1 Dead in Attic (36 page)

Well, that's fine advice for those with more self-restraint than me, because every time I hug myself I wind up making promises I can't keep and spending more than I can afford on dinner and a movie and for what, I ask you?

I'd rather go it alone, thank you. Me and all the voices in my head telling me everything is going to be okay.

I pulled into the Shell station on Magazine Street, my car running on fumes. I turned off the engine. Then I just sat there.

There were other people pumping gas at the island I had pulled into and I didn't want them to see me, didn't want to see them, didn't want to nod hello, didn't want to interact in any fashion.

Outside the window, they looked like characters in a movie. But not my movie.

I tried to wait them out, but others would follow, get out of their cars and pump and pay and drive off, always followed by more cars, more people. How can they do this, like everything is normal, I wondered. Where do they go? What do they do?

It was early August, and two minutes in my car with the windows up and the air conditioner off were insufferable. I was trapped, in my car and in my head.

So I drove off with an empty tank rather than face strangers at a gas station.

•  •  •

Before I continue this story, I should make a confession: for all of my adult life, when I gave it thought—which wasn't very often—I regarded the concepts of depression and anxiety as pretty much a load of hooey.

I never accorded any credibility to the idea that such conditions were medical in nature. Nothing scientific about it. You get sick, get fired, fall in love, get laid, buy a new pair of shoes, join a gym, get religion, seasons change—whatever; you go with the flow, dust yourself off, get back in the game. I thought antidepressants were for desperate housewives and fragile poets.

I no longer feel that way. Not since I fell down the rabbit hole myself and enough hands reached down to pull me out.

One of those hands belonged to a psychiatrist holding a prescription for antidepressants. I took it. And it changed my life.

Maybe saved my life.

This is the story of one journey—my journey—to the edge of the post-Katrina abyss and back again. It is a story with a happy ending—at least so far.

•  •  •

I had already stopped going to the grocery store weeks before the Shell station meltdown. I had made every excuse possible to avoid going to my office because I didn't want to see anyone, didn't want to engage in small talk, Hey, how's the family?

My hands shook. I had to look down when I walked down the steps, holding the banister to keep steady. I was at risk every time I got behind the wheel of a car; I couldn't pay attention.

I lost fifteen pounds, and it's safe to say I didn't have a lot to give. I stopped talking to Kelly, my wife. She loathed me, my silences, my distance, my inertia.

I stopped walking my dog, so she hated me, too. The grass and weeds in my yard just grew and grew.

I stopped talking to my family and my friends. I stopped answering phone calls and e-mails. I maintained limited communication with my editors to keep my job, but I started missing deadlines anyway.

My editors, they were kind. They cut me slack. There's a lot of slack being cut in this town now. A lot of legroom, empathy, and forgiveness.

I tried to keep an open line of communication with my kids to keep my sanity, but it was still slipping away. My two oldest, seven and five, began asking “What are you looking at, Daddy?”

The thousand-yard stare. I couldn't shake it. Boring holes into the house behind my backyard. Daddy is a zombie. That was my movie: Night of the Living Dead. Followed by Morning of the Living Dead, followed by Afternoon . . .

•  •  •

My own darkness first became visible last fall. As the days of covering the Aftermath turned into weeks that turned into months, I began taking long walks, miles and miles, late at night, one arm pinned to my side, the other waving in stride. I became one of those guys you see coming down the street and you cross over to get out of the way.

I had crying jags and fetal positionings and other “episodes.” One day last fall, while the city was still mostly abandoned, I passed out on the job, fell face-first into a tree, snapped my glasses in half, gouged a hole in my forehead, and lay unconscious on the side of the road for an entire afternoon.

You might think that would have been a wake-up call, but it wasn't. Instead, like everything else happening to me, I wrote a column about it, trying to make it all sound so funny.

It probably didn't help that my wife and kids spent the last four months of 2005 at my parents' home in Maryland. Until Christmas I worked, and lived, completely alone.

Even when my family finally returned, I spent the next several months driving endlessly through bombed-out neighborhoods. I met legions of people who appeared to be dying from sadness, and I wrote about them.

I was receiving thousands of e-mails in reaction to my stories in the paper, and most of them were more accounts of death, destruction, and despondency by people from around south Louisiana. I am pretty sure I possess the largest archive of personal Katrina stories, little histories that would break your heart.

I guess they broke mine.

I am an audience for other people's pain. But I never considered seeking treatment. I was afraid that medication would alter my emotions to a point of insensitivity, lower my antennae to where I would no longer feel the acute grip that Katrina and the flood have on the city's psyche.

I thought, I must bleed into the pages for my art. Talk about “embedded” journalism; this was the real deal.

Worse than chronicling a region's lamentation, I thought, would be walking around like an ambassador from Happy Town telling everybody that everything is just fine, carry on, chin up, let a smile be your umbrella.

As time wore on, the toll at home worsened. I declined all dinner invitations that my wife wanted desperately to accept, something to get me out of the house, get my feet moving. I let the lawn and weeds overgrow and didn't pick up my dog's waste. I rarely shaved or even bathed. I stayed in bed as long as I could, as often as I could. What a charmer I had become.

I don't drink anymore, so the nightly self-narcolepsy that so many in this community employ was not an option. And I don't watch TV. So I developed an infinite capacity to just sit and stare. I'd noodle around on the piano, read weightless fiction, and reach for my kids, always, trying to hold them, touch them, kiss them.

Tell them I was still here.

But I was disappearing fast, slogging through winter and spring and grinding to a halt by summer. I was a dead man walking.

I had never been so scared in my life.

