John Brownlee lost his father to a heart attack. But it was Bruce Brownlee's depression that slowly killed him: My Father The Werewolf.
"I think about my father's generosity a lot. My father was generous, but he was also depressed, and the nature of depression is to be selfish: to starve those who love you of the best of you, in the relentless feeding of that which can never be nourished. In that, he—the most depressed person I ever met—was also the most selfish. For my entire life, he would give me anything I asked for, as long as it was a movie or a book. But when my mother and I begged him half a dozen times to go see a doctor if he loved us, he wouldn't lift a finger. How do generosity and selfishness co-exist like that in a person without destroying him?
I don't know. And, of course, it did eventually destroy him. But that was my father: a lycanthrope of contrasts. Whatever he was, he was also the opposite."
I met Bruce just once and it struck me that every path to him was gated with thorns, and I thought it grew from the reading. But I'm struck more by his son's effort to break through, to finish a story that couldn't be written until the last word was said.
My Father The Werewolf [Pillpack]
