Feeding the Deer

A while ago, a series of traumas unsettled my life. First, my granddaughter had a life-threatening illness; one that kept her on a respirator for days. Two months later, my father died. An only child, I instantly became an orphan. Soon after, I was in surgery for a major, emergency operation. After I recovered, my mammogram, like a bad joke, came back abnormal, and I returned to patient status for a biopsy. Even the benign outcome didn't lift my increasingly dark mood. So who wouldn't be a little down? I asked myself. But my mind and body twisted in ever-tightening knots.

At my job – I work as a nurse practitioner in a women's health clinic – I pretended to gossip with residents and nurses, always feeling just a beat or two removed. Worse, I felt increasingly distanced from any meaningful contact with my patients. There were other barriers as well: lots of patients and little time; conversations siphoned through translators, deadening the spark that accompanies genuine communication; and so many single mothers without resources to help them. If I'd had to name my emotions, I would have said sad, lonely, or ineffective. I never even thought the word "depressed."

Driving home, I'd cry, inexplicably moved by radio commercials – those other worlds in which families laughed together at dinner and the laundry always came out spotless. Such naïve happiness seemed wrenching and unattainable. At night, I worked hard to finish a series of poems I was writing about women's health and the lessons I'd learned from my patients. In spite of illness and inadequate income, they were brave and resilient. So why couldn't I just snap out of it? What was wrong with me?

I tried to answer that question the same way I unravel a patient's symptoms, by ticking off the probable causes. Was it an absence of spirituality? Was I lacking in generosity as a caregiver? Was it something in my diet? I tried the cures I urged on others: eat well, drink more water, exercise, sleep eight hours, stop listing those undone tasks, and open yourself to the mercy of time.

Then, the first big snowstorm arrived. My supervisor called and told me the clinic was closed. I stayed home, thankful to have one day in which no one called my name, when no woman sat crying before me. I was drinking tea, isolated in my numbing sadness, when, outside my window, I saw three deer pawing at the snow looking for food. Their stomachs were drawn up with hunger. They shivered in the wind. When they sensed me standing there, they lifted their snow-clotted muzzles and sprinted away.

The next morning, I drove to Agway and bought 10 50-pound bags of deer food, a sticky, grainy concoction that resembled the sweet feed I once scooped out for my children's pony. I filled a bucket and carried it to the edge of the driveway.

Soon, 11 deer were arriving every day at 6am, some with early fawns trembling in their speckled birth coats. I got up before my husband, pulled on boots, and threw a coat over my bathrobe. Going into the dawn, I felt as naked and vulnerable as the women I examined in the clinic. Cold air stung my bare legs and fluttered up under my nightgown. The deer snorted and jumped back, and waited for me to dump the sweet feed. When it poured icy rain, when the weekends came around, when new snowstorms piled the drifts almost to my knees, I still plodded out to feed the deer.

My interaction with the deer seemed elemental, involving neither obligation nor expectation. I could offer my full bucket twice a day, but I had no control over how many would come forward and eat or how, if what I gave wasn't enough, they would help themselves to survive.

I was, for the first time in a long time, happy.

In April, when green, spearheaded shoots began to emerge, I stopped putting out my mounds of sweet feed. I watched as the deer began nipping at the grass, then at the leaves sprouting on the lowest branches.

Next year, I'll probably feed the deer again, understanding that while I may not save them, they might save me. Understanding, too, that my brief descent into depression was situational – I needed time to recover from that string of loses … the kind we all encounter as we go through our lives. Perhaps I was given my small portion of depression to help me better understand my depressed patients. Certainly I have a new appreciation for how subtle and insidious depression can be. How it can tap you on the shoulder one day and lead you down desolate paths you never chose to travel.

For now, I'm busy and feeling good again. There's my new grandchild, a little girl. And poems keep coming – oh, glorious poems! And women arrive daily at the clinic – crowds of them newly pregnant and waiting in the hallways. Like any of us, they seek reassurance. They want someone they trust to listen, to share their sorrows, to rejoice at their happiness … to offer them sustenance.

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