 www.womenspress.ca/books/a/afraid.htm
“We can easily forgive a child
who is afraid of the dark;
the real tragedy of life is when adults are afraid of the light.”
(Plato)
"My mind is troubled like a
fountain stirred, and I myself
see not the bottom of it."
(Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida)
Grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change
the things I can and the wisdom
to know the difference.
"Eventually, he hid himself away, on the
heights of Mount Pilatus, and dwelt alone among the clouds and crags for years...But rest
and peace were still denied him, so he finally put an end to his misery by drowning
himself."
(Mark Twain, 'A
Tramp Abroad')
"I came to the
puddle, I could not cross it. Identity failed me. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot
across. I laid my back against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself
back into my body over the grey cadaverous space in the puddle. This is the life then to
which I am committed."
(Virginia Woolf,
'The Waves')
"The relationship
between a
mother and daughter is comprised
of a very deep understanding of
and support for each other.
It is based on an enormous
amount of emotion and love.
There is no other relationship in
the world where two women
are so much like on."
(Susan Polis Schutz
-
'To my Daughter with Love')
"We are all on the
edge
of destruction and we escape
by the skin of our teeth,
and when we come through
to the other side,
we find there is a
meaning to life."
(Albert Camus)
"Your friends will
know you
in the first moment that you meet,
than your acquaintances
will know know you
in a thousand years."
(Richard Bach)
A November Rose
You came to see me yesterday,
And plucked a rose-bud on you way,
Do you remember?
From the sweet bush beside your gate,
I did not know it bloomed as late
As dull November.
To-day the world is grey and old,
Around me, with the fog and cold
A dark night closes.
And I, with thoughts akin to tears,
Travel through many bygone years
Marked by your roses.
For blossoms all will soon be done,
My latter days are nearly won
For quiet reflection.
And I am tired, and you are sad,
For all the love you might have had,
And sweet protection.
But dear, from your November rose
To-night a deeper memory grows,
Than a friend's or lover's.
Deep as the knowledge is to be,
When my last slumber carefully
The brown earth covers.
(Victorian Poet Dolly Radford)
|
|
Welcome
to the website for
Afraid
of the Day:
A
Daughter's Journey
Published by
Women’s Press
/ Canadian Scholars’ Press
April
2003
Thank you for visiting.
(Please note that
this website is a work-in-progress. )
Afraid of the Day: a
daughter’s journey, chronicles my family's ordeal with my mother's
recurring bouts of major clinical depression. It
recounts her roller coaster journeys into the deep dark hell of the disorder and back, and
what it was like to be forced along for the ride. The
creation of this site is but an extension of the journey I have been on since I emerged
from my mother’s womb more than 40 years ago and the book that it catalyzed.
My
mother is not a woman of accomplished status. She
is an ordinary mother, and we her ordinary family. Yet,
as Kathy Cronkite wrote in her conversations with celebrities who have battled mental
illness (On the Edge of Darkness), depression is the great equalizer. On the grounds of this fundamental simplicity, Afraid of the Day: a daughter’s journey, is
intended to validate the experiences of those whose lives have been ravaged by depressive
illness. It describes how my mother’s clinical depression manifested itself upon our
family, at a time when the illness was predominantly treated in isolation of spouses and
children. It traces our efforts to
disentangle ourselves from the insidious web of her cycles of depression, ill-equipped as
we were to cope with her repeated hospitalizations, failed treatment attempts and frequent
suicide watches.
My mother’s
depression had so long organized our lives, we knew of no other family dynamic. Thus, the story continues. In the years of my mother’s relative
wellness, the legacy of her illness lives on, as revealed by the more covert, secondary
webs of reactive depression, substance abuse, eating disorders and estrangements that have
cleverly interwoven themselves into the primary meshwork of our family.
I
have chosen to write the book from behind the frightened and confused eyes of a child-
caregiver, who weathered the storms of her mother’s depression; from the perspective
of an insecure, self-destructive teenager, whose own issues were intuitively repressed;
from the vantage point of an adult daughter, a veteran of her own battles with depression
and substance abuse, who struggles to come to terms with the wreckage of the past, in a
conflicted attempt to achieve relative sanity and live an authentic life.
It
is written from the vantage point of a daughter who bares witness to her mother's courage
to keep coming back from the edge of despair. Because
the experience of depression is not an uncommon one, the emotional and psychological havoc
it wreaks upon all members of a family is frequently underestimated
My
Mom, Dad, brother and I still do not openly talk about the years of my mother’s
depression and how they shaped us as a family. It
is to our detriment that we allow the proverbial elephant to swallow up so much space in
our lives. For better for worse, the writing
of this book has been my way of talking.
Before
the sun rises or sets upon another day, I beseech of you, to get help, if you, or someone
you love or care for, is caught within the web of depression. There are far too many elephants and waiting
bodies of water in the world. If but one
person is somehow helped by the reading of this book, not only have I realized a
long-coveted dream, but I have accomplished something of merit in this life. That one more soul will not be afraid of the day.
Thank you, for picking up this book
in the first place.
Be not afraid of the day.
Page last updated
08/07/03 03:14 PM
Nancy Graham
Copyright © 2003 [Afraid of the Day]. All rights reserved.
Email Webmaster:
afraidoftheday@hotmail.com |
“My mother died the moment I was born, and
so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back
was always a bleak, black wind. I could not
have known at the beginning of my life that this would be so; I only came to know this in
the middle of my life, just at the time when I was no longer young and realized that I had
less of some of the things I used to have in abundance and more of some things I scarcely
had at all.”
(Jamaica
Kincaid, "The
Autobiography of
my Mother")
Days absence,
sad and dreary
clothed in sorrow's
dark array -
days of absence,
I am weary she I love
is far away
(Jean-Jacques
Rousseau -
Days of Absence)
Children Learn What
They Live
"If children live
with criticism,
they learn to condemn.
If children live with hostility,
they learn to fight.
If children live with ridicule,
they learn to be shy.
If children live with shame,
they learn to feel guilty."
(Dorothy Law Nolte)
If you cannot find the
truth
right where you are,
where do you expect to find it.
(Dogen Zenji)
"I came here to
find myself.
It's so easy to get
lost in the world."
(Saugeen Indian
passage,
Southampton, Ontario, 1996)
"The turning point
in your life is some day you'd
counted on to do the work you've never done.
It doesn't come suddenly - you train yourself for it.
It comes after years and years of letting it run past you while you fretted yourself
away."
(Sam Shepard as
Dashiell
Hammett in 'Dash and Lilly')
"Without my journey
and without this spring,
I would have missed
this dawn."
(Shiki)
" A book must be
the ax
for the frozen sea within us."
(Franz Kafka)
"I have
gone to find her. I a retracing the steps of my childhood towards a highway; the journey
of my youthful innocence when I sought a friendly face and was denied it. After so many
years, I rise once more to the surface of my solitude. I emerge from the depth of the
past. I want to live. I know today, it is a trap. But I too shall overcome it and tast the
food of the flesh."
(Anne Hebert, 'The
Torrent') |
