April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory with desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

(T. S. Eliot, "The Burial of the Dead," from The Waste Land)

A patient, deep in depression, recently wrote to try to describe his experience of Spring. He said, "The sunshine is crushing, the flowers are incredibly sad, and seeing the couples in the park is like stepping on the third rail." Why is this? Why do the very things that feel life affirming and attractive, when we are not depressed, become sources of pain when we have descended into depression?

One way to understand is: depression turns us into ghosts. What is a ghost? The human mind and body, denuded of sensation, relationship, and of the possibility of influence-that is a ghost. It is what depression does to a human being. Depression leaves us outside the world, like a starving person locked outside a restaurant, reminded of what cannot be attained, experiencing a seemingly inescapable and interminable loss. When we are turned into ghosts, then the not feeling, the not seeing, the not engaging: these become seductive balms. As Eliot states it,

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth with forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dry tubers.

The reawakenings of April exposes our ghost-state to life, and is akin to warming from frostbite: it inevitably comes with pain. The ghost, in its numbed Winter darkness, does not have the contrast to remind it of loss and lack. Coming back to life, viscerally remembering loss, brings the pain of reawakened feeling.

When there is enough support, though, this pain of thawing is able to be borne. But without support, we balk at venturing out from our Winter cave, as lonely as it is to stay within. Support is crucial. Without it, experience is too intense and we are overwhelmed, and then a return to Winter makes a deep sense. Support comes in many forms-relationships, medicines, nature, spirituality, art-but each form serves, essentially, to make the pain of thawing meaningful and bearable.

We will try to refuse support, not trusting, or, in our ghost state, not able to feel the holding. But Spring comes eventually, nonetheless, and none of us are powerful enough to stay permanently in Winter, as much as we may long for "forgetful snow." Allowing in support is the courage, and being able to allow it in the blessing, which is required for the thawing, for that return to sensation, relationship, meaning, life.