S TOR Y

THE DEPRESSEDPERSON

By David Foster Wallace

Le depressed person was interrible andunceasing emotional pain, and the impossibili-ty of sharing or articulating this pain was itselfa component of the pain and a contributingfactor in its essential horror.

Despairing, then, of describing the emotionalpain itself, the depressed person hoped at leastto be able to express something of its context-its shape and texture, as it were-by recountingcircumstances related to its etiology. The de-pressed person's parents, for example, who haddivorced when she was a child, had used her asa pawn in the sick games they played, as inwhen the depressed person had required ortho-donture and each parent had claimed-notwithout some cause, the depressed person al-ways inserted, given the Medicean legal ambi-guities of the divorce settlement-that the oth-er should pay for it. Both parents were well-off,and each had privately expressed to the de-pressed person a willingness, if push came toshove, to bite the bullet and pay, explainingthat it was a matter not of money or dentitionbut of "principle." And the depressed person al-ways took care, when as an adult she attemptedto describe to a supportive friend the venomousstruggle over the cost of her orthodonture andthat struggle's legacy of emotional pain for her,to concede that it may well truly have appearedto each parent to have been, in fact, a matter of"principle," though unfortunately not a "princi-ple" that took into account their daughter'sfeelings at receiving the emotional message that

scoring petty points off each other was more im-portant to her parents than her own maxillofa-cial health and thus constituted, if consideredfrom a certain perspective, a form of neglect orabandonment or even outright abuse, an abuseclearly connected-here she nearly always in-serted that her therapist concurred with this as-sessment-to the bottomless, chronic adult de-spair she suffered every day and felt hopelesslytrapped in.

The approximately half-dozen friends whomher therapist-who had earned both a terminalgraduate degree and a medical degree-referredto as the depressed person's Support Systemtended to be either female acquaintances fromchildhood or else girls she had roomed with atvarious stages of her school career, nurturingand comparatively undamaged women who nowlived in all manner of different cities and whomthe depressed person often had not laid eyes onin years and years, and whom she called late inthe evening, long-distance, for badly neededsharing and support and just a few well-chosenwords to help her get some realistic perspectiveon the day's despair and get centered and gathertogether the strength to fight through the emo-tional agony of the next day, and to whom,when she telephoned, the depressed person al-ways apologized for dragging them down or com-ing off as boring or self-pitying or repellent ortaking them away from their active, vibrant,largely pain-free long-distance lives. She was, inaddition, also always extremely careful to share

David Foster Wallace is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine. His most recent book, A Supposedly Fun ThingI'll Never Do Again, was published by Little, Brown last February.

STORY 57

with the friends in her Support System her be-lief that it would be whiny and pathetic to playwhat she derisively called the "Blame Game"and blame her constant and indescribable adultpain on her parents' traumatic divorce or theircynical use of her. Her parents had, after all-asher therapist had helped the depressed person tosee---done the very best they could do with theemotional resources they'd had at the time. Andshe had, the depressed person always inserted,laughing weakly, eventually gotten the ortho-

precedence and required her (i.e., the friend)to get off the telephone.

The feelings of shame and inadequacy thedepressed person experienced about callingmembers of her Support System long-distancelate at night and burdening them with herclumsy attempts to describe at least the contex-tual texture of her emotional agony were an is-sue on which she and her therapist were cur-rently doing a great deal of work in their timetogether. The depressed person confessed that

when whatever supportive friend shewas sharing with finally confessed thatshe (i.e., the friend) was dreadfullysorry but there was no helping it sheabsolutely had to get off the tele-phone, and had verbally detached thedepressed person's needy fingers fromher pantcuff and returned to the de-mands of her full, vibrant long-dis-tance life, the depressed person alwayssat there listening to the empty apiandrone of the dial tone feeling evenmore isolated and inadequate and un-empathized-with than she had beforeshe'd called. The depressed personconfessed to her therapist that whenshe reached out long-distance to amember of her Support System she al-most always imagined that she coulddetect, in the friend's increasinglylong silences and/or repetitions of en-couraging cliches, the boredom andabstract guilt people always feel whensomeone is clinging to them and be-ing a joyless burden. The depressedperson confessed that she could wellimagine each "friend" wincing nowwhen the telephone rang late atnight, or during the conversationlooking impatiently at the clock or di-recting silent gestures and facial ex-

