Last night we finally finished watching "The Beaver". I rented it because it was recommended. At first it looks like a really goofy movie,made directed by, acted in, etc, by two really goofy people (at least in my opinion). Jodie Foster and Mel Gibson. The farther you get into the movie, (it took me three attempts, and today I'm wondering why I persisted) it breaks your heart, watching these people deal with depression.

There were no answers. The guy in the movie literally cuts his depression from his life. He accepts the love and help of his family, who finally forgive him all the pain he caused for them. The message, maybe; "you're not alone."

Here's my question. How do you deal with the depression of someone who you love, when they use it to beat you to a bloody pulp. I go along and think that I've just locked that compartment of my life away and then it sneaks up on me and my heart breaks all over again. I get on with my life and think I have literally cut that malignancy out of it, but it keeps growing back.

I admit I do not understand depression. When I was going through treatment for cancer, my doctor told me I was depressed because I would cry at inappropriate times for seemingly no reason. Are you kidding me? NO REASON. Cancer treatment is torture.You go each day and wonder why, because you're pretty sure you're going to die anyway (in fact we all are going to die anyway, but at that time you figure your death is eminent).

For the first time ever, I comtemplated suicide. I would drive home from radiation and look to the mountains in the west and wonder how long it would take me to drive as high as I could and then walk even higher. It would be so easy to sit down under a tree and when the sun went down and it got colder and colder,just go to sleep. Hypothermia, a cowards way out.

Guess you figured by now, I didn't do it. I kept putting one foot in front of the other and letting them torture my body to within an inch of death. Just enough to kill the cancer and not me. I wanted one more day, I wanted to experience everything I could in that day and then the next one and then the next one. It's eleven years to the month of when I finished treatment.It took years to feel human again. Normal is something that will never come.

Anyway, during that time, I had a small relationship with antidepressants. I say small because we never fell in love. I could not stand feeling nothing. Even pain is better than the nothingness.

I "cowboyed up", took it and got through.

I have a hard time understand depression, when there doesn't seem to be a reason. I accept it. I know it happens to people. I just don't know how to deal with it. I don't know how to deal with the hole in my heart drilled by someone else's depression.Who has a pill for that?

I probably shouldn't post this, but I'm gonna. Maybe it will help me deal with all of this for another two years before I break down again. The problem this morning has been way too much thinking and sad songs.

"Thinking must be optional."