Time is not on our side Dec. 25, 2024

   

On the verge of breaching the quarter mark of the 21st Century, I’m somewhat depressed this Christmas.

Not just by the fact that the most intimate members of my family have passed as have my closest friends, but also by the realization that what we thought would occur this far into the future did not.

Our dreams, the high hopes of living as artists or songwriters or poets or such, never materialized, dissipated like smoke.

Unlike my closest friends, I never hoped for fame or glory (although I might have settled for fortune), and so, I’m less disappointed in how my life turned out than I am with the failed expectations I had for my friends, each of whom had much more talent than I ever had, and so had more of a chance to achieve.

They say don’t put all of your eggs in one basket, meaning if you have multiple talents, the more likely you are to achieve success.

A fallacy when it comes to my friends, each of whom had potential in music, art and other fields, while I always only had one basket into which I had to place my hopes and dreams.

Since my three best friends were all born around Christmas, these thoughts bubble up in me this time of year.

Also depressing was my visit to see my daughter last Sunday, something I had not done since early summer – deliberately.

Several years ago, she suffered a significant mental disorder, partly because she and my ex-wife live in a bubble, out of touch with the “real” world where most people interact via the internet, and not always for the better.

My daughter is a throwback to the 1960s and has watched that world rapidly vanishing. She used to love going to the East Village and I often accompanied her there during her visits. Only the East Village has gentrified and the icons of the 1960s evaporated, leaving the place devoid of anything resembling what it once was.

A few years ago, prior to COVID, I drove her up to Woodstock so that she might find the last remnants of that generation, but Woodstock largely is a museum, far from what it was during the heyday of Bob Dylan.

The real world has become the internet, where people meet, date and marry or some variety of it. But also a place where people feel emboldened to say whatever pleases them, rude or not, and often brutal.

During exchanges with friends my daughter knew from high school, she felt humiliated, and went into a mental tail spin from which she has not fully recovered.

She apparently had inherited this mental vulnerability from my side of the family, and began to hear voices the way my mother had (having inherited this from her grandfather, who had heard them as well – the ailment skipping a generation only to reappear).

After several breakdowns, most recently over a failed romance, she went through this again over the summer. My visit early in the summer suggested she was in serious crisis, her voices telling to do self-destructive things. Rather than complicate an already complicated situation, I stayed away, calling her mother every other day to check on her progress.

Eventually, my daughter checked herself into a crisis center, where they increased the dosage of her medication. When this failed to do away with the voices, they increased it again. She seemed much more normal when I saw her Sunday, but she privately admitted she still heard the voices, something she did not tell her mother about.

As if a perversion of a Portrait of Dorian Gray, the mental issues had a horrible effect on her appearance, aging her decades. I had noticed this after her early episodes, but it was far worse this time. In some aspects, she looked older than her mother, something that struck me even harder after I took a picture of her with Santa at the mall during our wanderings on Sunday, and this recollected a picture her mother had sent me a few years after our breakup of my daughter posing with Santa.

Prior to these mental issues, my daughter had always looked and acted like a perpetual teenager. Now, time has caught up with her and gone far beyond, as if she needed to pay the price for having seemed so young for so long.

The whole thing casts a vast shadow over the holidays, and I wonder, is there a way to reverse it, to bring back some of the youth she’s been robbed of, a question to which I have no answers.

 

 

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