pressions communicating her boredom andfrustration and helpless entrapment to all theother people in the room with her, the expres-sive gestures becoming more desperate and ex-treme as the depressed person went on and onand on. The depressed person's therapist's mostnoticeable unconscious personal habit or ticconsisted of placing the tips of all her fingerstogether in her lap and manipulating them idlyas she listened supportively, so that her matedhands formed various enclosing shapes-e.g.,cube, sphere, cone, right cylinder-and thenseeming to study or contemplate them. The de-pressed person disliked the habit, though shewas quick to admit that this was chiefly be-cause it drew her attention to the therapist'sfingers and fingernails and caused her to com-pare them with her own.

donture she'd needed. The former acquain-tances and classmates who composed her Sup-port System often told the depressed personthat they just wished she could be a little lesshard on herself, to which the depressed personresponded by bursting involuntarily into tearsand telling them that she knew all too wellthat she was one of those dreaded types ofeveryone's grim acquaintance who call at in-convenient times and just go on and on aboutthemselves. The depressed person said that shewas all too excruciatingly aware of what a joy-less burden she was, and during the calls she al-ways made it a point to express the enormousgratitude she felt at having a friend she couldcall and get nurturing and support from, how-ever briefly, before the demands of that friend'sfull, joyful, active life took understandable

58 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 1998 Illustrations by Mark Ulriksen

The depressed person shared that she couldremember, all too clearly, how at her thirdboarding school she had once watched herroommate talk to some boy on their room'stelephone as she (i.e., the roommate) madefaces and gestures of entrapped repulsion andboredom with the call, this popular, attractive,and self-assured roommate finally directing atthe depressed person an exaggerated pan-tomime of someone knocking on a door untilthe depressed person understood that she wasto open their room's door and stepoutside and knock loudly on it so asto give the roommate an excuse toend the call. The depressed personhad shared this traumatic memorywith members of her Support Systemand had tried to articulate how bot-tomlessly horrible she had felt itwould have been to have been thatnameless pathetic boy on the phoneand how now, as a legacy of that ex-perience, she dreaded, more than al-most anything, the thought of everbeing someone you had to appealsilently to someone nearby to helpyou contrive an excuse to get off thephone with. The depressed personwould implore each supportive friendto tell her the very moment she (i.e.,the friend) was getting bored or frus-trated or repelled or felt she (i.e., thefriend) had other more urgent or in-teresting things to attend to, to pleasefor God's sake be utterly candid andfrank and not spend one momentlonger on the phone than she was ab-solutely glad to spend. The depressedperson knew perfectly well, of course,she assured the therapist;' how such arequest could all too possibly be heardnot as an invitation to get off thetelephone at will but actually as a needy,

manipulative plea not to get off-

T never to get off-the telephone.

he depressed person's parents had even-tually split the cost of her orthodonture; a pro-fessional arbitrator had been required in order

to structure this compromise and, subsequent-ly, to negotiate shared payment schedules forthe depressed person's boarding schools andHealthy Eating Lifestyle summer camps andoboe lessons and car and collision insurance,as well as for the cosmetic surgery needed tocorrect a malformation of the anterior spineand alar cartilage of the depressed person'snose which had given her what felt like an ex-cruciatingly pronounced and snout ish pugnose and had, coupled with the external or-

IThe multiformshapesthe therapist's mated fingersas-sumed nearly alwaysresembled various geometricallydiverse cages, an association which the depressed per-son had not shared with the therapist because its sym-bolism seemed too overt and simplistic to waste theirvaluable time together on. The therapist's fingernailswere long and well-maintained, whereas the depressedperson's nails were compulsively bitten so short andragged that the quick sometimes protruded and beganspontaneously to bleed.

