The black demon comes out of nowhere, obliterating thoughts and feelings, destroying all that was before. I am no longer recognizable even to myself. Its tentacles spread themselves through my body into my brain feeding on the life that was once there and leaving behind a frightened, desperate shell of a human who crawls through each day.

The days are endless, without color or hue, much like a gray day of winter when the trees are in death, leaves long gone. Hope of spring, of rebirth is never to be felt again. In nature, seasons come and go and spring follows winter when the ice thaws and buds spring up again and blossom and the cycle of life once again becomes beautiful. Not so with the demon of depression. The trees remain in death eternally - immobile, unmoving, accepting only of the icy coldness that comes with winter. There will never again be a spring or a summer or even a fall. I feel there is no hope.

There have been so many winters before that have ended and life has returned to me. But this one, I fear I will not make it through. I’m too weak from hanging on. My mind has been ravaged by the depression, so completely stripped of any remote form of hope that death would be a welcome ending to the enormous emotional pain of having my mind consumed with black and tortured thoughts and feelings.

I have stayed alive for my son. How could a child, even a grown child, understand a mother who would take her life? How would he learn to accept it, even knowing that I’ve had this illness for years? Could he ever understand that for me, it was only an end to the pain that I desired? Could he ever believe that if I truly loved him as I do that I could leave him without a mother? And worse still, what if by some awful chance, he developed the disease himself and was left alone without me there to carry him through it as only one who has been there before could? He is so proud of my tenacity and my strength. How could I take that from him?

Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, I wake up one day, months after this demon has inhabited me, and I think I might feel like getting dressed and leaving the house today. But I’m afraid to trust the feeling. So I tell no one. I simply continue to wait. And then the next day I wake up and the demon is gone. Completely. As if my prayers have at last been heard and answered. I am grateful beyond explanation but I do not understand.