River of Time

by Naomi Judd

  A sliver of raw garlic clove wrapped in tissue would solve the earache and a call to the musicians’ union, which answers 24/7, would give us access to someone who could replace the sound board within an hour or two. I took every complication in stride. My coworkers and family have always been more than willing to let me take charge. They nicknamed me “the Queen of Serene.” But now I could not figure out how to fix my deepening depression and panic attacks and it was really starting to scare me.

  I stood for fifteen minutes before my open closet door, paralyzed. I was unable to choose what to wear for an afternoon of shopping with the girls. I finally found a pair of black stretch pants and a jacket that I could zip up over a T-shirt, an outfit that I would normally never wear for an afternoon outing in town, but it was the best decision I could manage. I pulled my hair back into a rough twist and pushed it under a newsboy wool cap. I applied a heavy layer of cover stick makeup over the dark circles under my eyes.

  At the first antique store, I wandered around, listening to the other women laugh and talk. I turned the corner, around a tall white armoire, and looked directly into an antique mirror in a gilded frame. The frame was ornate, but the mirror had about a dozen cracks running through it in jagged lines. The reflection of my face in the mirror, divided and distorted into broken pieces, stopped me cold. My image resembled exactly how I felt inside, jagged pieces, barely held together. I had a sinking feeling that this crazed reflection was symbolic not only of my present, but of my future.

  * * *

  The holidays came and went in a blur. I ventured out to buy a few gifts for the family and it took every bit of energy I could muster.

  Every year, Larry and I throw a huge Christmas party at our house, a holiday gala that takes weeks of preparation. Our friends and family look forward to this gathering. I usually start talking about it in early October. Some of our friends even count this warm and intimate evening as their Christmas. One couple, Gary and Alex, retail gift shop owners, don’t put up a single decoration in their own home, because they get such a large dose of Christmas at my house. Every banister, door frame, nook, and corner in my house is decorated, even to the point of poinsettia plants and candles in the bathroom!

  We invite about ninety people and have a catered buffet, an open bar with a bartender, and tables and chairs set up strategically throughout the entire downstairs where people can gather, eat, and chat. In our great room we arrange a stage area for live entertainment near the massive stone fireplace. There is always a keyboard player, drums, and guitars. Before the evening ends, we all gather around the piano to sing Christmas carols from old-fashioned songbooks.

  As a child, I always dreamed of cozy, warm family gatherings like the ones portrayed on the covers of Christmas catalogs. I would picture scenes of pine boughs strung across our fireplace mantel with lit candles and angel figurines nestled in between. In my fantasies, there was a beautiful holy manger scene on a red and green table runner, candy canes and a plate of frosted cookies for Santa, and a stack of Christmas records playing continuously on our hi-fi. That’s not how it was, in the least. It was only near the front window of the living room that it looked like Christmas at all at our house. We would have a tree with sparse ornaments set up there, some handmade from our Sunday school classes.

  I loved my daddy. This Christmas when I was fifteen, I got a camera and he got a sweater.

  We had no Christmas music, only one Tennessee Ernie Ford album of church hymns. I longed to have Daddy read “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” or sing “Jingle Bells” with us. I wanted my grandparents and aunts to ask me what I wanted for Christmas, but no one ever did. And no gifts were ever given. Santa usually brought a few gifts for my siblings and me.

  When I was ten, my Santa wish list was the boldest one yet. I wanted a bicycle. The other girls at my elementary school had all been given brand-new bikes for their seventh or eighth birthdays, but my ninth and then tenth birthday came and went with no bike to ride. So eleven months later I wrote it down as my only gift request from Santa.

  On Christmas morning, I was beyond excited. I rushed down the stairs and Daddy pointed to the front door. There was a blue Schwinn bike on the front porch. Santa had paid attention to me! I sprinted toward the shiny handlebars. But they weren’t as shiny up close and the handgrips were stained and cracked. The white rims of the tires were more of a dingy gray and there was a long scratch right in the middle of the frame near the pedals. This couldn’t be from Santa. He would never bring a used bike, especially to a little girl who tried so hard to be good and made certain she had a perfect report card. I looked over at Daddy’s face but he lit one of his unfiltered Camel cigarettes and turned away. My siblings were unwrapping their presents and Mother had gone to the kitchen to make coffee.

  Three of my childhood beliefs were destroyed in that one moment. Any lingering belief in a Santa Claus was gone. My dream of a perfect family Christmas was smashed. And, most damaging for me, my feeling of basic security was jeopardized. My ten-year-old mind scrambled to understand what this battered old bike represented. We must be poor. Something must have happened and no one is saying anything. What would happen to us? I was terrified.

  As extreme as my thought process was that Christmas Day, it was strongly reinforced when neither one of my parents would come outside to teach me to ride the bike. Were they both ashamed of the used bike?

  As I struggled to learn to balance and pedal without training wheels, my emotions teetered back and forth from the feelings of betrayal to the reminder of my resolve that I would figure out my own way to take care of myself. That would become the pattern of how my life would progress: free-falling into each new experience with no training wheels to keep me from a painful spill, but always figuring out a way to get wherever I wanted to go.