thodontic retainer she had to wear twenty-twohours a day, made looking at herself in themirrors of her rooms at her boarding schoolsfeel like more than any person could possiblystand. Also, in the year that her father remar-ried, he, in either a gesture of rare uncompro-mised caring or a coup de grace that the de-pressed person's mother had said was designedto make her own feelings of humiliation andsuperfluousness complete, had paid in toto forthe riding lessons, jodhpurs, and outrageouslyexpensive boots the depressed person hadneeded in order to gain admission to her sec-ond-to-last boarding school's Riding Club, afew of whose members were the only girls atthis school who the depressed person felt,she had confessed to her father on the tele-phone in tears late one truly horrible night,

STORY 59

even remotely accepted her at all and aroundwhom the depressed person hadn't felt so to-tally pig-nosed and brace-faced and inferiorthat it had been a daily act of enormous per-sonal courage and will just to leave her roomand go eat dinner in the dining hall.

The professional arbitrator her parents'lawyers had agreed on for help in structuringtheir compromises had been a highly respectedconflict-resolution specialist named Walter D.("Walt") Ghent Jr. The depressed person hadnever even laid eyes on Walter D. ("Walt")Ghent [r., though she had been shown hisbusiness card-complete with its parenthe-sized invitation to informality-and his namehad been invoked bitterly in her hearing oncountless occasions, along with the fact thathe billed at a staggering $130 an hour plus ex-penses. Despite overwhelming feelings of re-luctance on the part of the depressed person,the therapist had strongly supported her intaking the risk of sharing with members of herSupport System an important emotional real-ization she (i.e., the depressed person) hadachieved during an Inner-Child-Focused Ex-periential Therapy Retreat Weekend whichthe therapist had supported her in taking therisk of enrolling in and giving herself open-mindedly over to the experience of. In the 1.-e.-F.E.T. Retreat Weekend's Small-GroupDrama- Therapy Room, other members of hersmall group had role-played the depressed per-son's parents and the parents' significant oth-ers and attorneys and myriad other emotional-ly painful figures from her childhood, and hadslowly encircled the depressed person, movingin steadily together so that she could not es-cape, and had (i.e., the small group had) dra-matically recited specially prepared lines de-signed to evoke and reawaken trauma, whichhad almost immediately evoked in the de-pressed person a surge of agonizing emotionalmemories and had resulted in the emergenceof the depressed person's Inner Child and acathartic tantrum in which she had struck re-peatedly at a stack of velour cushions with abat of polystyrene foam and had shrieked ob-scenities and had reexperienced long-pent-upwounds and repressed feelings, the most im-portant of which being a deep vestigial rageover the fact that Walter D. ("Walt") GhentJr. had been able to bill her parents $130 anhour plus expenses for playing the role of me-diator and absorber of shit while she had hadto perform essentially the same coprophagousservices on a more or less daily basis for free,for nothing, services which were not only gross-ly unfair and inappropriate for a child to feelrequired to perform but which her parents hadthen turned around and tried to make her, the

60 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/jANUARY 1998

depressed person herself, as a child, feel guiltyabout the staggering cost of Walter D. Ghent[r., as if the cost and hassle were her fault andundertaken only on her spoiled little fat-thighedpig-nosed shiteating behalf instead of simplybecause of her fucking parents' utterly fuckingsick inability to communicate directly andshare honestly and work through their ownsick issues with each other. This exercise hadallowed the depressed person to get in touchwith some really core resentment-issues, thesmall-group facilitator at the Inner-Child-Focused Experiential Therapy Retreat Week-end had said, and could have represented a realturning point in the depressed person's journeytoward healing, had the public shrieking andvelour-cushion-pummeling not left the de-pressed person so emotionally shattered anddrained and traumatized and embarrassed thatshe'd felt she had no choice but to fly backhome that night and miss the rest of theWeekend.

