The story of how my parents met goes something like this. My father’s roommate in college threw bottles at the wall between their beds and there was glass left all over his room. He went down to the laundry room to get a broom. My mother saw him in the laundry room and helped him find the broom. Greatest love story ever. In actuality, they’d both seen each other in the halls before. My mother had told him he should smile more. The reason my father didn’t smile much was because he was living with depression.
Eric struggled with depression from his teenage years. He remembers, “I always believed I was never good enough. Wasn’t good enough to be on a team, be a friend, to learn to drive, be a husband, be a dad.” This was a statement that drove his life. The feeling caused depression and suicidal thoughts. He still remembers the moment he chose to live. He says, “I think I was eighteen. Maybe nineteen, because I was driving home. I decided my life was going to be hard, but ending it was simply not an option. Because I had good days. Days that were worth living for. I never had an issue with thinking about suicide after that.”
While being lucky enough to have resolve that kept him from suicide, he still suffered from depression. he met my mother at a time in his life that he was all about just taking care of himself. He had six months until he was leaving for the Navy. This was a point in his life where he says, “Nothing I did mattered. It was a freedom and a reprieve from my mind. So I could take any risk I wanted. Worse that would happen was I never came back to school. The problem was it wasn’t me.” My mother fell in love with this reckless abandon and the fact that he just did what he wanted. They married while he was still finishing his training for the Navy reserves.
After he finished A School for the Navy, he came back home and started searching for work to do on a day to day basis. He couldn’t find the type of job he wanted and wasn’t able to make real money, so he sunk back into depression. My mother ended up suggesting he worked at Boeing. It wasn’t what he really wanted, but it was a way to make money and support his family. The first year of marriage was very difficult for both of them.
Once he had work to disappear into, Eric focused there as they started to build their family, buying their first home, then selling it to move out to the country where Eric felt most comfortable. This was a time that was extremely challenging for my mother. She told me about those difficult few years in the new house, where they struggled with being on well water and my father worked constantly. Eric says, “your mom was not happy, isolated in the woods, a baby, not enough water to live a normal life, it was rough on her. I don’t know what would have happened if she didn’t have to go do laundry with her mom every week. I was working three weeks a month at Boeing and my weekend off, I had reserve duty.”
As me and then my sister got to be functioning human beings, my mother immersed herself in Girl Scouts and became a leader of a troop of girls. This change brought her happiness, but slowly pushed them further apart. My mother had found her purpose, but Eric was just working to work, just going on living with depression. My mother said that during this period of time, she did a lot of trying to inspire him to do things that would help make him happy outside of work. She helped make his dream of owning a boat possible. Went out with us and him on it even though it made her seasick.
As a child, I never realized my father was depressed and that my mother went through periods of depression as well. My parents worked to give us everything we needed, without regard to themselves. I really appreciate that. My mother’s depression triggered again after the death of my grandma and who she became after was someone different than before. Eventually my parents divorced.
Kody always looked to my father as a guide when it came to depression. He and my father were very similar people, but Kody didn’t have the same resolve to stay alive. I know he and my father shared many conversations about depression. He wanted some clue on how my father had made that choice to live. But what worked for him, didn’t work for Kody. Eric explains, “I wish I had wisdom to pass on so others would get that. But I don’t. It was a conscious choice I made. Like my choice to stop drinking. Or to never smoke. Something like the deal I made to bring my kids up catholic. Some promise I made to me that I cant back out of. I don’t fully understand how or why I keep those things. But I do.”
My father continues living with depression to this day. The thoughts that he’s not good enough still haunt him. He explains, “Why did it take four months to finish the bridge over the creek? Because I wasn’t good enough to build it. An extra three days for my deck? I wasn’t good enough.” But he continues to live each day because of a promise he made to himself.