Love in the Dark

In which I struggle to hold on.

Illustration from Tatterhood and Other Tales, edited by Ethel Johnson Phelps

“Probably you were not quite well, my little dove, when you wrote to me, for a note of real melancholy pervaded your letter. I recognized in it a nature closely akin to my own. I know the feeling only too well. In my life, too, there are days, hours, weeks, aye, and months, in which everything looks black, when I am tormented by the thought that I am forsaken, that no one cares for me. Indeed, my life is of little worth to anyone. Were I to vanish from the face of the earth to-day, it would be no great loss to Russian music, and would certainly cause no one great unhappiness. In short, I live a selfish bachelor’s life. I work for myself alone, and care only for myself. This is certainly very comfortable, although dull, narrow, and lifeless. But that you, who are indispensable to so many whose happiness you make, that you can give way to depression, is more than I can believe. How can you doubt for a moment the love and esteem of those who surround you? How could it be possible not to love you? No, there is no one in the world more dearly loved than you are.”

- Letter from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to his nephew

I said: what about my eyes?
He said: Keep them on the road.

I said: What about my passion?
He said: Keep it burning.

I said: What about my heart?
He said: Tell me what you hold inside it?

I said: Pain and sorrow.
He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.

-Rumi*

My mom, who was a capital-F Feminist without needing a sash proclaiming such, and a lover of great literature, including books for children, ensured our library as kids had an array of marvelous texts that celebrated the power of girls and women. The best of these was Tatterhood, a book of folk tales from around the world in which all of the heroines were female. I now read these stories to my own daughters, and one of my favorites is the tale of Janet and Tamlin. 

In the story, which originated in Scotland, Tamlin, a young man bewitched by the Queen of Elfland, is unwittingly summoned by Janet when she picks the roses growing by an enchanted well. They visit together night after night, and she learns that he had been a mortal man who was taken by the Queen to serve as a knight in Elfland. Janet, who has fallen in love, asks if there is any way that she can rescue Tamlin from the Queen. He responds: “Next week is Halloween, when the Queen and her company ride abroad. That is your chance.” He describes the horse he will be riding, and his place in the procession, and tells Janet what she must do to save him.

On Halloween night, Janet goes to the place where Tamlin has told her to wait. Soon enough, the Queen and her company approach. Janet runs out and pulls Tamlin down from his horse, and as she does, she hears a cry, “Tamlin is away!” And then, as she holds on to him for dear life, knowing that if she lets go she will lose him forever, he changes: first into a lizard, then a fearsome snake, then a snapping wolf, then a massive bear, then a ferocious lion, and then a red-hot bar of iron, and finally into a glowing coal. As Tamlin has instructed her, Janet throws the coal into the nearby well, and Tamlin emerges, transformed back into a mortal. And so the story ends, happily ever after.

Alas, not every Janet and Tamlin story has a happy ending, and not every evil enchantment can be broken. We can hope, but hope is not a promise. We can love in the dark, but without a crack to let the light through, love cannot grow.

I have thought of this story often in the past few years, and it has taken on a new layer of meaning as I struggle to hold on to the people I love who are being transformed by the terrible hex of depression. I have fought depression myself, and it is every bit as awful as it seems from the outside, but lately I’ve had to put my own mental healthcare second to supporting others. That’s not a particularly great strategy, it turns out, but when you’re a mom and a daughter (and sometimes, a partner), there often isn’t a whole lot of room to prioritize oneself. 

My dad came first. His grief over losing my mom in 2011 made me feel as if I was holding on to an impossibly heavy bag of sand, and I staggered under the sliding, gravity-tugged weight of it, often experiencing my own grief through the lens of his agony. My tears in the aftermath often came only after I had had my nightly call with him, and my pain felt sympathetic in nature - not my own, but pain from his pain. Then he slid from grief into depression, and that felt like holding on to a block of granite, so unyielding was his misery. Nothing I said or did or offered made him feel better for more than a brief moment, and when I encouraged him to do the things I knew might lift his spirits, he couldn’t. It still feels that way sometimes, but the granite is giving way to something else now - to snowflakes threatening to melt and slip through my fingers. As I reluctantly and slowly yield to the immovable fact of his depression, as I let go and let him sleep all day, as I give up on exhorting him to get out of his apartment and engage with his community, I feel each flake beginning to blur at the edges, and soften into water. This is letting go by default. This is the inevitable fact of losing the war against time.

