Resiliency

February 9, 2012

Resiliency

This past Monday morning, my husband watched the medical examiner take my neighbor’s body out of his home in a body bag. We don’t really know what happened. We didn’t really know the man. He was pleasant and quiet and we only made small talk in the summer while doing yard work or in the winter when we happened to be out shoveling at the same time. There have been rumors of suicide, but I don’t know anything for sure. And that is private business, but it certainly got me thinking.

I think about depression and suicide often. Probably more often than most people do. I have been depressed before, and I have hated life before, but I have never been suicidal. But I know that I have watched many people in my lifetime in darkness. I have watched depression and hopelessness eat all the light out of a person’s body. No one in my lifetime that I am close to has committed suicide, but too many have had frequent thoughts about it.

When I was a young girl, probably about 12 or 13 years old, I watched from the end of the hallway as my mother told my father she was thinking of a divorce. I did not hear the entire conversation, but I did hear my dad say, “If you leave me, I would kill myself.” And she never left. She would be appalled that I am writing about this-she may even deny it, but that memory is forever etched into my life. He was a very depressed man. His life was dark and though I begged my mom to leave him on more than one occasion, I understand why she did not. We never talked about it.

I had a friend in high school call me on the phone one night to tell me she was locked in the bathroom and was thinking of taking a bottle of pills. My memory of that night is a bit of a blur. I don’t know what I said to her exactly, but I do know that I never told an adult about it and the fear that settled into my chest while talking with her was heavy and cold. She didn’t do it. We never talked about it.

A very close friend of mine had a plan-a well-thought-out, easy-to-access plan for killing himself. We had an agreement of how he would let me know so that I would know how to find him. I sat in his darkness with him for many years. I was an adult. We talked about it.

And then I read a blog recently by The Blogess in which she discusses her depression and her reservations about discussing it on such a public forum. And it got me thinking about how our society deals with grief, loss, depression, death. We’re not good at it.

This made me think of resiliency. It is a term I often used during my years as an educator, but I often find myself using as a midwife as well. Some kids have it, others do not-you can see it even in newborns-the fight, the vigor, the will to push past the trauma.

Resiliency.

I think of the definition in relation to an ecosystem; our life’s journey and our psyche as part of our internal ecosytem.

Resiliency: the ability of an ecosystem to return to its’ original state after being disturbed. 

I think of women and men who have been through extreme trauma: war, rape, abduction, bearing witness to trauma. Some people’s ecosystem will, at least on the outside, return to it’s original state after being disturbed. Yes, they are forever changed, however they eat, drink, dress, and live and somewhere, deep under the fresh moss and dewy grass-the soil underneath was tainted with some toxic event. But they are resilient.