•  •  •

Early this summer, with the darkness clinging to me like my own personal humidity, my stories in the newspaper moved from gray to brown to black. Readers wanted stories of hope, inspiration, and triumph, something to cling to; I gave them anger and sadness and gloom. They started e-mailing me, telling me I was bringing them down when they were already down enough.

This one, August 21, from a reader named Molly: “I recently became worried about you. I read your column and you seemed so sad. And not in a fakey-columnist kind of way.”

This one, August 19, from Debbie Koppman: “I'm a big fan. But I gotta tell ya—I can't read your columns anymore. They are depressing. I wish you'd write about something positive.”

There were scores of e-mails like this, maybe hundreds. I lost count. Most were kind—solicitous, even; strangers invited me over for a warm meal.

But this one, on August 14, from a reader named Johnny Culpepper, stuck out: “Your stories are played out Rose. Why don't you just leave the city, you're not happy, you bitch and moan all the time. Just leave or pull the trigger and get it over with.”

I'm sure he didn't mean it literally—or maybe he did, I don't know—but truthfully, I thought it was funny. I showed it around to my wife and editors.

Three friends of mine have, in fact, killed themselves in the past year, and I have wondered what that was like. I rejected it. But for the first time, I understood why they had done it.

Hopeless, helpless, and unable to function. A mind shutting down and taking the body with it. A pain not physical but not of my comprehension and always there, a buzzing fluorescent light that you can't turn off.

No way out, I thought. Except there was.

•  •  •

I don't need to replay the early days of trauma for you here. You know what I'm talking about.

Whether you were in south Louisiana or somewhere far away, in a shelter or at your sister's house, whether you lost everything or nothing, you know what I mean.

My case might be more extreme than some because I immersed myself fully into the horror and became a full-time chronicler of sorrowful tales. I live it every day, and there is no such thing as leaving it behind at the office when a whole city takes the dive.

Then again, my case is less extreme than the first responders, the doctors and nurses and EMTs, and certainly anyone who got trapped in the Dome or the Convention Center or worse—in the water, in their attics, and on their rooftops. In some cases, stuck in trees.

I've got nothing on them. How the hell do they sleep at night?

So none of this made sense. My personality has always been marked by insouciance and laughter, the seeking of adventure and new experiences. I am the class clown, the life of the party, the bon vivant.

I have always felt as if I was more alert and alive than anyone in the room.

In the measure of how one made out in the storm, my life was cake. My house, my job, and my family were all fine. My career was gangbusters; all manner of prestigious awards and attention. A book with great reviews and stunning sales, full auditoriums everywhere I was invited to speak, appearances on TV and radio, and the overwhelming support of readers, who left gifts, flowers, and cards on my doorstep, thanking me for my stories.

I had become a star of a bizarre constellation. No doubt about it, disasters are great career moves for a man in my line of work. So why the hell was I so miserable? This is the time of my life, I told myself. I am a success. I have done good things.

To no avail.

I changed the message on my phone to say, “This is Chris Rose. I am emotionally unavailable at the moment. Please leave a message.”

I thought this was hilarious. Most of my friends picked it up as a classic cry for help.

My editor, my wife, my dad, my friends, and just strangers on the street who recognized me from my picture in the paper had been telling me for a long time: You need to get help.

I didn't want help. I didn't want medicine. And I sure as hell didn't want to sit on a couch and tell some guy with glasses, a beard, and a psych degree from Dartmouth all about my troubles.

Everybody's got troubles. I needed to stay the course, keep on writing, keep on telling the story of this city. I needed to do what I had to do, the consequences be damned, and what I had to do was dig further and further into what has happened around here—to the people, my friends, my city, the region.

Lord, what an insufferable mess it all is.

I'm not going to get better, I thought. I'm in too deep.

•  •  •

In his book
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
—the best literary guide to the disease that I have found—the writer William Styron recounted his own descent into and recovery from depression, and one of the biggest obstacles, he said, was the term itself, which he calls “a true wimp of a word.”

He traces the medical use of the word “depression” to a Swiss psychiatrist named Adolf Meyer, who, Styron said, “had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the damage he had inflicted by offering ‘depression' as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease.

Nonetheless, for over 75 years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.

He continued:

As one who has suffered from the malady in extremis yet returned to tell the tale, I would lobby for a truly arresting designation. “Brainstorm,” for instance, has unfortunately been preempted to describe, somewhat jocularly, intellectual inspiration. But something along these lines is needed.

Told that someone's mood disorder has evolved into a storm—a veritable howling tempest in the brain, which is indeed what a clinical depression resembles like nothing else—even the uninformed layman might display sympathy rather than the standard reaction that “depression” evokes, something akin to “So what?” or “You'll pull out of it” or “We all have bad days.”

Styron is a helluva writer. His words were my life. I was having one serious brainstorm. Hell, it was a brain hurricane, Category 5. But what happens when your own personal despair starts bleeding over into the lives of those around you?

What happens when you can't get out of your car at the gas station even when you're out of gas? Man, talk about the perfect metaphor.

Then this summer, a colleague of mine at the newspaper took a bad mix of medications and went on a violent driving spree Uptown, an episode that ended with his pleading with the cops who surrounded him with guns drawn to shoot him.

He had gone over the cliff. And I thought to myself: If I don't do something, I'm next.

•  •  •

My psychiatrist asked me not to identify him in this story, and I am abiding by that request.

I was referred to him by my family doctor. My first visit was August 15. I told him I had doubts about his ability to make me feel better. I pled guilty to skepticism about the confessional applications of his profession and its dependency medications.