  Once Larry and I moved into our beautiful house on our farm in Tennessee, I knew I could create the kind of merry Christmas I had always wanted. I made sure that my friends were able to have that magical holiday, too. This year, though, for the first time, I had a nervous apprehension about hosting the party. Would they notice that I was not myself? Would they wonder what was happening to me? I felt as if I were watching the festivities from a distance and not really there. I fought back tears. People would hug me and try to talk to me and I did my best to respond, but I couldn’t even keep up a cheerful conversation. I was the Ghost of Christmas Past, dragging heavy chains of unresolved PTSD. Even to “sleep in heavenly peace” had become an impossibility.

  Ashley was back in town for Christmas week, after a long humanitarian trip to work with children in Africa, and came over in a jovial holiday mood. She wondered why I wasn’t cooking as much as I usually did, but I shrugged it off by saying I was still tired from the tour. Wynonna came over later on Christmas Day, after celebrating with Cactus and the kids in the morning, and we exchanged our gifts. But we didn’t have a chance to exchange much in the way of words as the house filled with family and the meal was being prepared.

  Because we spent so much time together on the road over the years, I know Wy’s taste in clothes and accessories and she, in turn, knows mine. The gift I bought her made her smile and that made me feel good, but she left the beautiful long coat at my house, not taking it with her, as if to say she didn’t want “things,” she wanted understanding. Even though it wasn’t the right time to talk, seeing her face I remembered that we are still bonded for life, no matter what.

  On New Year’s Eve, I was in bed at 8 p.m. I half-heartedly prayed that I would have a new start with the New Year, while not really caring if I woke up to see even one day of 2012.

  Every January 1, I start a brand-new Day-Timer planner. I have always chronicled my life, day by day, making notes of how I felt and interactions with new people I met. My journal for 2011 has a full list of experiences on almost every date before November, when I had returned from the tour. In 2012, my first three months show that I spent almost every single day on the couch in my kitchen. I a
ttended very few functions or social events and then only made a brief appearance and came up with an excuse to leave after a few minutes. Larry no longer believed my story that this was “just a phase.” Neither did I.

  The mornings were quickly becoming as unbearable as the nighttime. I was to find out later that depression tends to be worse in the mornings. Even if I had been able to fall asleep the night before, I would wake up with a jolt at 3 a.m. My nighttime panic attacks were so frequent now that I would do my best to not wake Larry up anymore. He was becoming exhausted from his own interrupted sleep. Once the panic subsided, the depression would wrap me in a heavy cloak of despair. It seemed that the panic disorder and lasting depression were trying to bury me alive. Worse still was that I was beginning not to care if my life ended. The only thing I cared about was disappointing my family, who always looked to me to be the steadfast matriarch.

  Larry and I have a small group of close friends, three other couples, of more than twenty years called “the Unusual Suspects.” We try to gather for a potluck dinner at one of our houses at least once a month, and then watch movies or play games, like charades. These are fun-loving, intelligent, caring, good-hearted people. We all know each other and our families so well. I looked forward to our get-togethers and my friends referred to me as “the life of the party.” I certainly didn’t fit that description anymore. I rarely smiled for days on end. I moved slowly and my sense of balance was off.

  As 2012 progressed, I could tell that I was devolving, day by day, and hour by hour, into a stumbling zombie. My usually perky personality seemed to be circling the drain. I would tell the other “Suspects” that I would attend the upcoming potluck dinner, but then I would feel a burdensome dread descend on me. I couldn’t bear to face anyone anymore, including my best friends. I started backing out of all of our social engagements. I would still make the food that I had promised to bring, but I would leave it on top of my car in the driveway for one of the “Suspects” to pick up.

  Even if they knocked on the door to check on me, I wouldn’t answer it. I’d hide behind the curtain. It didn’t take my friends long to understand that if the big yellow bowl of my famous potato salad was waiting for them to pick up on top of my car, then I was truly not well. I would, again, retreat to the security of the kitchen couch and stare blankly at the cast of strangers who had no expectations of me: the characters on NCIS or Law & Order reruns.

  I had begged Larry not to tell our friends about what was going on with me. I especially made him promise to not talk about my depression or anxiety with Ashley or Wynonna. As a result, my depressed state of mind left me feeling more isolated than I had ever felt in my life.

  In the late spring of 2012, Larry once again pulled a chair up to the kitchen couch and sat with his head bowed and his eyes focused on his hands in his lap. There would be no more convincing him that I would bounce back soon. I knew it and Larry knew it. It was time to seek the help of a professional. Truthfully, it was long past time. I had now become a danger to myself.

  My thoughts were in such disarray that I couldn’t possibly have good judgment in choosing a therapist. But I was determined to keep my depression as my secret, so I didn’t ask anyone for recommendations to help me find a highly qualified doctor. I blindly trusted that a run-of-the-mill Nashville psychiatrist I had met at one event in the past year would understand the complexities of the neurochemical brainstorm in my head. He ran me through a number of tests and then told me that he had determined from the results that I had both severe treatment-resistant depression and extreme anxiety.

