THE TOUGHEST, MOST MAGICAL EASTER I EVER HAD

This photo was taken about 6 years before I went to get help for depression  and anxiety. There’s a look of some mild sadness, even then at a marvelous birthday party in California. 

Easter is a time of miracles. Or at least that’s how I see it. We all have our own way of looking at life on this planet, and that’s just my way. I realized that this Easter day marked a strange and mystical milestone for me.

17 years ago today, on April 4th, 2009, I entered a very well-known facility in the Southwest desert for anxiety and depression treatment. There is a sign on the way in that says, “Expect a miracle”. Very few see it.

How I ended up there and what the experience was is a story for another day. The facility was a campus, it was lovely and expensive, but the program was tough as nails. My brother, had some recommendations from a friend and also from the therapist he took me too, being concerned pushed me but with love.  I decided I would go. What looked like a therapeutic paradise on the site, turned out to be far rougher and having much less individual therapy than we had imagined. An A list rock star once called it “Sackcloth and ashes”. But he got well.

Today, as my brother and I just spoke of, they have gentler places for those of us who don’t have drug or alcohol issues, just depression and anxiety. 

I got better there, through therapy and medication, but it was one of the most difficult experiences I’ve ever had, and I’ve had plenty of difficult experiences.

There I was in the desert, 1,300 miles from home. The desert itself was both literally and I suppose proverbially, vast, stripped down, stark, and both dreary and beautiful, sometimes at the same time.

I knew no one and we were cut off from the world. Family could call and leave messages, could send flowers and packages, but as no cell phones, tv, books that we not treatment approved, newspapers, or internet were allowed, we were on our own. We could call friends and family during the phone hour. There were lines though, and for the most part, you usually ended up trying another day. Medication lines were very long, due to a major staff layoff due to another corporation taking over.

I spent 42 days there. We were scheduled from 6 am to 10 pm every day.

And yet, there was a sense of magic about the place that I didn’t see for at least two weeks. No one does, as they arrive traumatized and the shock of entry sets you back before you start to gradually improve. Survival shock mode lasts a couple of weeks, then you move into just a day to day get through it, but finally, if you’re lucky, you move from survival to thriving. Many didn’t last there and left. I stayed. 

Easter that year was April 12th. I was still in the shock phase, imagining my friends and family happily celebrating. I was newly single, which was a very good thing, but I saw how it helped many patients who had supportive partners. I was lucky to have family and friends who cared, but that Easter Day, I found little comfort.

After a walk around the campus using one of the rare free times that day, I thought, why am I here? Is it the right thing? It felt a bit like free falling with nowhere to land. I needed something, anything to ground me. I needed a sign. I needed a mystical message. I prayed.

In the cafeteria, they had an Easter brunch of sorts. I sat with a beautiful and warm woman from California that I had met in the first few days. We talked of our despondence in being there, feeling alone, feeling cut off. We decided to make a pact. We would each ask for a sign that told us we were on the rocky but right path.

Her sign was white roses.

Mine was, as usual, a double rainbow, an unlikely sign in the desert but always a sign that my late father was watching over me. My father loved double rainbows and pointed one out to me a few months before he passed. A few weeks prior to his sudden passing in 2003, he’d had a dream that he was on a train to the east coast and then got on a boat.  He said to me, “Hey,sis, what do you think that means?” I said, “How did that feel, Dad?” He replied, “I didn’t know a soul but I felt just fine”. The dream perhaps told him something was to come. My father was intuitive, but being Dad, he just called it his gut feeling.

My dear friend, who passed just a few months ago, and I decided to take a trip in my father’s car to fulfill his dream. We drove east, heading for the coast.  Each day we strangely saw a rainbow. And when we reached Rhode Island, there was the most beautiful double rainbow I’d ever seen.                                                                                                        

Back to what we all called “The Psycho Spa” in the desert. About 5 minutes later, in that cafeteria, we heard banging on the roof, an extremely strong cloudburst. People starved for rain, went to the window. It lasted several minutes. We stayed at the window. An enormous double rainbow just stunned us all. I have yet, to this day, to ever see one like it. My now husband, Eric, who also has suffered terribly with depression over his  long life, interestingly saw a rainbow in winter on a drive to come be with me. 

My friend did not receive her sign, but she had given it much thought and told me she had decided to transfer to another treatment center by the ocean. I hope she is well.

But for whatever reason, I stayed, and in a sense, I shed parts of the old Cindy and formed a new one. If some of us think of Easter Day as an ascension, I also look at it as a spiritual rebirth, a sign of hope, and a sign of transformation. and really, a miracle.

When I spoke to one of the group therapists the night before I left, I told her that I didn’t miss my mutually destructive relationship with my by then ex-husband, who was a good person and a brilliant man, but was drowning in depression, alcoholism, and dysfunction. I had been back and forth with this for 24 years. That stress, along with a tough reaction to a minor surgery that caused depression, brought me to this place.  It wasn’t all his fault; it was mine too. I found out something I already knew. I was severely codependent and in need of a diagnosis of the anxiety that had plagued me since early childhood.  

I have had another frightening and severe depression in 2016.  It was the longest I’ve ever had. By then they had ketamine. It was a miracle. My family has stood by my side since day one, as have my good friends and colleagues. I can’t escape my diagnosis of severe panic disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder, but I am one of the lucky ones, who after a period of months of terrible suffering, who lands in the right place. There is no cure for what I have, but new treatments have emerged since then.  I have had three severe months long depressions in my lifetime and a few more moderate depressions. It hangs over my head like the sword of Damocles, but I can continue to treat. And hope.

The therapist who helped me through all of that, in the much milder and gentler, second part of the program called Progressions knew all about my patterns. When I said, I didn’t miss him and had a better outlook on my own issues and anxieties, she said, referring to the entry sign, “There’s your miracle, Cindy”. And so, it was.