Dear William Styron,
I write to you today knowing that you died in the Autumn of 2006. Hopefully you will not resent my intrusion into your long and much deserved rest.
After talking for many years about the shortest book of your extinguished writing career, you should be pleased to know I have just finished reading "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness" and it is clear to me, perhaps much to your undeserved distress, that we have been brothers in the arms of the Devil named depression.
Being somewhat younger now than you were when you passed on, I came to know you in likely the least admirable way from your perspective, by the motion picture "Sophie's Choice" via Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, followed by reading the book, and then your other books "The Confessions of Matt Turner" and "The Long March.
I see by your admission in Darkness Visible that you might believe that depression was in your soul from childhood. This I do not dispute but we do not share similar backgrounds.
The monster that I have come to call "the hole" came to me in 2003 and eventually swallowed me up by July. As I look back, as you did in your book, what was besetting me day by day for 6 or 7 months was a mystery to me, a surprise over time from an unexpected and most unwelcome visitor. I really did not understand what was happening or where I was headed.
Like you, I eventually came as most depression sufferers do to the wall of death aka suicide, and like you, but for apparently different reasons, I was able by the grace of God, or luck, or total accident to retreat and save myself.
Round two came several years later. Previously hardened by wrestling with this monster, even though the ideation of doing myself in was a daily companion, I made an oath to my soul and to those who love me even at my worst that suicide was a bad joke I would laugh at for the rest of my days. Feel like dying? Oh yes. Suicide? Not on my to do list.
Lucky me, I have climbed out of the hole again and life is better and richer and more creative and more interesting today than it has ever been. I am confirmation of your postulation that there can be a "shining world" upon recovery.
I lost my great friend and brother I never had, James Travis Cackler, to depression induced suicide in April of the year of your death. I was the eulogizer at his funeral, the hardest job I have ever had to do. I loved this man so much.
To you Sir William, I say thank you for exposing the bare and tender underbelly of your soul, your dreadful fall and triumphant rise from the suicidal grips of this insidious disease.
And to those of you who are in this dreadful state of mind and body, and to those of you who are falling but do not yet know to what depth you will descend, I can tell you that depression is Hell. But, you can and most likely will escape and recover. But, if you choose to kill yourself - and it IS a choice - all hope is lost.
We who have been to the far side of Hell and back, and in many cases more than once, can tell you better than anyone why suicide is a very bad idea. Because we have suffered as you are suffering and returned and did not do ourselves in, we are proof of something that is hard to imagine, especially the first time you are in the hole.
The old theme song from the TV series "MASH" says that suicide is painless? Perhaps you can turn your lights off permanently without too much suffering, but you will NEVER in Heaven or Hell be able to undo the pain you cause to those who love you and fellow sufferers of depression who love you even though they have never met you.
By hook or by crook or by luck or by miracle of miracles, find yourself a brother or sister who has been in the same hole you are in and has survived. William and I are both able to tell you that there is light at the end of the tunnel and it is not an oncoming train.
Hope is your reward earned by enduring unimaginable pain. You can be whole again and you can honor your good fortune by helping others survive and prosper, as our colleague in suffering William Styron has done in his most eloquent and excruciating book. Read, live and prosper. After all you have been through, you more than anyone deserve this.
Thank you so much, William, for helping us help ourselves. I love and salute you. And to my fellow compatriots, 5000 IU of a good quality vitamin D-3 per day is what works for me. I have never taken pharmaceuticals for depression, and I never will.
If you are a fellow sufferer, or if you know someone who is, read Darkness Visible, save a life.
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Obsession about depression
I happened upon this book in a roundabout way-Styron was quoted in a book about happiness of all things-and I was just intrigued enough to buy a hard copy of his book, particularly since it was a very brief read. It is not in my nature to read profoundly depressing books, (nor do I commonly read books about happiness, but it was given to me as a gift), and I generally avoid the self-help genre altogether because I find it all very tedious, particularly since I have lived with clinical depression for my entire 55 years, and there’s simply nothing new to say about it, much like my decision to discontinue talk therapy because I have nothing new to say and I’m sick to death of hearing my voice telling the same narrative.All that being said, once I started reading my hard copy of Styron’s book, (I’ve since purchased the Kindle version), I found myself grabbing my highlighter and by the time I was finished reading and highlighting I found that I had highlighted no less than 18 passages in this profoundly insightful book of less than 100 pages. Nowhere have I ever heard or read anything that affected me in such a visceral way, namely, Styron’s ability to verbalize in the written word the truest description of depression and all its grim detritus in such a brilliant way. I became obsessed with this book and insisted to all my depressed “people” that they’ve got to read this book. I have never in my entire life felt so validated and I think it’s should required reading if for no other reason than one might gain a scintilla of an idea of what this monstrous disease is like and what it is capable of. An entire generation of people could be educated, finally, on the ability and necessity to truly feel compassion and who would choose to be an active participant in eradicating the stigma that so many of us live with.
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