My daughter Grace, who is an adult with disabilities, says she is depressed. This is nothing new. I hear this every day. The same laments, the same discouragements, the same complaints. But today, as I drive her to her little job, she says, “On the outside I look happy, but on the inside I’m sad. There are so many reasons.”

Grace always sits in the middle row behind me, even though she’s the only passenger. I glance at her in the rearview mirror. I know she’s flooded with unprocessed fears and a merry-go-round of thoughts that her crippled emotions just can’t handle.

“Can you just list five things you’re struggling with?” I ask. I’ve heard them all before, but I think optimistically, that maybe if we at least organize them we can sort them out.

She starts, but quickly covers her ears. She’s tired of saying the same old things over and over.

I tell her it’s good to say them out loud because when the thoughts are floating around in her brain, they seem bigger and worse than they actually are. 

So she stammers and stumbles in her words and eventually names three: her life isn’t working out the way she hoped, she doesn’t live in her former town of Grand Ledge, and she’s afraid of dying – of everyone she loves dying. 

I drive quietly, thinking about how normal these fears and sorrows are for such an abnormal girl. I think about how her disabilities and meltdowns mask her humanness and how much she shares in common with the rest of us.

We tackle them one by one.

Continue reading “COMFORT FOR THE CRIPPLED HEART” →