Depression runs in my family like the veins of a blue cheese, smoke-wisp thin or nonexistent in most places and a full- blown cavity of destruction in others like a black hole of mold that instead of adding nuance or character sucks the flavor and joy out of life.
When this particularly invasive mental illness bloomed in my mother, it unfurled into a festering, weeping mess of alcoholism that eventually sucked the life out of life.
We don’t get to pick our parents, and they don’t get to pick us. But we do get the chance to learn from each other, and that’s what I’ve tried to do, slowly and sometimes painfully, mostly with a sense of humor that can turn defensive or even caustic, but most often simply says, hey, what the heck.
Because mental illness happens. And many of you out there know it’s happening to someone you love right now.
The thing about thinking of depression as a moldy cheese is that you also start to think of it as coming with its own set of crackers, as it were.
When I was a teenager and began to be the adult in the relationship, my mother would have clear-thought days where she would make jokes about being the crazy one in the family, about being “crackers.”
My mother got it by then, knew who she was enough to say that people with mental illness are indeed crackers, all right, and usually not in a funny way.
Except that my mother was the funniest person I’ve ever known, and she had a distinct way of laughing, first throwing her head back and chuckling hard out loud, and then rising up, her whole body shaking violently. When she laughed, she gave herself over to it fully.
It’s what relatives often point out as my inheritance. “You’re so funny, and you laugh just like your mother,” they would say when I was younger, and I bristled then, because who wants to share anything with a falling-down drunk?
But now I relish those comparisons, hold onto them like I would a sweater that smelled like her. The same way I cherish her potato latke recipe and smile when I make it even now, thinking of how she used to tell my sister and me, all of us Catholics, that we were having an authentic Jewish meal.
She served the latkes with bacon.
Don’t get me wrong, the little potato pancakes were heavenly and still are, especially with cool dollops of sour cream and warm, chunky homemade applesauce, and a nice little pile of crisp, salty strips of pig flesh.
I have no idea where she got the recipe or the idea that with bacon they made a Jewish meal. With the exception of those latkes and greasy fried chicken spackled with saltines, my mother was quite possibly the worst cook on the planet.
It’s ironic, though, that obsession with food was a major factor in my childhood, since addictions are among the crackers depression spreads itself over. The crackers of food and alcohol were my family’s daily bread.
Mom would do things like take an entire week’s worth of grocery money to buy a lot of one item, whatever it was her body made her eat incessantly right then. One day, there would be nothing in the refrigerator but maple nut rolls, 50 of them, and my father would throw a fit, wondering where in the bleep the food money was going.
My mother would construct some plausible lie, my father would pretend to believe her, and I would race to the store with the amped-up energy of the enabler and pick up pork chops, hastily fry them in the electric skillet and serve them with canned applesauce and frozen green beans.
Another time, she became hooked on these adorable, gelatinous, spearmint-flavored, leaf-shaped candies coated in sugar. She ate them for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and we found baggies of them in our lunch boxes. And nothing else.
She would eat M&Ms by the pound bag, or toast slathered in butter and sprinkled with powdered sugar. She was addicted to Pepsi, and there is a storage shelf of my childhood memory devoted to the time when you would take the clear-glass bottles back for a refund, and we would push in two store buggies stacked higher than my head each week with returns.
Her name was even a food, Candy, short for Candace.
She showed up periodically, between bouts of lying-in-bed-all-day stupor, my real mother, like a guest on a talk show. Appearing now, live in the kitchen, it’s Mom! Lucid! And she taught me how to make the latkes, how to fry up chicken coated in saltines, and we stood around the stove fighting over the little bits of saltine that fell off the bird and sat soaked in Crisco, and she tried to share what she had figured out about life, and we laughed.
She also taught me how to make SOS, which infuriated my father, whose stint in the Army made him never again want to eat you-know-what-on-a-shingle (also known as creamed chipped beef on toast).
It was her own private joke, a way of slapping back at a world she felt had dealt her a bad set of crackers.
By the time I was in high school, I effectively was mother to my younger sister, and I eventually learned the names for my own mother’s many “problems,” as we had been calling them over the years. I also learned that bacon with potato latkes was most definitely not a Jewish meal.
When I haughtily informed my mother of that fact, Mom, with characteristic self-deprecation, threw back her head and enjoyed a full-body laugh at her own expense. From then on, they came to be known in our family as “Catholic latkes.”
Soon after, she began what would be an unsuccessful 10-year race against time to find a rehabilitation program that would save her from herself.
After she was gone, there was a hole bigger than any food could ever fill, but I tried.
And then I gave birth to my own two daughters, and I realized I had to find another way. The void could be soothed by sweeter things in life than M&Ms and maple nut rolls.
So now I make the latkes and the fried chicken, and my daughters and I fight over the little broken pieces of saltine oily with Crisco. We talk about the family members who have the disease, and we try to love and support them as best we can, and we talk about how there’s healthy drinking and unhealthy drinking, and healthy eating and unhealthy eating.
And when we laugh, I am delighted to note my older daughter throws her head back and my younger daughter doubles up and gives her whole body over to it fully.
Sometimes I’m so grief-stricken that my girls will never know their grandmother that I have to sit down from the sheer physical force of it. Toward the end of her life, the moldy tendrils of the illness so destroyed whatever they touched, it’s hard even to imagine what the scene might have looked like.
But they have her laugh inside them, and her latke recipe, and those are the things we were given to keep, and to share.
And we’ve come to realize that sometimes it’s the broken parts that give life its richest flavor.
Dining critic Kyle Wagner can be reached at 303-820-1958 or kwagner@denverpost.com.
