Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression (23 page)

I was practising yoga and walking every day, but the year following my suicide attempt was complicated in other and various ways. Two steps forward, one step back. A few sideways.

My father was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

‘Most men die with it, rather than of it,’ he said, in his matter-of-fact way as he embarked on a round of treatment. Once I had got passed the original shock of the diagnosis, I worried about him, but not profoundly. It seemed that they had caught it early and, by then, I had learned enough from therapy to concentrate on the present and on practical solutions and not to project dark imaginings into the future. My father made light of it and I took my cue from him.

I embarked on a search for a garden, having finally put my flat on the market and sold it. I knew a garden was essential to my recovery and, eventually, I found it; a tangle of weed and bramble on which I could impose some order while still respecting the structure and the life that existed deep within it.

It was, I decided, like my mind, in need of loving care and valiant restoration. The weeds and brambles of depression needed clearing. I could only hope that my mind still existed, intact, beneath them.

I had never designed a garden before but I bought graph paper and thick black pens, coloured pencils and set squares and began to lay out on paper what had lived only in my dreams. I worked around the existing trees, designing the garden to fall into shape with the symmetry it had inhabited for so long before I arrived.

It was my therapy, a way of moving forwards and of trusting in the process. Not just in my process, but in the process of life. I knew the garden would exist, although not perhaps in the state I imagined, long after I had ceased to matter, and I took great comfort from that. My distress and the enormity of my illness (which was, of course, enormous only to me) meant little against that. More than that, things that had fallen into disrepair could be made beautiful again.

Once my plans were on paper, through happy chance, I met Martin, a landscape contractor who looked at my plans and began, meticulously, to carry them out, laying paths and terraces and digging flower beds until, one freezing November day, the bare bones of my garden appeared, rising out of the mud as if by magic. It is not a huge garden, although it is big by London standards, but it does have a curiously peaceful charm and atmosphere. I sometimes think it is because it was designed and then planted with such hope. Perhaps that is fanciful but I did once say to a neurologist, as she stood in my garden, that it had played a huge part in my recovery from depression. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can see that.’

I bought a car. This is a more important statement than its casual nature might at first imply. I had not been able to drive for ten years, since the time that Molly was born, having suffered from a phobia of driving so intense it made me shake so badly I would come close to passing out. My heart would race and I would sweat until my hands slipped off the steering wheel—even in a stationary car. I was scarcely better as a passenger. It got so bad that I had to give up driving entirely and rely on Jonathan to take me everywhere. Looking back, I think the phobia may have been the first sign of impending depression. I was also very low for a year after Moll was born, although certainly not clinically depressed. Those two things make me understand that I may, even then, have been fragile in some way.

Now I was on my own. I needed a car, and I needed to be able to drive. My new flat was some distance from Jonathan, although no distance by car. Molly had to be ferried between the two of us, and taken back and forward from school. She needed to be able to rely on me. More than that, I needed to be able to rely on me. I was determined to beat the phobia, just as I was determined to overcome my own mind.

So I bought a new car using some of the money from the sale of the house, and had it delivered. I thought it might embarrass me into driving. I thought too, that by then, I might have overcome my fear.

It sat in front of my flat looking shiny and new and utterly terrifying.

It sat there for weeks.

Finally, I called a driving school, and booked some lessons.

‘I have a new car which I am too frightened to drive,’ I said. ‘I need the calmest, and nicest, instructor in London.’

A woman said, ‘Do you have a date booked for your test?’

‘I passed that eighteen years ago.’

There was a long silence.

‘I have a driving phobia, and a new car,’ I said. ‘I need help.’

‘You need Geoffrey,’ she said.

Two weeks later, Geoffrey appeared at my door. For a week, for three hours every day, we drove round and around the city. Then we moved outside London. We drove down the M25, up the A1, along the M1. Motorways held a particular terror for me. Even as a passenger, I had to close my eyes. Obviously, this was no longer an option. The first time I pulled out of the slow lane to overtake, Geoffrey applauded. At the end of the week, he shook my hand. ‘You’ll do nicely,’ he said.

I discovered, again, that I love driving, rather like I discovered, once the depression had receded, that I love life. That both hold particular terrors for me has nothing to do with driving, or with life. The terrors exist in my mind. Learning to drive again went a long way to exhuming them.

That summer, just after I had moved into my new flat, my mother was taken into hospital. One of the main arteries in her thigh had become blocked. There was little, or no, blood reaching her foot, which was slowly dying. The pain was excruciating. The consultant attempted to blow open the artery but the blood clot was buried so deep that the operation failed. She had a morphine drip by her bed, but it did little to help. She could not eat, because of the pain and the nausea from the drug. This went on for six weeks while we considered, with the consultant, what could be done.

I drove up and down motorways to the hospital. Every time I saw my mother, she seemed to have shrunk a little more. By the time she left that hospital, she had lost four stone. I bought her cashmere socks, to warm her frozen toes, and massaged her foot and leg. In the operating theatre, they stuck needles in her leg and pushed balloons through her arteries. Nothing worked.

There was only one thing to be done: amputation. My mother agreed to have her toes removed. There was no hope of saving them and little chance of saving her lower leg but it was worth a try. If the first amputation did not work, she would need a second, then a third, each one moving further up her leg.

