Friends join hands against depression

Date: January 16, 2011
Edition(s): News & Record
Page: D2
Section: Life Column: Personal Adds
Source:CAROLE PERKINS

Recently, I dreamed I was riding on a go-cart with my friends of many years, Joy and Jill. We laughed and whooped as the sweetest smelling wind possible blew back our hair against the backdrop of a robin's egg-colored sky, anchored by a carpet of purple and yellow flowers. We rounded a corner and the go-cart tilted, catapulting us into a pit with slippery red clay walls sinking into inches of brackish water. The smell was the overpowering stench of dead water moccasins on hot asphalt. I clung to a ledge and drew my feet up in horror as a snake slithered underneath. Joy and Jill seemed nonplussed, having landing feet first in the pit, but they jumped to action when they saw my distress by making a human ladder with one on top of the other's shoulders. I climbed on top and pulled myself out of that pit as fast as I could.

Now, it doesn't take a Freudian dream analyst to decipher this dream of a beautiful day in heaven flipped to a nightmare in hell. I'm no expert in matters of depression, but I do know the serious grip of that python who tries to strangle its victims, sometimes successfully.

A while back, I found myself sitting in the pit in the dark with my legs drawn up to my chest. I knew I wasn't alone. Heck, even Johnny Cash once fell into a burning ring of fire and Kevin Gordon sang that he ain't going down to the well no more 'cause he'd has his fill, as Lucinda Williams chimes in about the time "he broke down to the core and threw his black Stratocaster through the plate glass door."

Whew! That's really hitting rock bottom when you start throwing Stratocasters around, and it was of great comfort to me to know I had my girlfriends who meet on Wednesday mornings to talk, pray, laugh and sometimes cry.

A few years ago, one of my friends in the group, Karen, was also doing time in the pit. Somehow, I reached my hand out in the blackness to try to get my bearings and my hand brushed against hers. We held on tightly for dear life in that dark time.

Then, one day I wiped the muck out of my eyes and spit great clods of red clay from my mouth and marveled to hear birds chirping in the morning. Karen wasn't too far behind.

A few years passed and our group continued to meet on Wednesday mornings. Then Karen, who is no stranger to tragedy, having lost her young son in a car accident, got slapped with an ALS diagnosis. We all watch, as if stuck in a dream where you run in slow motion away from harm, as Karen's tell-tale limp requires a hot pink cane and sometimes the luxury of a wheelchair for transportation.

I haven't tiptoed down to the pit to see if she's hanging out down there. Like Jimmy Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock's suspense thriller "Vertigo," I'm afraid if I stand too close to the edge, I might get dizzy and fall in.

But Karen is an amazing woman of great faith who always finds something to laugh about. And if she starts slipping down that hill, I hope she finds a ledge to cling onto, a place to draw up her feet in case a serpent sneaks by, in which case her strong group of friends will build the tallest human ladder possible to lift her up.

And if she holds out her hand in the darkness grasping for bearing, I'll find it. And I'll never let it go.

Carole Perkins is a freelance writer in Greensboro. Contact her at CPGuilford@aol.com.