The eventual compromise which she and hertherapist worked out together afterward wasthat the depressed person would share the shat-tering emotional realizations of the I.-e.-F.E.T.R. Weekend with only the two or threevery most trusted and unjudgingly supportivemembers of her Support System, and that shewould be permitted to reveal to them her re-luctance about sharing these realizations and toinform them that she knew all too well howpathetic and blaming they (i.e., the realiza-tions) might sound. In validating this compro-mise, the therapist, who by this time had lessthan a year to live, said that she felt she couldsupport the depressed person's use of the word"vulnerable" more wholeheartedly than shecould support the use of the word "pathetic,"which word (i.e., "pathetic") struck the thera-pist as toxically self-hating and also somewhatmanipulative, an attempt to protect oneselfagainst the possibility of a negative judgmentby making it clear that one was already judgingoneself far more negatively than any listenercould have the heart to. The therapist-whoduring the year's cold months, when the abun-dant fenestration of her home office kept theroom chilly, wore a pelisse of hand-tanned Na-tive American buckskin that formed a some-what ghastlil y moist-looking flesh-coloredbackground for the enclosing shapes her handsformed in her lap-said that she felt comfort-able enough in the validity of their therapeuticconnection together to point out that a chron-ic mood disorder could itself be seen as consti-tuting an emotionally manipulative defensemechanism: i.e., as long as the depressed per-son had the depression's affective discomfortto preoccupy her, she could avoid feeling the

deep vestigial childhood wounds whichshe was apparently determined to

S keep repressed at all costs)

everal months later, when the depressedperson's therapist suddenly died-as the resultof what was determined to be an "accidentally"toxic combination of caffeine and homeopathicappetite suppressant but which, given the ther-apist's extensive medical background, only aperson in very deep denial indeed could fail tosee must have been, on some level, intention-al-without leaving any sort of note or cassetteor encouraging last words for any of the patientswho had come to connect emotionally with thetherapist and establish some degree of intimacyeven though it meant making themselves vul-nerable to the possibility of adult loss- andabandonment-traumas, the depressed personfound this fresh loss so shattering, its resultanthopelessness and despair so unbearable, that shewas forced now to reach frantically and repeat-edly out to her Support System, calling three oreven four different supportive friends in anevening, sometimes calling the same friendstwice in one night, sometimes at a very latehour, and sometimes, even, the depressed per-son felt sickeningly sure, either waking them upor maybe interrupting them in the midst ofhealthy and joyful sexual intimacy with theirpartner. In other words, sheer emotional sur-vival now compelled the depressed person toput aside her innate feelings of shame at being apathetic burden and to lean with all her mighton the empathy and nurture of her Support Sys-tem, despite the fact that this, ironically, hadbeen one of the two issues about which she hadmost vigorously resisted the therapist's counsel.

The therapist's death could not have oc-curred at a worse time, coming as it did just asthe depressed person was beginning to processand work through some of her core shame- andresentment-issues concerning the therapeuticprocess itself, the depressed person shared withher Support System. For example, the depressedperson had shared with the therapist the fact

2 The depressed person's therapist was always ex-tremely careful to avoid appearing to suggest thatshe (i.e., the depressed person) had in any con-scious way chosen or chosen to cling to her endoge-nous depression. Defenses against intimacy, thetherapist held, were almost always arrested or vesti-gial survival mechanisms: they had, at one time,been environmentally appropriate and had servedto shield an otherwise defenseless childhood psycheagainst unbearable trauma, but in nearly all casesthese mechanisms became inappropriately imprint-ed and outlived their purpose, and now "in adult-hood," ironically, caused a great deal more rraumaand pain than they prevented.

that it felt ironic and demeaning, given her par-ents' dysfunctional preoccupation with moneyand all that that preoccupation had cost her,that she was now in a position where she had topay a professional therapist $90 an hour to lis-ten patiently and respond empathetically. It feltdemeaning to have to purchase patience andempathy, the depressed person had confessed toher therapist, and was an agonizing echo of thechildhood pain she was so anxious to put be-hind her. The therapist, after attending veryclosely and patiently to what the depressed per-son later acknowledged to her Support Systemcould all too easily have been interpreted as justa lot of ungrateful whining, and after a longpause during which both of them had gazed atthe digiform ovoid cage which the therapist'smated hands at that moment composed.I hadresponded that, while she might sometimes dis-agree with the substance of what the depressedperson said, she nevertheless wholeheartedlysupported the depressed person in sharing what-