On the afternoon she agreed to the amputation of her toes, I walked out of her room and into the hospital corridor and burst into tears.

‘Why are you crying?’ Dad said.

‘Poor Mum,’ I said. There is something brutally shocking about amputation. My mother has always had very beautiful legs. I have a black and white photograph of her on my mantelpiece, taken in the 1960s, in Aden. She is dancing, wearing a silk dress and high heels. Her smile is radiant.

Dad patted me ineffectually on the shoulder, looking vaguely alarmed.

I drove home, ready to return the next day after the operation. My father called that evening, distressed and panicky. The hospital had discovered that his health insurance would not pay for the six weeks my mother had spent in hospital. It was a technical point. The insurers maintained that the procedures she had undergone did not constitute surgery. The consultant was furious, but impotent. We owed in excess of £20,000, which had to be paid the next morning.

No money. No operation.

My father said, did I have any savings? Fortunately I did, from the sale of the house I had owned with Jonathan. I had bought a smaller flat than I might otherwise have done, in order to put money aside in case I was unable to work. I did not know, at that time, if I would ever be able to write again. My concentration was still horribly awry. I could just about manage to read but still found it difficult to remember the beginning of a sentence once I had reached the end. Holding an idea, let alone a sophisticated network of thoughts in my head—in other words, meaning—was still difficult. What would happen once the money had run out, I did not know. And nor could I bear to imagine.

The next morning, I met my father at the hospital and gave him a cheque.

‘This is all wrong,’ he said.

Dad went to the accounts department and I went to see my mother. She was adrift in a sea of tears and pain.

‘They came into my room last night and asked me who was going to pay. I said I don’t know about money. My husband handles that. I told them to ask him. Imagine asking for money from somebody who is about to have a foot amputated.’

Yes, imagine.

Once Mum had been taken down to theatre, I drove Dad home. On the way, we stopped at a pub for lunch.

‘If it doesn’t work, she’ll have to go to the NHS hospital for the next operation,’ he said fretfully. ‘We don’t have enough money to keep her in the private wing.’ He took a sip of beer. ‘She won’t like it.’

‘The NHS is fine, Dad,’ I said.

It wasn’t. It was grim. This time, her leg was amputated high above the knee. It was her decision. She could not, she said, face two more operations or another that did not work.

The next six months were difficult but my mother faced them with extraordinary courage and determination, getting used to her prosthetic leg and swapping the car for an automatic so she could drive again. She had scarcely found her new balance when she fell and broke her wrist.

Dad fell too, and hurt his head and knee so badly that, at one time, neither of them could walk. His cancer seemed to be in check, although the medication affected him in other ways.

I drove up and down motorways with food during that cold, bleak drawn out winter. Dad’s breathing became difficult as the result of the drugs he was taking and he was admitted to hospital. In a grim echo of the previous months, he was in the ward next to the one where Mum had her leg amputated. My younger brother, Tony, became badly depressed, about that and other things.

I thought the spring would never come. The twiggy silhouettes of the shrubs I had planted in my new garden looked like barbed wire sticking out of the iron earth. I walked the length of it every day, peering at each stiff, brown branch and wondering when, or if, life would return.

As the months passed, I discovered that reading was still difficult but I managed and I started to write again, at first tentatively and then with greater fluency. For two years, Corinna Honan, my commissioning editor at the
Daily Telegraph
, had been taking me out to lunch, buying me impossibly expensive food I could not eat and encouraging me to write again. Her kindness and constancy were touching. She particularly encouraged me to write about depression.

‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘It’s too much.’

‘It will help. You’re not the only one. You’ll see.’

So I wrote, trying to inject as much hope (as much for myself as anyone else) as I could. It was incredibly painful but, curiously, the actual writing of it came easily perhaps because I didn’t see it as a piece of journalism but as a way of connecting. I didn’t much worry about form or style. I just wrote what I felt and what I felt was that I had never read a brutally honest personal account of how it really feels to be severely depressed. When I was very ill, that sense of understanding and connection was what I most longed for so I tried to write and do for others what I wanted done for myself. I cried as I wrote, but it did not stop me writing.

Nor did dark warnings from friends in the media who implied that such a vulnerable and exposed personal statement was a piece of professional suicide, marking me out as unreliable and unemployable. In short, labelling me as a depressive. I refused to be stigmatised or frightened because I felt it was fear (and the silence it imposes) that kept the stigma in place. Or perhaps I thought that I had nothing left to lose. I don’t know. I do know that sitting down to write that newspaper article broke the deadlock I had about writing. Not immediately (it took another two years to re-establish my career as a freelance journalist but only because it took me that long to become well enough to cope with the pressures of constant deadlines), but it gave me the confidence to at least try. As for the dark warnings, none of them came true. All I was met with was support and kindness. Everyone, it seems, has been touched by depression, either personally or through family and friends.

The letters came pouring in.

I read the letters with tears pouring down my face and attempted to answer each one but the effort of sitting with so much unhappiness was often more than I could bear.

Those letters did make me understand that I was not the only one. Some of them even made me laugh. And then cry.