Points of Light

Two Years Ago

January 23, 2015: David’s white blood cell count is very low: 3.42. Of these, 23% are leukemic blasts. [Spoiler alert: the percentage blasts will never be that low again.] Semi-weekly clinic appointments populate our weeks.

From my blog, January 19:

So, we continue trying to remember to appreciate each uneventful day. As Jim wrote in his summary of the past year: “Except for a few days of severe intestinal pain just before Christmas, the past five weeks have been the best since March. Mary, David, and I each seek in our own way to deal with the prospect of imminent death mixed with the ordinariness of one pretty good day after another.”

Mid-January 2017

This past week I’ve felt, at times, slow-moving and irritable. When I experience these feelings, I fear that it isn’t grief, but the dark side of manic-depression returning. (Like Richard Dreyfuss, I prefer ‘manic depression’ over ‘bipolar’. So descriptive of my actual experience.)
Since David’s death, and after my parents' deaths,I often facilitate the newcomers support group at DBSA-Boston (Depression Bipolar Support Alliance). I explain that for me, there is a distinct difference between grief and depression. I’ve been trying to come up with an analogy. Here's my latest attempt: it’s like the difference between a broken arm and a bone infection. They both can cause pain and swelling, but the etiologies are different and the conditions require different treatments.
When I am actively grieving, it hurts; I double over in pain. Grief is intense feeling; depression is a deadening, an emptiness I can’t fill.
So, am I getting depressed? I hope not. I’ve been stable for several years and I’ve gotten used to it. The prospect of going down into those depths frightens me.

But today I feel energetic and hopeful. It’s laundry day again, (it’s always laundry day on Tuesday, same day as my blog post), and laundry is a very satisfying activity, with a concrete and visible positive result.

Saturday evening, at 5 p.m., Jim took me for a spin in his new car. It was still light out; a welcome change from a few weeks ago when darkness fell at 4:30. We tooled down Lincoln St. and into the quiet town of Lincoln as dusk fell. Returning home, we drove around the block to survey our house from all sides in the dark. Jim bought replacement window-candle bulbs this year: LEDs. They are energy-efficient and will last a long time. They are also dimmer than the old incandescent ones and I wanted to see them from my neighbors' vantage. Their dim light looks more like real candles, little points of light in the winter night.