3 The therapist-who was substantially older thanthe depressed person but still younger than the de-pressed person's mother, and who resembled thatmother in almost no respects-sometimes annoyedthe depressed person with her habit of from time totime glancing very quickly at the large bronze sun-burst-design clock on the wall behind the recliner inwhich the depressedperson customarily sat, glancingso quickly and almost furtively at the clock thatwhat bothered the depressed person more and moreover time was not the act itself but the therapist'sapparent effort to hide or disguise it. One of the ther-apeutic relationship's most significant break-throughs, the depressed person told members of herSupport System, had come when she had finallybeen able to share that she would prefer it if thetherapist would simply look openly up at the bronzehelioform clock instead of apparently believing-orat least behaving, from the depressedperson's admit-tedly hypersensitive perspective, as if she believed-that the hypersensitive depressed person could befooled by the therapist's dishonestly sneaking an ob-servation of the time into something designed tolook like a routine motion of the head or eyes. Andthat while they were on the whole subject, the de-pressed person had to confess that she sometimes feltdemeaned and enraged when the therapist's face as-sumed its customary expression of boundless pa-tience, an expression which the depressed personsaid she knew very well was intended to communi-cate attention and unconditional support but whichsometimes felt to the depressed person like emotion-al detachment, like professional courtesy she waspaying for instead of the intensely personal compas-sion and empathy she sometimes felt she had spenther whole life starved for. She was sometimes resent-ful, she shared, at being nothing but the object ofthe therapist's professional courtesy or of the so-called "friends" in her pathetic "Support System"'scharity and abstract guilt.

STORY 61

ever feelings the therapeutic relationship itselfbrought up so that they could work together onexploring safe, appropriate environments andcontexts for their expression.t

The depressed person's recollection and shar-

ing of the therapist's supportive responsesbrought on further, even more unbearable feel-ings of loss and abandonment, as well as wavesof resentment and self-pity which she knew alltoo well were repellent in the extreme, the de-

4 Or even that, for example, to be totally honest, itfelt demeaning and somehow insulting to know thattoday (i.e., the day of the seminal session duringwhich the depressed person had opened up andrisked sharing all these issues and feelings about thetherapeutic relationship), at the moment their ap-pointed time together was up and they had risenfrom their respective recliners and hugged awkwardlyand said their goodbyes until their next appoint-ment, that at that moment all of the therapist'sseemingly intensely personally focused attention andinterest in the depressed person would then be with-drawn and effortlessly transferred onto the nextwhiny spoiled self-involved snaggletoothed pig-nosedfat-thighed pathetic shiteater who was waiting tocome in and cling pathetically to the hem of thetherapist's pelisse, so desperate for a personally inter-ested friend that they would pay almost as much permonth for the temporary illusion of one (i.e., of anactual friend) as they paid in fucking rent. This eventhough the depressed person knew quite well, shehad said, holding up a pica-gnawed hand to preventinterruption, that the therapist's professional detach-ment was in fact not at all incompatible with truecaring, and that it meant that the depressed personcould for once be totally open and honest withoutever having to be afraid that the therapist would takeanything she said personally or judge it or in any wayresent or reject the depressed person; that, ironically,in certain ways the therapist was actually an ab-solutely ideal friend for the depressed person: i.e.,here, after all, was a person who would truly and at-tentively listen and care and give emotional supportand empathy and yet would expect absolutely nothingback in terms of empathy or emotional support or re-ally any human consideration at all. The depressedperson knew perfectly well that it was in fact the $90an hour which made the therapeutic relationship'ssimulacrum of friendship so ideally clean and one-sided. And yet she nevertheless found it demeaningto feel that she was spending $1,080 a month to pur-chase what was in many respects just a fantasy-friendwho fulfilled her (i.e., the depressed person's) infan-tile fantasies of getting her emotional needs met byan Other without having to empathize with or evenconsider the valid human needs of the Other, an em-pathy and consideration which the depressed personthen tearfully confessed she often despaired of evereven having it in her to be able to give. The de-pressed person had here inserted that she secretlyworried constantly that it was her own inability toget outside her needy self-centeredness and to trulyemotionally give that had made her attempts at inti-mate, mutually nurturing relationships with mensuch a traumatic and agonizing across-the-board fail-ure. And that her resentments about the cost of ther-apy were in truth less about the actual expense-which she freely admitted she could afford-thanabout the idea of paying for an artificially one-sided

