February is just about here. It’s the month of Valentines sent and not sent, the month when the New England mud begins in earnest, and the month the ghosts here get restless. Already I can feel the melancholy creeping this way, up the hill, to my door.
I really hate that damn word depression. A depression is a crater, a dip in the road, a surface bent out of shape. A depression is one spot, simple to point out. There, there it is.
I keep moving—years of moving on, how absurd can it get?—but my melancholy follows me. This is grief, yes? That’s my guess, anyway, and since I’m the last one standing here, I suppose I can call it what I like. Complicated grief is the official term for a loss so massive, the mind cannot work it out. Oddly enough, complicated grief has yet to make its way into the official manual of psych disorders. When it does, I expect the editors will take pains to make sure the definition refers only to the unshakable sadness that follows the death of a loved one—and only death. The big guns. They won’t let me get near that diagnosis, because there’s no death certificate.
Divorce, well, that’s something else. One is expected to recover, get over it. Was this always the case? At a certain point, one is expected to absorb the divorce into one’s being like anything else that identifies us: eye color, a scar, a middle name.
A comedian I like was talking about divorce. His point: no need to feel bad for a friend going through a divorce. After all, he argued, no one’s leaving a happy marriage.
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