Jeff and I crossed paths for the last time one year ago. His smile was wide and his skin was lobster red, burned by the sun. He had been living at McKinley Marina, squatting, I guess you’d say, on a boat he said he intended to buy whenever his business partner could get his finances together.
This was typical of Jeff. He was prone to outlandish acts – stunts and schemes that were sometimes hard to fathom.
It was an outlandish act that took him out of this world in April, his most outlandish stunt of all, an act of self-destruction. Friends and family could see it coming. But no one could stop it.
I had known Jeff since high school. He was one ring removed from a small circle of friends who have stayed in touch over the years. Jeff did not marry, did not have kids. He was hard to keep up with, flying from one thing to the next. He owned a trucking company, built patio decks, remodeled warehouses into condos. He’d run a triathlon after a night of heavy drinking and spend an afternoon with his goddaughter picking wild asparagus along the roadside. He once drove through Iowa in a blizzard without headlights or wipers, once lost $20,000 in a hair-brained investment in Jerusalem artichokes.
A few years ago, Jeff was diagnosed with manic-depression or bipolar disorder. That explained a lot to those who knew him.
I watched Jeff’s life out of the corner of my eye, like watching a solar eclipse, captivated but wary. He called one day last summer and we had lunch. He flirted with the waitress and ordered steak and a glass of wine; it was still before noon. He was in the midst of another scheme: He’d donated his run-down Mercedes to a local artist, who painted it sky blue, bumper to bumper, and parked it on the sidewalk. It would be on display as a work of art for Gallery Night.
Jeff told me he’d been living with his sister. He told me a cousin had committed suicide a year earlier. He told me he was struggling with manic-depression. He told me he had stopped taking his medication but was able to control his mood swings by self-medicating – a glass or two of wine in the morning, a few cups of coffee at night. He was managing, he told me.
But he wasn’t.
Jeff put a gun to his head just a few weeks after his 50th birthday. Four months earlier, yet another cousin had killed himself, walked into Lake Michigan in the middle of winter. Jeff became the third cousin to self-destruct. Each suffered from some form of depression.
Bipolar disorder is as invisible as the wind. A few hard facts:
• Bipolar disorder is a treatable illness marked by extreme changes in mood, thought, energy and behavior. It is not a character flaw or a sign of weakness. Bipolar disorder affects more than two million adult Americans. It usually begins in late adolescence, though it can start in childhood or later in life. Research points to a genetic link.
• Patients suffering from depression and bipolar disorder are far more likely to take their own lives than people in any other psychiatric or medical risk group. Without effective treatment, bipolar disorder leads to suicide in nearly 20 percent of cases.
There are times when I sink deep inside myself, hole up in my den, refuse to talk on the phone. These moods pass with the light of a new day, and I chalk them up to life circumstances: a bad day at work, a disagreement with my wife, money worries.
Our lives have highs and lows, peaks of excitement and creativity and valleys of worry and dread. But there’s a vast difference between a bad day and a debilitating, life-threatening disorder, between a lousy attitude and a physiological chemical imbalance.
Researchers see a tie between manic-depression and creative genius. Kay Jamison, a psychiatrist and the author of An Unquiet Mind, takes lithium to treat her own manic-depression. “I honestly believe that as a result of it, I have felt more things, more deeply,” she says of her illness. “Depressed, I have crawled on my hands and knees in order to get across a room.… But normal or manic, I have run faster, thought faster… than most I know.”
This is a good depiction of Jeff as well. In some ways, his manic side is what made Jeff Jeff. But without treatment, he was too long on his hands and knees, and in the end, he couldn’t get up.
Jeff died on a Saturday in April. The rain had lifted, the grass was turning green, the birds had returned to the trees.
“Don’t sweat the small stuff” – a perfect spring day makes it easy to practice what we preach. But for some, even the small stuff is insurmountable. For some, the clouds turn dark and menacing and the rain falls until it seems as if the storm will never end. M
For more information on bipolar disorder or depression, contact the National Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association at 800-826-3632 (www.ndmda.org) or the National Foundation for Depressive Illness at 800-239-1265 (www.depression.org).