62 HARPER'S MAGAZINE /JANUARY 1998

relationship, the depressed person then laughing hol-lowly to indicate that she heard and acknowledgedthe unwitting echo of her cold, niggardly, emotional-ly unavailable parents in the stipulation that whatwas objectionable was the idea or "principle" of an ex-pense. What it really felt like sometimes was as if thehourly therapeutic fee were a kind of ransom or "pro-tection money," purchasing the depressed person anexemption from the scalding internal self-contemptand mortification of telephoning distant formerfriends she hadn't even laid fucking eyes on in yearsand had no legitimate claim on the friendship of any-more and telephoning them uninvited at night andintruding on their functional and blissfully ignorant-ly joyful if somewhat shallow and unconscious livesand appealing shamelessly to their compassion andleaning shamelessly on them and trying to articulatethe essence of her unceasing emotional pain whenthat very pain and despair and loneliness renderedher, the depressed person knew, far too self-involvedto be able ever truly to Be There in return for thesupportive friends to reach out and lean on in return,i.e., that the depressed person's was a patheticallystarved and greedy ornnineediness that only a com-plete idiot would not expect the members of her so-called "Support System" to detect all too easily, andto be repelled by, and to stay on the telephone onlyout of the barest and most abstract human charity,all the while rolling their eyes and making faces andlooking at the clock and wishing desperately that thephone call were over or that the depressed personwould call someone else or that the depressed personhad never been born and didn't even exist "if thetruth be told," if the therapist really wanted the "total-ly honest sharing" she kept "alleging [she] wantjed],"the depressed person later tearfully confessed to herSupport System she had hissed derisively at the ther-apist, her face (i.e., the depressed person's face) con-torted in what she imagined must have been a repul-sive admixture of rage and self-pity. If the therapistreally wanted the truth, the depressed person had fi-nally shared from a hunched and near-fetal positionbeneath the sunburst clock, sobbing uncontrollably,the depressed person really felt that what was reallyunfair was that she was unable, even with the trustedand admittedly compassionate therapist, to commu-nicate her depression's terrible and unceasing agonyitself, agony which was the overriding and a priori re-ality of her every waking minute-i.e., not being ableto share the way it felt, what it actually felt like forthe depressed person to be literally unable to share it,as for example if her very life depended on describingthe sun but she were allowed to describe only shad-ows on the ground ... The depressed person had thenlaughed hollowly and apologized to the therapist foremploying such a floridly melodramatic analogy. Sheshared all this later, with her Support System, follow-ing the therapist's death from homeopathic caffein-ism, including her (i.e., the depressed person's) rerni-

pressed person assured her Support System,whose members she was by this time calling al-most constantly, sometimes even during the day,from her workplace, swallowing her pride anddialing their work numbers and asking them totake time away from their own vibrant, stimulat-ing careers to listen supportively and share andhelp the depressed person find some way toprocess this grief and loss and find some way tosurvive. Her apologies for burdening thesefriends during daylight hours at their workplaceswere elaborate, vociferous, and very nearly con-stant, as were her expressions of gratitude to theSupport System for just Being There for her, be-cause she was discovering again, with shatteringnew clarity in the wake of the therapist's word-less abandonment, just how agonizingly few andfar between were the people with whom shecould ever hope to really communicate andforge intimate, mutually nurturing relationshipsto lean on. The depressed person's work envi-ronment, for example, was totally toxic and dys-functional, making the idea of trying to bond inany mutually supportive way with coworkers lu-dicrous. And her attempts to reach out in herisolation and develop caring relationshipsthrough church groups or nutrition or holisticstretching classes or community woodwind en-sembles had proved so excruciating, she shared,that she had been reduced to begging the thera-pist to withdraw her gentle suggestion that thedepressed person try her best to do so. And as forthe idea of girding herself and venturing outonce again into the emotionally Hobbesianmeat market of the dating scene ... at this junc-ture the depressed person usually laughed hol-lowly into the speaker of the headset telephoneshe wore at the terminal inside her cubicle andasked whether it was even necessary to go intowhy her intractable' depression and highlycharged trust-issues rendered this idea a sheer

