Who’s got two thumbs and just started taking an antidepressant?
The world finally broke me, I guess. Or I felt myself start to crack, and before it broke me I got a prescription for a bulletproof vest. I know that’s not a real metaphor but lately no amount of yoga, rest, enjoyable meals, vitamins, companionship, dog walks, moderate drinking, meditation, money, work, or funny TV shows could soothe my assaulted nervous system. It seems incredible, to medicate myself in order not to be crushed by my own reaction to life itself. And yet here we are!
I talked to my therapist, who suggested I talk to my doctor, and then I talked to Brian, and then Alice, who asked me if I knew if my issue was depression or anxiety, and when I said I didn’t know the difference she sent me a link to this self-assessment test. My results indicated signs of clinical depression so I sent a screenshot of that to my doctor and twenty minutes later the pharmacy texted me that I had prescription ready to pick up.
I liked the idea of medication, but I also didn’t like it at all. A solid portion of my adult identity has been based on Being Fine No Matter What. Admitting I was Not Fine was a sign that behind the mask of Fine I was weak, sad, inferior, etc. Nobody else was weak, of course! Not you with *your* medication that helps you function and enjoy your life. No, just me, I’m the failure who with all her advantages couldn’t get her shit together. Sorry, can’t come, too sad.
My doctor had told me it might take three to four weeks before the Sertraline (generic for Zoloft) kicked in, and the pharmacist said eight to ten. Both of them warned me that things might get worse before they got better, which scared me because I was about to start a six-day yoga workshop which was going to be pretty intense, the teacher was known to be strict and what if I got in there and fell apart and messed the whole thing up? I mean, sure, people get overwhelmed in all sorts of places, yoga isn’t be the worst place to lose your shit. In the end, my feelings were heavy enough that I didn’t want to wait until yoga week was finished before I started taking my sadness pills, so I swallowed half a Sertraline and let the chips fall where they may.
That was Thursday, and my main side effect was a stomach ache. Friday I took it with food and felt a little hyper, like sort of jiggly inside, but not really worse. By day three, when the yoga started, I still felt jiggly inside but in an okay sort of way. It’s possible that all the moving and breathing and chanting helped break my big chunks of sadness into smaller, less painful chunks. It’s possible that I was starting to feel a little better already.
Then I got a text from my brother.
Monday morning, after yoga workshop day two, I got a text from my brother, Tim. Our older brother, Chris, who had early-onset Alzheimer’s and was living in a memory care place in Denver, had become unresponsive. He’d been going slowly downhill in the past five weeks and now the hospice nurse said he was in transition to the final phase of his life. Tim said I had days, maybe a week at the most, to see him.
Chris was born eleven years before me and I could write a book about how different our childhoods were, but I’ll just say for now that he had a rough road and I had a lot of trouble handling the chaos he traveled around with.
I couldn’t leave until Wednesday so I booked a flight and a hotel, bailed on yoga, apologized to Brian for not asking him to come with me, and also apologized for making him responsible for all the pet care while I was gone. He’s a tremendously good sport but I have brought four pets into the life of a formerly single, child-free man, and though I try to shoulder most of their needs, while I was gone he would have feed two dogs twice a day, one of whom is a dream (PENNY) and one of whom needs meds and is afraid of bowls (WILLY), as well as two cats, one of whom is so nonchalant about wet food (RICHARD) that his dinner regularly gets eaten by the other cat who the vet keeps telling me needs to lose weight (CASSIE), and on top of that Brian would have to continually pet, walk, provide lap time, and reassure four critters who couldn’t possibly understand why one day Brian and I left the house together but only Brian came back.
The friendly skies
If you’ve ever flown into Denver you’ll know that when you get over the Rocky Mountains your airplane becomes a giant cocktail shaker. I wasn’t exactly white knuckling it but my teeth knocked together a few times before the captain came on and calmly told the flight attendants to strap into their jump seats. I’d never seen flight attendants run up the aisle like that before, but I had faith in my heart and an antidepressant in my veins. Then the captain came on again and said, Ladies and gentlemen we’ve got some convective activity over the Denver airport and they’ve temporarily closed all the runways so we’re just going to rattle around up here like Team America marionettes until our wings fall off. Did he really say that? I don’t remember, I was thinking about Chris, lying in his bed, and hoping the weather would clear soon. Also, I didn’t know what “convective activity” was so I texted Tim: Does that mean lightning?
Tornadoes, he texted back.
Tick tock tick tock
So that was just great. I couldn’t make the plane go any faster, and I didn’t know if I had a week or days or hours to see Chris, so I looked out the window while we bumped around in the sky. Would he be aware of me when I got there, and how was I going to comfort a man I wasn’t very close to? Would he want a hug? Would he want me to hold him? I’d read that dying people like to be held so I was preparing myself to do that. To be Fine. To be there for him in death in a way that I’d never been there for him in life.
