PAIN DISAPPEARS. THESE YEARS LATER—not even so many of them—summoning the details is hard: what exactly it was that made me feel so alone, so outside myself and my life, so lifeless I no longer wanted to be alive. To say I wanted to kill myself implies a will, a volition I certainly didn’t have. But to be mercifully dead?

Oh yes.

It was dark that year. All year. I cried when Degan left for work in the mornings, terrified of the solitude I have relished my whole life. In my memory, I see myself standing on our back porch in a perpetual dusk, filling my lungs with smoke as though at the base of some terrible chimney. In fact I know I kept rules for myself, smoking only one cigarette a day, or maybe one a week. Maybe I never smoked at all. But looking back, I remember one long smoking binge and an accompanying desire to be obliterated.

Good things did happen during that time. I landed a big publishing deal; I got married. But what I remember is the way my heart raced when I found myself awake again each awful morning. The panic when Degan ran to catch the streetcar. Jim Bryson on my stereo singing, “I got tired of sleeping in Toronto” while all around me the temperature plunged, the air so clear and brittle it seemed it might actually shatter. It hurt to move. Was this just a bad case of the blues, as common as a cold in a country where one in four people are diagnosed with depression? Or maybe it was my “artistic temperament” that did me in. The part of the brain that pumps out art appears predisposed to annihilation through tailpipes and slipknots.

These are just two hypotheses about the roots of depression. There are, of course, many others. For example, there’s the idea that it can originate before birth, the unresolved trauma of an ancestor passed down one generation, then down another, like a baton in a relay race. Perhaps my hand was open, ready to receive it—the suffering that had been coming my way for so long.

This wasn’t the first time I’d found myself in a dark place. Far from it. But something was different now; something more was at stake. Now there were others involved, people I loved; there might even be people ahead of me in time, waiting to be born. But before that could happen, I needed to look deeper, to finally address the ghosts buried beneath me.

As I started tunnelling, I made a desperate attempt to halt the despair, blindly grabbing for therapy, sun lamps, vitamin D. But all the while I was sucked into a vortex that no amount of leafy greens or exercise could touch. There was, I would soon learn, nothing to do but submit. Whoever lived below me, in my shadows, had me. A hand on my ankle, her nails digging in.