niscence that the therapist's display of attention dur-ing this seminal but ugly and humiliating break-through session had been so intense and professional-ly uncompromising that she had blinked far lessoften than any listener the depressed person had everopened up to face-to-face had ever blinked. The twomost special and trusted current members of her Sup-port System had responded, almost verbatim, that itsounded as though the therapist had been very spe-cial and the depressed person obviously missed hervery much; and the one particularly trusted and valu-able, physically ill long-distance friend whom the de-pressed person leaned on more heavily than on anyother friend during the grieving process suggestedthat the most loving and appropriate way to honorboth the therapist's memory and the grief over herloss might be for the depressed person to try to be-come as special and caring and nurturing a friend toherself as the late therapist had been.

pie-in-the-sky flight of pathetic and denial-ridden fancy, at best.

By this stage in the grieving process, the de-pressed person's emotional agony had so com-pletely overwhelmed her vestigial defense mech-anisms that whenever a member of her SupportSystem finally said that she was dreadfully sorrybut she absolutely Iuul to get off the telephone,the primal instinct for sheer emotional survivalnow drove the depressed person to swallowevery last tattered remnant of pride and to begshamelessly for two or even just one moreminute of the friend's time and attention, and-if the "supportive friend" held firm and termi-nated the conversation-to spend now hardlyany time listening dully to the dial tone orgnawing the ragged cuticle of her index finger orgrinding the heel of her hand savagely into herforehead or feeling anything other than sheerprimal desperation as she hurriedly dialed thenext ten-digit number on her Support SystemTelephone List, which by this time had beenphotocopied several times and placed in the de-pressed person's address book, workstation ter-minal's PHONE.VIP file, billfold, minilocker atthe Holistic Stretching and Nutrition Center,and in a special pocket inside the back cover ofthe leatherbound Feelings Journal which the de-pressed person-at her late therapist'ssuggestion'i-e-carried with her at all times.

It was at this same point, driven by despera-tion to abandon all defenses and to share herdeepest feelings with what was possibly the sin-gle most trusted and indispensable member of

5 As a natural part of the grieving process, sensuous de-tails and affective memories flooded the depressed per-son's agonized psyche at random and unpredictablemoments, pressing in on her and clamoring for ex-pression and processing. The buckskin pelisse, for ex-ample, though the therapist had seemed almost fetishis-tically attached to the Native American garment andduring cool weather had worn it, seemingly, on a near-daily basis, was always immaculately clean and alwayspresented an immaculately raw- and moist-lookingflesh-toned backdrop to the varioform cages the ther-apist's unconscious hands composed. It had never beenclear how or by what process the therapist's authenticpelisse's buckskin was able to stay so perfectly clean-unless, the depressed person confessed to imagining, thetherapist had woru it only for their particular appoint-ments. The therapist's chilly home office also con-tained, on the wall opposite the bronze clock and be-hind the therapist's recliner, a stunning molybdenumdesk-and-personal-computer-hutch ensemble, one shelfof which was lined, on either side of the deluxe Brauncoffeemaker, with small framed photographs of thetherapist's husband and sisters and son; and the de-pressed person often broke into fresh sobs of grief andself-excoriation on her workstation's headset telephoneas she confessed to her Support System that she had nev-er even asked the therapist's intimate loved ones' names.

