Saw Sekhnet’s cousins last night.  Alan, a friendly man who describes himself as a pussycat, was beaming.   He had good news, finally being laid off from a lucrative and easy job he was trying to leave for years, with a nice severance package.  He’s 70, has plenty of money and investments and doesn’t need to work anyway.  He grinned from ear to ear as he laid out the details of his new freedom.  After a nice dinner Alan dropped us off at the nearby ferry.  As soon as we were in the car he laid on us the heavy medical news he’d just received.

Thinking of his beaming face at dinner in light of the scary news he related afterwards reminded me of a series of photos of me taken the mid 1980s.  Those photos are on two facing pages of an album my mother put together, now in my sister’s house.  In each photo I am beaming, looking happier than I ever remember being.  When I first came across these photos a few years back I was at a loss for why I looked so deliriously happy in each photo, posed with my arm around somebody, or putting my widely grinning face close to their’s for the photo.  

I did some figuring and realized with shock when they had been taken.  During a winter I was incapacitated by what felt like a deep depression.  The experts I saw diagnosed it as something called Dysthymia, which, years later when l read about it on the internet, told me they were at a loss to diagnose this sudden several month long bout of darkness and paralysis.  It disappeared as suddenly as it arrived, after six months or so, never to reappear in anywhere near that intensity or for very long.  

Dysthymia, for diagnostic purposes, is supposed to persist for  at least two years, with only minor interruptions in the generally depressed state of this chronic illness.  Dysthymia, we are told, lasts a lifetime and can only be mitigated, it would seem, by a lifelong regimen of various pharmaceuticals that inhibit the, dig it, reuptake of serotonin.

Our minds, moods and personalities are still in most ways mysteries.   I think of that beaming smile, which fools most of the people most of the time, and what a flimsy umbrella it actually is.