TEN: How Do You Serve a Friend Who Is in Despair?
āPerhaps the most useful thing I did was send him a video. My friend Mike Gerson, the Washington Post columnist, had been hospitalized with depression in early 2019. He delivered a beautiful sermon at the National Cathedral about his experience before he died of complications from cancer in November 2022. Depression, he said, was a āmalfunction of the instrument we use to determine reality.
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My friend Carpenter says we no longer need Chicken Little to tell us the sky is falling, because it already has. The issue now is how to take care of one another. Some of us are interested in any light you might be able to shed on this, and we will pay a great deal extra if you can make us laugh about it. For some of us, good books and beautiful writing are the ultimate solace, even more comforting than exquisite food. So write about the things that are most important to you. Love and death and sex and survival are important to most of us. Some of us are also interested in God and ecology.
A person suffering a dark night might say, āHelp me. Iām depressed. Get me out of it.ā But how can you get out of a natural process of change? How can you medicate self-transformation? The problem, of course, is that we no longer think in terms of passages and transitions. We have exchanged a spiritual awareness of lifeās meaningful moments for a psychological view based on medicine. We would like to cure ourselves of the darkness. The resulting confusion of categories only makes things worse.
A lot of the suffering we will witness in life will be greater than ours. Thereās the question of what we can do to help and the different question of what to do when we canāt help. Often one thinks of anotherās suffering: my dear friend you have so much life due you, how can this be happening? (Iām at Mass General waiting to see Emily.) For the sake of loyalty we keep in our minds the imagination of their private anguish. We cycle through all the emotions with them but often we also thinkāor behave as if we thinkāthe abyss is remote for us.
Part 2: I SEE YOU IN YOUR STRUGGLES
EIGHT: The Epidemic of Blindness
āBetween 1999 and 2019, American suicide rates increased by 33 percent. Between 2009
and 2019, the percentage of teens who reported āpersistent feelings of sadness or
hopelessnessā rose from 26 percent to 37 percent. By 2021, it had shot up to 44 percent. The percentage of Americans who said they have no close friends quadrupled between 1990 and 2020. In one survey, 54 percent of Americans reported that no one knows them well.
TWELVE: How Were You Shaped by Your Sufferings?
āPeople who are permanently damaged by trauma seek to assimilate what happened into their existing models. People who grow try to accommodate what happened in order to create new models. The person who assimilates says, I survived brain cancer and Iām going to keep on chugging. The person who accommodates says, No, this changes who I
am...Iām a cancer survivor. This changes how I want to spend my days. The act of
remaking our models involves reconsidering the fundamentals: In what ways is the world
safe and unsafe? Do things sometimes happen to me that I donāt deserve? Who am I? What is my place in the world? Whatās my story? Where do I really want to go? What kind of God allows this to happen?