STORY 63

her Support System, that the depressed personshared that she felt she had found, somehow, fi-nally, the willingness to risk trying to follow thesecond of the late overdosed therapist's two sug-gestions which she (i.e., the depressed person)had most vehemently resisted over the course oftheir work together. The depressed personproposed now to take an unprecedented emo-tional risk and to begin asking certain impor-tant persons in her life to tell her straight outwhether they had ever secretly felt contempt,derision, judgment, or repulsion for her, andwas choosing to begin this vulnerable inter-rogative process with the one particularly nur-turing and dependable and trustworthy Sup-port System member with whom she wassharing via her workstation's telephone rightthis rnorne n t.v She had resolved, the de-pressed person shared, to ask these potentiallydeeply traumatizing questions without pream-ble or apology or interpolated self-criticism.She wished to hear, with no holds barred, hervery most valuable friend's honest opinion ofher, the potentially negative and judging andtraumatic and hurtful parts as well as the posi-tive and affirming and supportive and nurtur-ing parts. The depressed person stressed thatshe was serious about this: the honest assess-ment of her by an objective but deeply caringconfidante felt, at this point in time, like a lit-eral matter of life and death.

For she was frightened, the depressed personconfessed to the trusted and convalescingfriend, profoundly frightened by what she feltshe was learning about herself following thesudden death of a therapist who for nearly fouryears had been her single most valuable re-source and trusted support and-with no of-fense intended to any of the members of herSupport System-her very best friend in theworld. For she had discovered, the depressedperson confessed, that when she took her dailyQuiet Time now, during the grieving process,and got quiet and centered and looked deepwithin, she could neither feel nor identify anyfeelings for the therapist as a person, as a per-son who had died, a person who only somebody

6 The singularly valuable and supportive friend onthe telephone wasan alumna of one of the depressedperson's boarding schools, a generous, nurturing di-vorcedmother of two in BloomfieldHills,Michigan,who had recently undergone her second course ofchemotherapy for a virulent neuroblastoma, whichgreatly reduced the number of activities and respon-sibilities in her full, vibrant, undepressed life, andwho thus wasnot only almost alwaysat home but al-so enjoyednearly unlimited conflict-freeavailabilityand time to share on the telephone, for which thedepressed person was now careful to enter a dailyprayerofgratitude in her FeelingsJournal.

64 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/JANUARY 1998

in truly stupefying denial could fail to see hadprobably taken her own life, and thus a personwho, the depressed person posited, had possiblysuffered levels of emotional pain and isolationand despair which were comparable to ormaybe even exceeded the depressed person'sown. And thus that although the depressedperson had had agonizing feelings aplenty sincethe therapist's suicide, these feelings appearedto be all and only for herself, i.e., for her loss,her abandonment, her grief, her trauma andpain and primal affective survival. And thatthis terrifying set of realizations, instead ofawakening in her any feelings of compassion,empathy, or Other-directed grief for the thera-pist-and here the depressed person waited pa-tiently for an episode of retching in the espe-cially available trusted friend to pass so thatshe could take the emotional risk of sharingthis with her-these realizations seemed mere-ly to have brought up in the depressed personstill more feelings about herself. At this point,sharing, the depressed person paused to swearup and down to her long-distance, gravely ill,frequently retching, but still caring and inti-mate friend that there was no toxic or manipu-lative self-hatred in this confession, only pro-found fear: the depressed person was frightenedfor herself, for as it were "[her] self" -i.e., her"spirit" or "soul," her capacity for basic humanempathy and compassion-she told the sup-portive friend with the neuroblastoma. She wasasking sincerely, the depressed person said,honestly, desperately: what kind of personcould seem to feel nothing-"nothing," she em-phasized-for anyone but herself? She wept in-to the headset telephone and said she wasshamelessly begging her now single most valu-able friend and confidante in the world toshare her (i.e., the friend with the virulent ma-lignancy in her adrenal medulla's) brutally can-did assessment, to pull no punches, to saynothing reassuring or supportive or exculpatorywhich she did not honestly believe to be true.She trusted her, she assured her. She had de-cided, she shared, that her very life itself, how-ever fraught with agony and despair and inde-scribable loneliness, depended, at this point inher journey toward healing, on inviting-even,if necessary, begging shamelessly for-honestfeedback, even if that feedback was traumaticor hurtful. The depressed person thereforeurged her terminally ill friend to go on, to nothold back, to let her have it: What terms mightbe used to describe and assess such a solipsistic,self-consumed, bottomless emotional vacuumand sponge as she now appeared to herself tobe? How was she to decide and describe-evento herself, facing herself-what all she hadlearned said about her? •