1: “My most searing encounter with depression came when the illness hit my oldest friend, Peter Marks,” David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
“Severe depression was revealed to me as an unimagined abyss,” David writes. “I learned that those of us lucky enough never to have experienced serious depression cannot understand what it is like just by extrapolating from our own periods of sadness.”
Depression is not just sorrow and unhappiness. It is a landscape that “is cold and black and empty,” the journalist Sally Brampton observes. “It is more terrifying and more horrible than anywhere I have ever been, even in my nightmares.”
The novelist William Styron described his battle with depression as “a curious inner convulsion that I can describe only as despair beyond despair. It came out of the cold night; I did not think such anguish possible.”
2: David and Peter’s lifelong friendship began when they were eleven at Incarnation Camp in Connecticut. They were campers together and later counselors. We “built our friendship around play,” David recalls. “We played basketball, softball, capture the flag, rugby. We teased each other, pulled pranks, made fun of each other’s dance moves, romantic misalliances, and pretty much everything else.
“We could turn eating a burger into a form of play, with elaborate smacking of lips and operatic exclamations about the excellence of the cheese. We kept it up for five decades.”
David’s wife describes Pete as the “rare combo of normal and extraordinary. He was masculine in the way you’re supposed to be masculine, with great strength and great gentleness,” David observes.
“A father in the way you’re supposed to be a father, with endless devotion, a sense of fun and pride. A husband n the way you’re supposed to be a husband, going home at night grateful that the one person in the whole world you most want to talk with is going to be sitting right there across the dinner table from you.”
Pete also had “an exuberant goofballism about him,” David recalls. “Once, in a fit of high silliness, he started skipping around the dining hall, singing and leaping higher and higher with each skip. He tried to skip right out of the room, but there was a doorframe, probably about seven feet tall, and Pete slammed his forehead into the top of the frame and fell flat on his back. The rest of us, being sixteen-year-old junior counselors, found this utterly hilarious. Pete, also being sixteen, found it utterly hilarious, too. I remember his lying there in a fit of giggles, with a doorframe-shaped bruise forming on his brow.”
After college, Pete joined the Navy and later attended medical school, where he became an eye surgeon.
“On evenings before surgery Pete took great care of himself, didn’t stay out, made sure he had enough sleep to do the job he loved,” David writes. “On evenings after surgery, he’d call his patients, to see how they were feeling. His wife, Jen, a dear friend who was also at camp with us, used to linger around just to hear the gentleness of his tone on those calls, the reassuring kindness of his manner.”
3: Pete had “a cheerful disposition, a happy marriage, a rewarding career, and two truly wonderful sons, Owen and James,” David notes. “He seemed, outwardly, like the person in my circle least likely to be afflicted by a devastating depression.
“But he was carrying more childhood pain than I knew, and eventually the trauma overtook him.”
Looking back, David did not appreciate how serious the situation was. “That’s partly temperamental,” he writes. “Some people catastrophize and imagine the worst. I tend to bright-icize and assume that everything will work out.
“But it’s also partly because I didn’t realize that depression had created another Pete. I had very definite ideas in my head about who Pete was, and depression did not figure into how I understood my friend.
“I tried the best I could, but Pete succumbed to suicide in April 2022,” he notes.
The chapter in How to Know a Person is based on an essay David wrote for the New York Times. In it, he “attempts to capture what I learned from those agonizing three years and that senseless tragedy.
“It reflects a hard education with no panaceas.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Do I have any personal experiences with severe depression, either with friends, family members, or perhaps myself? How would I describe the experience?
Action: Discuss with my spouse or a close friend.