The Valley of the Shadow: Surviving Dark Angel Mornings

I wonder what makes for sad mornings?  What makes that evil grayness that comes up with the sun and wants only to block its light?  What causes one to look at the coffee and find it too cool or too hot or too bitter or too weak? Days when one wonders that everyone else seems to be so normal.  Why does a sad morning not include everyone so we can work our way through it together?  But feeling alone is part of a sad morning.  Not being alone, there are the same people who were there yesterday, probably.  But they did not get hit by the darkness.  Their coffee was fine.  

Truly depressed people can find help.  We reach long arms to try and bring them back to life.   Even if we do not know them, we have people who are waiting at the end of phone lines to talk to them.  We are there, hoping they will call.  We have people who want them to come—they go through many years of college just to be available to them.  We have whole classes of medicine to bring them to be the people they really are under the darkness.  For them, we can turn on the lights.

But sad mornings have no one.  If expressed, it seems silly.  Maybe you slept wrong, perhaps had a bad dream you are not remembering, save for its melancholy.  Perhaps it was too much sugar the day before.  Or you have overwhelmed yourself with projects due to work or home life.  But you were not sad yesterday.  Can a day make such a difference?  Can a cookie do such damage?  Cookie Monster certainly doesn’t think so.  Why, the sad morning asks, do we allow such a being?  Would cookies be good without him?  Would children want cookies without him?  Does he represent a cookie lobby that wants to sell more cookies and make fat children?  Where is the salad monster? “Yummmm, lettuce leaf!” he would yell. 

Dreams unremembered seem an unlikely source.  Why would something you do not know pull down the heavens on your head?  Was there a dream?  Was it of dying or guilt or pain?  If you do not know how can it darken bright skies? 

Weather!  Ah, yes, blame the atmosphere!  But you got through other days of endless rain without wanting to hide. The child you were stood in snow over her boots, freezing in darkness to search for the yellow monster that ate her up and spit her out at the school door.  She was not unhappy.  Resigned, perhaps, to wet socks through lunch, work that seemed banal, and teachers having their own sad mornings, but she was not sad.  She saw her friends smile and warmed quickly. 

I do think sad morning come from a sense of not being heard.  I am old.  I remember when family argued over the Eisenhower/Stevenson Presidential contest.  No one heard, but they did all talk. Then, Kennedy ran against Nixon.  No one heard then, either.  But they talked and talked and talked.  Until they quit talking—some of them quit talking for thirty years.  Some of them never talked again. Neither man was who we thought they were.  Kennedy had girlfriends.  He was on a date when his tiny child was fighting for life in an incubator.  Nixon’s wife had furs.  She put them away and wore cloth so we would think they were like us.  They were not.  He was…strange, a personality as dark as his countenance.  Pat and Jacqueline were dealing with heavy things of which we knew nothing.  Life Magazine showed their smiling faces, hiding their darker truths.  Such contests can darken any morning but do not bear the burden of all such days.  Not even when I must admit that years of voting have taught some of us to feel we pull a lever that is connected only to the opening of Pandora’s Box.

Mornings of the dark angel must be lived.  They must be survived.  The gray veil is worn until the necessity of life melts it away.  You pour the offending coffee down the drain.  You stare at the nothingness for a few seconds–that void just beyond the sink that only you can see.  “Let go of the sink,” you tell yourself.  Make the bed; wash your face.  Take hold of the dark angel and shut her in the closet.  It is day and there is work to do.