Magik Studios

PREFACE
In the summer of 1983, at a wedding reception filled with bad music and too much perfume, I fell in love with a girl who laughed louder than anyone else in the room. Her name was Kathy. When she smiled, people turned their heads. When she laughed, the sound filled the space like it belonged there. I was young, a little rough around the edges, and already carrying the quiet watchfulness that comes with the kind of work I would later do in law enforcement. She was light where I was heavy. I wanted that light in my life.
We married. We built a home. We had three children — J.J., Jonathan, and Jeannie. We argued about money the way most young couples do, stretching paychecks and hoping the next month would be easier. We were ordinary. That ordinariness felt like a gift.
What I did not understand then is that depression does not always arrive with drama. Sometimes it comes quietly after the birth of a child. Sometimes it settles in and waits. Kathy’s sadness began after our first son was born. The doctors called it postpartum depression and put her on medication. We tried to laugh it off like it was just another hard season that would pass. We were in our early twenties. We thought hard things passed if you just kept moving.
They didn’t.

Over the years the depression grew teeth. Then came the injury on the school bus, the surgeries, the pain that never left, the pills, and finally the alcohol. Each one fed the next. By the time our oldest son forced the issue in 2015 and sent her to treatment in Clovis, the woman I had married was already disappearing. I drove her there believing I was helping her get well. I came home alone and discovered that her illness had followed me.
The rehab center gave Kathy an assignment to keep a daily journal of her experiences. I thought that was a good idea and decided to do the same so we could exchange the journals when this nightmare was over and both see how it had affected us. I thought I was writing to pass the time. Instead, I was documenting the moment her depression became mine. The empty house. The sleepless nights. The rage at a system that held my wife just out of reach. The slow understanding that loving someone who is drowning can pull you under too.
I am not a therapist. I am not an expert. I am a man who stayed. I am a man who watched the girl with the loud laugh slowly leave, first in pieces, then all at once. I wrote these pages for the husbands, wives, and partners who are still in the middle of it — the ones sleeping beside an empty pillow even when the bed is shared, the ones who keep showing up when it would be easier to quit. You are not weak for struggling. You are not failing because you are exhausted. The illness is real, and it is contagious.
If these pages do nothing else, I hope they make you feel less alone.