If given the assignment to live my marriage of fifty seven years over again, what would I do differently than I did? There are several large changes I would make, some of which would focus on my thinking, beliefs and conduct, and some on those of my wife. On this date, which marks her birth date, I concentrate on a negative factor she faced. She called it depression, and I accepted that identification. My failure early on was that she ought to get over it. The reasons from childhood she gave for it were no longer applicable. Consequences should dissolve. That was naive of me, and I got over that, but took away time to address realistically the context of the problem. What I did, she later told me, was helpful, but not what it could have been, and ought to have been. I should have given attention to learning about what was happening in her experience, and assisting more than I did in meeting the matter that was important in her life sojourn. The matter related to healing and habit, both of which needed to be understood and addressed. Whether positive or negative in our conducts, there is the element of habit that helps continue the affirmative or negative issues in our lives. One does well to advance the habits affirming the best in us, including health, and to find ways of reducing, even dissolving the negatives so as not to be held by denigrating experience.
I now believe my wife suffered what is called Dysthymia, a milder form of denigrating depression which is always present or just below the limen (awareness) in one’s own being. Along the way, it breaks out in severity, so has many of the features of major depression. In this in-and-out cycling, the person feels that there is something wrong with them, in that they feel they are getting well only to find they are not. The cycles create an uncertainty. That uncertainty can be a part of the suffering. For the Christian it may cause the person to believe he or she is bad in some undefined way, so the comfort of faith may be lost in the looming barrier of the swollen wound of the human spirit. Dysthymia has been diagnosed as: Persistent feelings of hopelessness, irritability, low self-esteem, exacerbated by low energy levels. It is not uncommon in children, where it ought to be addressed as soon as it is recognized. If not addressed, it can go on for decades, perhaps a lifetime, depending on the later approach to management, even release, from the debilitating condition. As a teenager, even with nurture in a Christian home, my wife thought seriously of suicide. I stopped her once when she was so sunk in a depression that she was going to take her life. I now believe she was calling out to me for help, which I gave, but not with adequate knowledge of what was happening to her. My help could have been so much more with a more orderly pattern that would include better understanding persons caught in these patterns. I understood the situation more when I got to know her father well, after his retirement. His depressions had found a place in his daughter. I did not want her to fall into the negative context I found in my father-in-law, a devout Christian.
So it was that I woke up to devote time to her situation. She wanted to keep her darkest feelings and thoughts from our children. I aided that request, so took on some details of everyday life that she would engage when feeling well. It was, I believe, wise decision for their early years. She would do better if not interrupted during her sleep in the nights, so if the children needed some attention, I would do, perhaps clumsily, whatever was needed. She said it helped. The children seemed to sense some problem and did things that would lift her spirit. We did not talk it over with the children in their advancing years, and that was a mistake as they would have done even more to address the problem. She had been popular in college, where we met, and after one semester was elected by the students to hold the highest office that a female student could gain in that time era. I was considered lucky by the students to have gained her hand in marriage. On our honeymoon she told me about her recurring depressions which she had tried to hold to herself, although I had detected them in the early months of our pre-marriage period. We were married within six months of our first date. Out of the context of her depression I learned that one should give adequate attention to a problem and address it with a sense of loving service. However, both of us learned the effectiveness of Scripture and prayer for relief. We became victorious – together. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020