Also, as I have written about before, in the spring of 2020, Annie fell into the clutches of this disease (diagnosed first as depression, then as bipolar disorder), and so it has been ever since, although medication has helped some. When Annie descends into darkness, she hates herself, she hates me, she hates everyone, and - most of all - she is certain that everyone hates her, and would be happier if she was dead. In the middle of the worst of it, I truly feel like Janet, as all I can do is hold on - emotionally, if she won’t allow me to hold her physically - and stay with her as she becomes a razor blade, a tiger, a Tasmanian devil, a ball of barbed wire. As the anguish subsides, and the anger, she descends further than you would think possible for a child, into an unfathomable sadness. Then, holding her is like holding a lake with no bottom, an ocean with no far shore. It is like holding a black hole, all the while trying to resist being sucked into the darkness myself.

And in and around holding onto my dad and Annie with all of my strength, there have been men I have tried to hold onto also, most recently, the man I fell for at the end of this past summer. I knew he struggled with severe depression - he told me this almost immediately when we met - and I knew that a lifelong history of brutal and unrelenting traumas had left him with wounds he could only live with, but that would not heal. I fell for him anyway, and falling felt easy. He valued good communication and honesty above all else, and our conversations started deep and stayed deep, as we shared the most vulnerable parts of our selves and our stories, and listened to each other, and offered what comfort we could. 

And then, several months into the relationship, a new trauma hit him out of the blue, and all of a sudden the man I loved began to change. He became a lizard, wriggling away from me as I tried to hold him. He became a shadow, unable to offer me anything more than ghostly glimpses of himself. He became a grenade, about to self-destruct. And occasionally he became a snapping turtle, trying to break my hold by biting at me with words, which, while followed quickly by apologies, still stung. For a long time I held on with all of my strength, refusing to let go. I did everything I could, while suffering through days of silence and uncertainty, which sent my own anxiety and depression into the stratosphere. I subsisted on crumbs of formerly abundant sweetness. I cried, and ached, but I held on. 

Yet in the end, my strength failed. Ending the relationship gutted me, and I resisted giving up entirely for as long as I could, despite the pleas of my friends and therapist to walk away, for my own well-being. I felt like a failure. I felt mean and small, for letting him go in the midst of his misery. But while holding onto my dad and Annie through the worst of their depression is non-negotiable, no matter how much damage holding onto them does to me, I had a choice - albeit an awful one - with him. And so I let him go to save myself. 

I have tremendous empathy for this man, who has crafted a brave and beautiful life for himself, against what for many others would have been insurmountable odds. I wish things had turned out differently, and I miss him terribly, even though we didn’t last nearly as long as I had hoped. But not every Janet and Tamlin story has a happy ending, and not every evil enchantment can be broken. We can hope, but hope is not a promise. We can love in the dark, but without a crack to let the light through, love cannot grow.

*Many of you will likely recognize this Rumi poem as the source of the following Leonard Cohen lyric (part of which, as I shared in a previous post, is tattooed on my leg):
”Ring the bells that still can ring,
Forget your perfect offering,
There is a crack, a crack in everything,
That’s how the light gets in.”

Addendum: Whimsy & Pique is now one year old. It’s been a doozy of a year - the kind I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy - but it has been a lifeline to have this space to share my journey. I am also endlessly grateful to those of you who have read my posts, clicked through to my published writing, hit the like button, commented, and reached out privately to share your thoughts and responses. Someone asked me a little while back why I share so much of myself in writing, and my response was that I have felt compelled to write since I was very young; that this compulsion feels more purposeful when I know what I write will be read; and that - most of all - there’s nothing better than finding out that my writing has been meaningful or helpful or evocative for a reader. And so I unzip my life, and pour it onto the page, and hope for the best.