three part-time teaching jobs, I filled page after page of my journal with rants and threats and regret. But I never got stuck. I ran circles around the abyss.
When my best male friend, R, who would become my second husband seven years later, took me out to dinner, I could not get to the entrée without crying. R had white handkerchiefs and would hand one to me as I sobbed over the treachery, the pain of being abandoned at age fifty-one! Twenty-six years of marriage and he had fallen for a younger woman with big tits and no brain! All that love and history and he had thrown it away! Tears falling into my wine glass, other diners averting their eyes, my nose running, R would just hand me another white handkerchief.
And then weirdly, six months later, my about-to-be ex-husband asked me out on a date. Equally weirdly, I said sure, I’d go out to dinner with him. “For God’s sake don’t have anything to drink,” said my friend Nicki. “Excuse yourself and call me if you start to get emotional.”
It was the first time he’d seen my house. He hugged me and commented on how skinny I felt. I resisted all the snarky responses that sprang to mind. Yeah, but tiny tits. I wondered what had happened to the other woman. At dinner we didn’t discuss her or our separation. We talked about our kids. My anger had softened. Maybe we just needed space, some air in our marriage. During that dinner, I realized I was still in love with him.
A few weeks later, we drove to see old friends in San Diego. It was December. I was thinking maybe we’d work through all this. We spent the day with friends we’d known for years; we were comfortable with them, and were loved by them. It felt like we were moving back into our real life.
Driving home to L.A. that evening I asked him, “What are you doing New Year’s Eve?”
“Oh, you know me,” he said.
I looked at his familiar, handsome face illuminated by passing headlights. “Frankly, I’m not sure I do,” I said.
“I’ve never liked New Year’s Eve.”
This was true. He was always a pill about celebrating. “We can just hang out,” I said. “Watch movies.” Silence. The air had shifted. Something was up. “Okay?”
“No, not New Year’s Eve,” he said.
We were off the freeway now, headed toward my house. There was an elephant in this little sports car. And I suddenly knew the elephant’s name, the woman with the big tits. My husband’s date for New Year’s Eve, “She’s coming to L.A.?”
Never forthcoming in the best of times, he was now silent.
“No, no, no!” I started to yell and then went totally out of control, sobbing as I beat on the dashboard of the Austin Healey, the car we had owned for twenty-six years, that I had been afraid to drive when we lived in Vallejo and our girls were babies. A 1964 green Austin Healey British racing car. The top of my head was about to blow off. If I’d had a gun I’d have blown off the top of his head.
Later, my therapist said my fantasies of shooting him or running over him or crashing my car into his or tearing his car apart with my bare hands were perfectly healthy as long as I didn’t act on them. Every Tuesday afternoon I’d sit in her office and talk and talk.
About my anger. My pain. My parents. My past. My present. The rage. And about getting off the emotional roller-coaster of my failed marriage.
My grief over the loss of my marriage came in waves during that first year, and just when I thought I’d recovered I’d do something like go to the market to buy groceries and be flattened by memory and loss. C.S. Lewis wrote of being surprised that grief felt like fear, and that was part of it too; I was scared. But I knew there was a reason for the grief; it made sense. I had loved this person and shared my life with him for over a quarter of a century. I’d had children with him, made his family my family, and that’s why this loss hurt so deeply. I was neither crazy nor self-indulgent. I had a right to be angry, to grieve.
My anger was such that it eventually healed me.
Weirdly, it was divorce that finally “snapped me out of it.” Though I hated to acknowledge that my mother had been right, I finally grew up. The abyss was abandonment and loneliness, and I got through it. And when my father died, my mother got through it too and came to live in California. We became friends.
Terrible things happen—they go on happening all your life. But here’s what I discovered: anguish, unhappiness, sadness, fear, loneliness, and grief are not the same as depression. It can all hurt as much as depression, but you are not paralyzed. You keep breathing. And the lovely surprise of growing older is that most of us get happier. If you’re lucky and have decent health, friends, a roof over your head, food on the table, and something you love to get up and do every day—you calm down. You no longer want to throw yourself off a balcony.