  What I didn’t know then is that there are many types of depression, and knowledge about the illness is crucial when it comes to prescribing the right medications. I thought this man with a medical degree in psychiatry would know what he was doing. I didn’t expect to be his “trial and error” guinea pig.

  He decided to put me on SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), or what are called antidepressants. Serotonin is the feel-good chemical that our brains should produce naturally. For twenty million Americans, that doesn’t happen in the quantity that it should. Reuptake is the word that describes the process that is altered by the drug. Instead of the serotonin being absorbed back into the body, the SSRI should cause the serotonin to stay in the brain longer, increasing the feeling of well-being.

  Larry and I drove back to the farm with a sense of optimism. Perhaps these prescription drugs I held in my hand would be the simple answer. Could it be that my brain only needed a bit of medicinal support? I was ready to try anything. But, ominously, like a harbinger of the future, when we pulled onto the highway, a bank of dark clouds blew in and a chilling downpour pelted the car all the way home.

  After three weeks on Zoloft and Lexapro, I felt like a new person. But not a person anyone would ever want to get to know.

  Chapter 5

  One Pill Makes You Larger and One Pill Makes You Small

  I was not allowed to slam a door when I was a teenager. I never really thought about doing it, because I knew it would result in punishment once Daddy got home. But now, three weeks into taking an antidepressant, I was so agitated that I found myself slamming doors in my own house, even when I wasn’t intending to. The least little thing would infuriate me to the point where I couldn’t hide it. If I were home, I’d go upstairs and into the bedroom, where Larry couldn’t hear me. I’d let loose with a five-minute string of four-letter words and leave fist dents in every pillow on the bed.

  If I went out in the car to run a short errand, I would find myself leaning on the horn and flipping off other drivers who took my parking spot. I got quite a few incredulous stares from other drivers and their passengers. I know they were thinking, Is that Naomi Judd flipping me the bird? They would have been twice as surprised to realize I was carrying a titanium baseball bat and a gun in my car.

  I couldn’t concentrate or focus my attention for more than a few minutes. I could tell that it was getting harder for even Larry to be around me. My standard answer to his every question was, “Later. I’ll deal with it later.”

  We have done family counseling over the years and have learned good interaction skills, which Larry and I usually applied to any issue. For example, if Larry wanted to talk about the credit card bill, I could have the option of saying, “I’m not in a place to discuss that right now.” Through our past therapy, Larry would know to respond: “Okay, I hear you. I accept that. When can we talk about it?” That would allow me the freedom to say something like, “Let’s talk in an hour.” Larry was trying to continue using this method of communicating, but each time I would reschedule the discussion. Then, when the new time would come, I’d tell him, “I’m not clearheaded. I can’t talk to you now.”

  After three weeks of this, he realized that the chance to talk about anything involving my mental state was not going to happen. My nerves were more on edge than they had been when Wynonna and I performed at Super Bowl halftime for 72,000 people in the Georgia Dome and millions around the world. That was exciting. This was excruciating. My depression grew deeper than it was before I started medication and my anxiety increased with each passing night.

  After a month, Larry drove me back to see the Nashville psychiatrist. I don’t know why I never questioned that this doctor did zero follow-up or any talk therapy with me after giving me the first prescription. I’ve had doctors show more concern about how I was doing after something as simple as an eye exam. He never even suggested that I start some talk therapy with someone else; instead, he wrote the third prescription and sent me on my way feeling more confused than comforted.

  I explained my worsening condition as best as I could and then the psychiatrist reassured me that even if these current SSRIs weren’t helping, there were many others to try. I left with different prescriptions in hand and was told to stop taking the first ones I’d been given and start the new prescriptions as soon as possible. I never questioned his advice. I trusted that this well-dressed professional in his ni
ce office with a wall full of degrees knew what he was doing.

  Weeks later I was in a progressively worse state of mind. The third prescription had even less effect in lifting my depression than the first two and had done nothing but increase my anger and feeling of hopelessness. The Nashville psychiatrist called in yet another SSRI prescription, explaining to me that he would, eventually, land on the one that helped.

  That night, as I lay in bed, dreading the feeling of anxiety that was percolating under my breastbone, unbidden memories arose of my brother Brian and one of the last few hours I spent with him before he died a slow and terrible death. Brian was in the hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and my parents had agreed to let me go with them to visit him. They had always gone by themselves and had never given me a clue as to what was wrong with him.

  We checked in to a dingy, run-down tourist home on the outskirts of Columbus and headed over to the hospital. I didn’t want to go back to that awful, moldy room with my parents at the end of the day, so I told them I would sit up in Brian’s hospital room overnight. It had been a long time since I had had any time alone with my best childhood buddy.

  Brian stayed awake as much as he could to talk with me. I told him stories of everything that was happening in Ashland, which didn’t take much time. We talked about our days of playing cowboy and cowgirl, in our little felt hats with the string pulled tight under the chin. We recalled boosting each other up on a wooden soda bottle box to be tall enough to play the pinball machine at Daddy’s gas station, and trying to look up high on the shelves where the cartoon-style “girl in a bikini” car air fresheners were stored, out of the sight line of children. We laughed about how risqué that seemed to our young eyes. We talked about TV shows we watched together, never missing a Twilight Zone episode.