Free You Are My Heart and Other Stories by Jay Neugeboren Page B

‘missing’ year—and also a reminder (to me) of how often in this life I’ve used words on paper to avoid other things. Through most of my life, that is, I’ve had the largely benign habit of passing whatever I experienced, in mind or flesh, through the filter (lens?) of what, other than you, my son, was the great love of my life: stories.
    I tested (tasted?) all I did—my writing, teaching, wives, romances, friendships, pleasures, losses, memories, feelings—all, all, all—through stories I’d read, and people, places, and events I’d come to know in them. More: I often gave myself up as fully as I was able to the imagination of others—let myself believe I was part of the mind—the sense- ibility—that had conjured up these worlds so that, I suppose—vain hope!—my own imagination, like theirs, might find objects and tales equal to my desire to find them.
    But to the missing year itself: My great fear, you see, was that I would kill you. I wanted to kill you. The idea of killing you thrilled and pleased in a time distinctly bereft of thrills or pleasure. For a year—fourteen months and three days, to be exact—I thought, every day, of killing you. The thought arrived, as you
might guess, attached to my desire to do away with myself, and this desire arrived shortly before your mother left us both (nor, I note quickly, did I ever stoop to blackmailing her with the threat that I would kill the two of us if she did leave us). But the desire to kill the two of us came—this dark, unwelcome guest—and it stayed for more than a year, yet could occasionally, when most robust, bring with it (paradoxically?) an exhilarating feeling of liberation.
    The possibility of leaving this world, and taking you with me—of being in a place or non-place where consciousness was forever non-existent—this became balm to my pain, and the pain, let me tell you—and I hope you never know it in its dreadful particularity—was decidedly physical . During those fourteen months and three days I read a good deal about depression, which, I discovered, had a distinguished history, beginning at least 2500 years ago with Hippocrates, and though the reading taught me much about the melancholic disposition, and about suicidal desires and the pernicious ways they can take hold and take over, I found little about the sheer bodily pain that, as in my case, can accompany the affliction.
    Though I experienced most of what have become the standard symptoms that now make major depression certifiable and reimbursable (sleep disturbances, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness, thoughts of suicide), I experienced no weight loss, or loss of sexual desire, no headaches or flu-like symptoms, no sharp internal blade-like grindings. Instead, my lows were accompanied by constant nausea (even—especially!—during love-making), along with a vise-like pressure throughout my upper body, front and back, as if I’d been saturated with something heavier than blood—inhabited by a beast that was trying to suck and squeeze breath and life from me. When it came to rising from a bed or chair, the heaviness would at times paralyze me, as if the sheer weight of my body were the palpable equivalent of my spirits.

    Aware, however, that what I was experiencing might merely ( merely?! ) be advanced coronary artery disease, I did go to my physician, who forwarded me to a cardiologist, who—hope dashed again—found nothing wrong with my heart, or the arteries that fed it and were fed by it.
    Well, I told myself—much as the host of the annual sadomasochist convention is said to have announced—‘The good news this year is that we seem to have lots of bad news!’ For the cardiologist’s evaluation meant that what I was experiencing was, in fact, what I believed it to be: the great black bile itself—melancholic depression.
    So there we were, Charlie, abandoned