The Best Day the Worst Day by Donald Hall

Author:Donald Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

The Soul’s Bliss and Suffering

JANE FELT that she had been born with her bipolar mood disorder, described and embodied in her poem “Having It Out with Melancholy,” the disease inherited from her father. When I first knew her, and when we were first married, I noticed her moods especially when she was dark. In her first book of poems, finished when she was thirty, she wrote from bleakness and in elation. Many times during our early marriage, she was energetic and horny and high, noisy and humorous. More often she was withdrawn and private, brooding and sad. Becoming Christian, she found a site for both extremes in the dark of Maundy Thursday and the elevation of Easter sunrise. When she was low I might attempt to comfort her, as she did me in my bad times, and sometimes comfort or loving helped, but there were times I could not reach her, times she was beyond my help. At these times I learned not to fuss at her; I did not ask, “Was it something I said?” (During years of psychotherapy, before I knew Jane, I learned that I was not responsible for everything around me.) She also knew when to stay close and when to withdraw; mostly we let the other be. But nothing is simple: By temperament, I am on the move, eager (as Jane said) for “the next thing, the next thing.” Often she sank into speechless discontent while I remained energetic, depressive wedded to hypomanic.

When something in the real world hurt or upset us, we told the other, but not always at first. After receiving an upsetting letter or telephone call, I waited until I had talked it over inside myself. I remember Jane asking, “Did you get something bad in the mail?” when she saw my distressed face. Sometimes I learned about Jane’s depressed or even suicidal feelings only when I read a poem months afterward. The double and separate psychiatric help we had received was useful in our marriage by letting us understand that each carried burdens that the other could do nothing about. This separateness, in the usual way of the psyche, helped bring us together.

In 1981 Jane volunteered to become a hospice worker, a good idea for a chronic depressive, who is forced away from inward-gazing misery. She took training, and one of the exercises was keeping a journal of her training. I found it two years after her death, when I dismantled her workroom and sorted through her papers. Thinking over her mood history at that time, she spoke of a depression after the end of her “first marriage.” She put quotation marks around the reference to six months of cohabitation with her boyfriend before she and I dated. Jane had just finished hospice training, prepared to take on her first case, when her mother called from Ann Arbor to say that her father had terminal lung cancer. (He had stopped smoking decades earlier, when the children were born, but he made his living playing the piano in bars dense with smoke.

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