It took another twenty minutes or so but nature calmed down enough for us to start our descent. Because our plane was so late, a flight attendant came on and asked that we let people who had tight connections to other flights get off the plane first. I thought, I don’t have a connection, it’s just that my brother is dying. Did that count, was that a tight connection? Chris still had hours, maybe days, maybe a week yet to live. So I waited.
Then I grabbed my carry-on, got off the plane, made a quick stop in the women’s room, got lost trying to find Tim’s car in the rain, wished I’d brought a raincoat, found his car, got in, hugged my sister-in-law, Jan, over the back of her seat, and away we drove straight over to see Chris.
I’m trying to sleep over here
These care places can be kind of hilarious because you’ve got people scooting all over the place in their wheelchairs using their stocking feet, and here we had five of them posted right at the front door, eyeballing everyone who came through. We checked out, I guess, so we went back to Chris’s room. Tim peeked in but saw they were changing Chris’s sheets so we hung back to wait for my niece Grace to join us and she showed up a few minutes later. I love Grace for many reasons and not just because we’re both 5’10” and she’s 100% adorable.
When we got into Chris’s room two aides were bundling up his old linens and he was lying there with his eyes closed, mouth open, and fresh sheets pinned up to his chin.
“Has he been asleep long?” Tim whispered to them.
“Oh, he’s gone,” the lady aide said.
We looked at her. “Gone?” Tim said. But Chris was right there, we could see him.
She must have figured we were a little slow so she said it again, louder. “He’s gone. He passed.”
We all turned to look at Chris. His chest wasn’t going up and down. Tim went over and put his hand on Chris’s head. “He’s still warm.”
I couldn’t believe it. I put my hand on his head, too. His scalp was sweaty.
“Do you know what time he passed?” Grace asked.
“6:16 p.m.,” said the man.
We looked at the clock. It was 6:26 p.m.
“Oh, dang,” said Grace.
Some things about Chris
He was left-handed.
He was diagnosed as hyperactive as a child but no one did anything about it.
He and my dad once laughed for fifteen minutes straight about something on TV and I recorded them on a cassette tape that I no longer have.
He was terrible with money and would give it to any friend who asked.
When I was little I would see him go out at night wearing a black polyester shirt with red flowers on it and platform disco shoes.
He had a 1972 Chevy Nova that was painted Mojave Gold.
He had serious impulse control issues that, depending on how you felt about binge drinking, could actually be kind of funny, though his last girlfriend drank herself to death.
He worked a lot of dead-end jobs, sometimes as a janitor, often at night, but you have never seen a terrazzo floor look so beautiful as when he was done with it.
He was an excellent pool player and he knew a thousand jokes.
Any boyfriend of mine who met him said he was their favorite person in my family.
He smoked a cigar like Tony Soprano.
He played a decent game of golf and he had his own set of darts and he could tell you anything you wanted to know about the Denver Broncos.
He took care of both of my parents when they were old and sick, and the stress of it gave him a heart attack.
He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at the same age I am now.
Well, now what?
I’d come all this way to sit with him, so by God we were going to sit. We pulled up some chairs and someone got us water. We talked about Chris and other things and showed each other pictures on our phones. Grace and I both kept checking on his chest because you assume a person who’s just lying there is going to breathe at some point; you keep waiting because sometimes the breath slows down and takes a little pause. I had been practicing that in my yoga workshop: kumbhaka, retention of breath during meditation. It can be a holy practice that causes the mind to swoon. If you inhaled and held your breath forever, maybe you’d never die.
The hospice nurse came and used her stethoscope on his heart and checked his pupils with the light on her phone. There was no breath, no consciousness, so she was going to call a doctor to pronounce him. Maybe I don’t listen to enough murder podcasts but that was when I learned that it doesn’t matter what time people actually die, the death certificate will say the time of death is when the doctor comes in and pronounces.
She said the mortuary would come pick up Chris and store him until cremation, and I told everybody that after my roommate, Eric, killed himself I learned that bodies get picked up on a priority system, so that bodies in public get picked up first, then bodies in care homes and other facilities, and last to get picked up are bodies in private homes. Everybody thought that was interesting, but then Chris’s roommate, Bob, yelled from his bed behind the curtain, “I’M TRYING TO SLEEP OVER HERE,” so we got all whispery and asked each other, “Does Bob know Chris died? Should we tell him?” Nobody wanted to tell Bob.
In the hallway we decided where we should have dinner, and as we were about to leave I felt like I needed to say one last goodbye so I headed back to Chris’s room by myself. He was still tucked in just like we’d left him, but now he was cold.
Then we went to Texas Roadhouse and I ordered a margarita the size of my head. It didn’t have much effect on me, maybe they had a stingy bartender or maybe the sadness drug was doing its job, or maybe I was irredeemably sober because we all knew this day was coming and Chris — I can’t say “was better off now” because who knows? — but the Chris we knew was gone. He wouldn’t have said it like that, of course, he’d have made it into a joke. He popped his clogs. He fell off his perch. He’d gone into the fertilizer business. He’d bought a pine condo. He was taking a long dirt nap.