I wrote this for my newsletter, several weeks ago. I received many responses asking me to put the piece on a permanent web page. So here it is.
The other week, I ended with the sign-off: ” So do the thing that makes you smile, look after yourself, and I’ll see you next week.” Someone replied to me with: “Sadly, right now nothing makes me smile.”
I know a bit about that.
A while ago, someone else recommended to me a book about depression in men. It was the wrong time of year for me to want to pick up that book right then. I want to talk about that a bit, and to talk about the thing that makes you smile.
(ADDITION: per many requests, I add here the name of the book: MALE DEPRESSION by Terry Real.)
My dad worked on the factory floor for much of his life, but there was a period where he worked as a buyer for a timber firm. What we didn’t know at the time was that it was too much work – he was doing several peoples’ jobs at once. At home he was angry, stressed and distant, and I didn’t know why.
It was the habit to meet him at the door when he came home from work. For some reason, that day, I went to the front door alone, to open it when he got out of the car.
He didn’t get out of the car.
After what seemed like an age, I went out to the car to see what was going on. Inside the car, my dad was slumped over the steering wheel, half-conscious and crying hysterically. I got the car door open, and he didn’t even register I was there. I called for help and nobody came. I tried to pull him out of the car myself. I was eight, maybe nine years old.
Eventually, I got help, and a doctor was called. I don’t know what the 2022 term is, but, back then, it was pronounced that my dad had had a nervous breakdown. For the next several months, my dad was wrung out, bursting into tears spontaneously, shaking constantly, trying to find his way back.
By the next summer, he seemed better. We were in my nan’s back garden, mowing and weeding, me and my dad. I went inside to get a drink. When I came back, dad was on his knees, face down in the wheelbarrow full of grass cuttings, weeping incoherently. Again, I was on my own. I managed to pull his head out of the grass, in which he’d been choking. A “relapse” was summarily pronounced.
There followed a diagnosis of depression. Valium and sleeping pills. He improved, and eventually returned to work, back on factory floors. But the depression was always there, and he was emotionally much rawer than before. He was wounded and angry and sad. I grew up with his depression. I didn’t understand it: I just knew that there was this wet grey smothering thing over life, and that something was sharing my dad’s brain and trying to kill him.
When I was 14, my parents’ marriage dissolved. My mum, with the best of intentions, married an infantile, vicious prick who lived far too long. A couple of years on, my dad married a wonderful woman who I’m glad to say is still with us today, and they moved to the other side of the country.
By the time I reached my twenties, it had all taken its toll on my dad, and he began to get sick. Angina, heart attacks, bypass surgeries had put him in a wheelchair for periods. And then diabetes, a host of opportunistic other things, and finally the cancer.
There was a conversation during his last hospital stay when I mentioned – I’d quit smoking a few years earlier — that the craving for a cigarette had returned out of nowhere. “Well,” he said, “a little of what you fancy does you good.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Are you seriously laying there in bed with cancer telling me to have a fucking cigarette?”
He laughed so long and so hard that I thought he was going to croak right there.
He went a few weeks later, at home, with love.
The funeral was as grim as funerals can be. The first touch of light was when we shouldered the coffin, and there were sour mutterings about deliberate pre-mortem weight gain or whether he’d arranged for rocks to be put in the coffin to herniate the lot of us.
At the service, all the people who needed people around them had them in abundance, and so I sat pretty much on my own at the front in the far corner. I’ve spent most of my life on my own, so this is just my general reflex. So I sat down. And it was then that I discovered that dad had made a music selection for the funeral service.
Now, me and my dad never really saw eye-to-eye in our musical tastes. So when the worst Jon & Vangelis song ever started playing in the room, I just groaned and thought to myself, “Seriously? This?”
And then I heard my dad’s voice, clear as a bell in my head, say, “Jon & Vangelis never made a bad record, son.”
“X never made a bad X” was one of his mantras. “Queen never made a bad record,” he would say as I was stuck in my childhood chair to suffer through Fat Bottomed Girls. “Glenn Ford never made a bad film,” so I had to endure the blood-coagulating drag of Brotherhood Of The Bell.
“This isn’t even one of the two listenable ones,” I said. “This is some shit they threw on the end of Side B to fill out an album. This is bloody awful, Dad. Why would you do that?”
“I’ve listened to the bloody dirges you like.”
“Yeah, and that cover of Sloop John B that is the best version ever and you turned your bloody nose up -“
“Lonnie Donegan overdid that –“
“Don’t even. Lonnie Donegan nailed it so hard that that record has the only recorded instance in history of Van Morrison laughing and anyway you like Lonnie Donegan -“
“Don’t you get out of your pram with me -“
Afterwards, people came to check on me, because I was bent over and shaking during the service, clearly very emotional. I was shaking because I was trying not to laugh as I argued about music with my dad. I could hear him so clearly. And I still can, even today.
And, yes, I know it’s not really him, just my back-brain constructing his voice from my memories of him. But it sounds like him and he’s always there with me, making me smile. Just the other day, I found the envelope full of poppy seeds that he gave me a year or two before he went. “I told you you’ll always have poppies now,” he said.
All of which is to say: depression isn’t easy, there are no simple answers to it, and times are hard. I recognise the symptoms and cycles of depression in myself, and I’ve done a lot of work around them, especially over the last few years, but I have it easy compared to a lot of people. The point is: sometimes, even in the darkest days and coldest moments, something may happen to make you smile, if you just let it happen.
Not all sailors can swim. Dad told me that while I was learning to swim.
There was a story he told me once, and it went something like this:
Dad was in the Merchant Navy as a young man, and served on the Oriana, the first ocean liner with a swimming pool. It had to be drained every night and refilled every morning, but a swimming pool on a liner was a big deal.
One tour was characterised by the presence of two brothers. Not that you’d have known they were brothers to look at them. One of them looked like a Greek god, a bronzed Adonis. The other looked like a gargoyle, the thing you’d end up with if you used one of those big wooden mallets to beat the Elephant Man into the rough size and shape of Popeye. Both workshy, stupid as mud and strong as oxen. And they hated each other. Fought constantly. After an altercation at Xmas, there was talk of putting them off the boat at the next port. But first, the plan was to drop anchor in the South Pacific for New Year.
This was a fraught choice, as it was whale territory. But this was the plan. So on New Year’s Eve, they dropped anchor, drained the pool, made sure the searchlights were in good order, and the party was thrown.
The two brothers got blind drunk. And, bizarrely, for the first time, started getting on well together. Very well. Everyone was both curious and nervous. Was one laying a trap for the other? Was the boat haunted? People kept an eye on them. After midnight, the Greek god left the bar. A short while later, the gargoyle followed, but fewer people noticed that.
Moments later, the ship rang like a struck gong. Seconds later, it clanged again. Whale strike.
Everyone runs outside, goes to the spotlights, starts searching for whales. But they can’t see any. It takes a few minutes more before one of the searchlights pans over the swimming pool.
The Greek god is laying out cold on the bottom of the pool with a puddle of blood around his head. Next to him, severely broken but still conscious, is the gargoyle.
“Me brother fell in the pool,” he said. “But he can’t swim so I jumped in to save him.”