Old age, wisdom, life experiences, and the passage of time keep the “black dog” at bay in Daydreaming on the Porch

But when the melancholy fit shall fall

Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,

That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,

And hides the green hill in an April shroud;

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,

Or on the rainbow…

Or on the wealth of globed peonies,,,

John Keats
Ode to Melancholy

…Beloved, this must ever be a typical scene in every transformed life. There comes a crisis-hour to each of us, if God has called us to the highest and best, when all resources fail; when we face either ruin or something higher than we ever dreamed; when we must have infinite help from God and yet, ere we can have it, we must let something go; we must surrender completely; we must cease from our own wisdom. strength, and righteousness, and become crucified with Christ and alive in Him. God knows how to lead us up to this crisis, and He knows how to lead us through…

M.L. Cowman


The other day I wrote to someone about that dark chapter in my life 46 years ago when I suffered through months of clinical depression. I lost my job and was unemployed for eight months. I felt like I had lost everything, actually, friends and all that I had worked for thus far in my life. I was 27. But I noted that during April 1979 the most intensely beautiful Spring I could recall up to that time, bejeweled with color and sweet fragrances, overcame the drab winter landscape and transformed it. It was during long walks to the Mississippi River levee in New Orleans, where I was recovering at the home in the suburbs where I grew up, that I began to notice a slow transformation in my mood, and the depression began to lift. I was not taking any medications at that time, having experienced horrible side effects with two different meds months before.

As the dark clouds drifted away more each day during that lovely and almost ethereal Spring, I thought that I actually understood for the first time what the term “reborn” meant. I felt myself gradually being transformed into a new person. Every Spring since then there have been little signs that remind me of that time of reawakening: Azaleas with their rich pink and red clusters of blooms are the most prominent symbols of reawakening to me. Then there are the sweet fragrances of gardenias, honeysuckle, and ligustrum, each of which convey scented memories of the season of rebirth, for me, and everyone in his or her own way, as we all rejoice at the passing away of winter with it’s symbolism of death.

For years, I never wrote or talked much, if it all, about that time in my life, but since starting an online journal in June 1998, for the first time I was able to think about it with the aim of recording my thoughts as they come to me, not planning ahead what to write, but letting the words flow out. I knew my story could give hope to others.

It’s late summer 2024, and as I reflect on that experience from decades past, as well as on a more recent bout with the illness, I feel a strange and objectified disconnect from it all. It was so profoundly stressful to every part of my being that I have blocked out, or thoroughly suppressed, the worst memories. Not that they are wiped away. But when I allude to the experience, or even haltingly talk about it to someone who also went through something similar, I don’t have to say a lot, and yet the essence is communicated. The same with writing about it now. It is not a struggle to think about it, and it is not terribly painful to do so. And that is largely because of the passage of time, and the fact that I don’t “feel”things the way I did prior to those periods of depression.

Sometimes in frustration, I try to imagine what is missing or different in my emotional make-up and capacity for feeling since I am on long-term medication for depression. It’s a blessing and a curse. When you finally discover an effective med that really works, as I did with Zoloft, you cannot imagine going off it. However, call it what you will, but depression does allow for the most intense feeling and emotions to be expressed, and to manifest themselves, but these emotions are but a destructive, disordered and irrational emotional state, unrelenting storms of paranoia, negativity and worthlessness. How I wish I could reclaim some of that capacity for deep feeling, without plunging into the darkness that accompany it.

I’ve discovered over the past few years, especially as I have grown older, that the repercussions and effects of those times of severest depression, and accompanying extreme anxiety, have unutterably embedded themselves within me, and how I think about the world, and what I’ve done with my life since. I say to myself, “I am someone who once visited the blackest depths to which I could have thought it possible to descend, and yet I returned to the surface and was restored to light and life.” I didn’t think I would make it out at times, or else couldn’t imagine a time when I would be healed, or feel “normal” once again. Now I realize there is no such thing as “normal.” I think most people would agree with this.

The episodes of depression left permanent scars, but they’re invisible to everyone but me. I am always aware of them, though, for one can never forget.

Years ago, depression, or what was called “melancholia,” or “the black dog” was not something one talked about, as it was seen as personal failure, rather than an illness that feeds on brain neurotransmitters going haywire, life events and circumstances, and trigger points, all converging and boiling over into emotional cataclysms and loss of control over one’s life. Once in the storm, you are carried away as in a riptide trying to take you out to sea. It becomes very personal. What have I done to deserve this?

I can’t not think about the experience. I’m not ashamed of myself for it. But I am grievously sad whenever I think about how it affected my loved ones, and the distress that caused them.

Often I find myself attempting to comprehend some of its complexities, and why it happened to me. One of the most disturbing aspects of this reflection and self-examination is the fact that I do, in fact, know a lot about why it happened. I could have directly confronted certain people who were trigger points. I could berate myself for not dealing with the forces that were converging then. I got swept away in it all.

I could explain many things about it if I had to, or if there was someone I could talk to. But then, when I run these things through my mind, I briefly light on a little illuminations, wispy and fleeting, and they are just as quickly gone, but maybe not forgotten. My thoughts fall silent, having reached the point I always come to where my still limited, yet growing understanding, fails and mystery takes over.

I am thinking back to the Last Spring I spent in our beautiful house downtown three years ago, with its porch, garden and shady trees. It was a wistful and sad time, however, because we had just sold that house where I lived for years taking care of my mother. She passed away in January 2020. Perhaps there was a nice breeze in the garden, a warm sun, overhead, and a flawless blue sky above the bare branches of the pecan tree in front of where I often sat. Many memories and emotions mingled in that breeze. More great changes were ahead. But instead of becoming depressed, I embraced the move to a perfectly located apartment and a new life once again. It was starting anew at 69 with no job to have to painfully look for, nothing to prove to anyone, just quiet years to pursue the solitude, reading and reflection I’ve always sought but never achieved.

As I said, time and distance in literal years from a traumatic experience or event tend to render them mute. They can no longer claim as much of my time and energy, as when I was preoccupied with surviving each day, psychically, if not otherwise.

At my age now, those long ago episodes of depression, unemployment, and creeping hopelessness, seem to be completed chapters in my book of life. I will close the book for the last time, eventually, grateful for the opportunities to experience rebirth and not something else which I once feared so much I couldn’t even imagine it.

The pilgrim continues along the winding road, lessons learned, and the final stage of life appears with more clarity and understanding each day until it also is no longer feared.

Recommended reading: “Darkness Visible” by William Styron

Last updated August 25, 2024