1: Peter Marks took his life a few weeks before his younger son’s college graduation.
“If I’m ever in a similar situation again,” his friend David Brooks writes in How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, “I’ll understand that you don’t have to try to coax somebody out of depression.
“It’s enough to show that you have some understanding of what they are enduring,” David notes. “It’s enough to create an atmosphere in which they can share their experience. It’s enough to offer them the comfort of being seen.”
David writes that he feels “sorrow that I didn’t know enough to do this more effectively with Pete. I might have kept him company more soothingly; I might have made him better understand what he meant to me.”
But what he doesn’t feel is guilt.
“Pete had some of the world’s great experts walking with him through this,” David notes. “He had his wonderful wife and kids, who accompanied him, lovingly and steadfastly, every day. Pete used to say he found talking to Jen more helpful than talking to any of the experts.”
Ultimately, it is futile to feel like a failure when someone commits suicide. We cannot change what happened.
“Every case of depression is unique,” he notes, “and every case is to be fought with as much love and endurance and knowledge as can be mustered.
“But in this particular case, the beast was bigger than Pete; it was bigger than us.”
2: Grief is hard. “Death and I were too well acquainted in 2022,” David writes. “I lost three good friends—Pete, Mike Gerson, and my longtime NewsHour partner, Mark Shields—and each time, I was surprised anew by how profound and lasting the inner aches were.
“Pete’s death disoriented me. He’d been a presence for practically my whole life, and suddenly the steady friendship I took for granted was gone. It’s as if I went back to Montana and suddenly the mountains had disappeared.”
What gave David comfort was to witness “how heroically Pete’s boys, Owen and James, have handled this loss,” he reflects. “In their own grief, they have rallied around their mother.”
Two months after Pete died, David’s oldest son got married.
“To my great astonishment and gratitude, Jen and the boys were able to make the trip to attend. At the reception, the boys gently coaxed their mother to join us on the dance floor. It felt appropriate, since this was what we did at camp; dancing skeined through the decades of our lives. I have a sharp memory of those two fine young men dancing that evening, and a million memories of the parents who raised them so well.”
3: Depression changes someone at the core of who they are.
“In normal circumstances,” David writes, “I can get a sense of my friend’s perception of reality because it largely overlaps with my perception of reality. But depression changes that. . . Pete experienced a reality that was bizarre. He saw a world without pleasure.
“When we are trying to see a depressed person deeply, and make them feel heard and understood, we are peering into a nightmarish Salvador Dalí world, one that doesn’t follow any of our logic, that doesn’t make any sense, and that the depressed person will probably have difficulty describing for us.
“There is no easy way to get even partly into this alternate reality; we can only try to persevere through a leap of faith, through endless flexibility, and through a willingness to be humble before the fact that none of this makes any sense.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Do I have any personal experience with severe depression, either with friends, family members, or perhaps myself? Is it possible to describe the experience?
Action: Discuss with my spouse or a close friend.
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