Amid tears… a smile shines forth

Yes, I know being relentlessly cheerful is my default. However, two years ago I had become increasingly anxious – thanks to Covid, parental death, career failure, menopause, empty nest syndrome, First World problems – and then, oddly disassociated, faking it and faking it and still not making it.

I was (or seemed) fine all day, going through the motions, falling into bed exhausted, then up at 2am, 3am, 4am…

I’d startle upright from dreams of water: tidal waves, floods, overcrowded waterparks, snowstorms, ice, lakes with unfathomable deaths, pleasant waters where menace lurked.

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So I started taking the tablets. I felt better, which was magical. I slept better, which was a miracle. Anxiety? I was bulletproof.

But now I’m weaning myself off the drugs under my doctor’s guidance; now I’m on half a tablet five times a week.

And loss whispers out again in a myriad ways.

My mom was waiting for me at the mall sitting beside a man wearing a baseball cap. She says a woman appeared, took off the man’s hat and popped a kiss atop his bald head.

“I wanted to leap up and tell her to never, ever stop doing that,” she told me.

You see, my dad was bald, his head smooth with kisses.

I cried. I’m crying now.

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For several years before my dad died, he grew grumpier and more impossible but, because he’d always been a little bit volatile and a whole lot impossible, we didn’t realise how sick he was.

Instead, we’d share stories about infuriating things he did or said, thinking we’d have a lot to laugh about when he was gone.

We don’t though. The thing that seems to have stuck is sadness. I thought I’d stopped crying ages ago. Now I think that was the antidepressants.

Uncontrolled, unmedicated, emotions sneak up. And loss sucker punches you when you’re doing something you’ve done a million times: making a cup of tea, biting into a cherry, hearing Radio Gaga on the radio because that’s when you see them, offering you a cuppa in a lifetime of cuppas, eating cherries, singing along to a favourite song on the radio…

Yes, I’m weaning myself off my antidepressants. Sometimes I dream of water. Sometimes there are tears. But you know what? I’m laughing more too.