On this day, 30 years ago, my mother was living in a foreign country, with two babies, and an overwhelming case of depression. She chose on this day to pick up her purse off the nigtstand and walk out the door, leaving her babies crying in their cots.
She headed to a liqueur store and bought a bottle of vodka. Then she drove along the road and looked out for the first motel that she could find. Pulling up, parking the car, registering for one night only....she knew what she was going to do.
She walked from the check-in desk to the motel room. She breathed in the last but of her surroundings...the darkness of the night, the freshness of the cool air, the colors of the Christmas lights....and walked into the room that would become her coffin.
I wonder what the last thoughts she had were as she drank from the bottle of vodka and washed down the pills...
Did she think about the morning after? Who would find her? What would happen to those two baby girls crying for their mother's milk?
Knowing what depression makes you feel, I have to think not. That instead she only felt sadness. A pain of such heaviness that she could only feel a heavy heart, the loneliness that no-one understood her, that things could never change, that others were better off without her.
I put this story in the back of my mind most o the time, but every year at Christmas it comes back to me, especially as I grow older myself, and have felt those same feelings that she must have felt. I wanted to do the same thing she did, but I didn't.
I chose life.
