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Last Time Around (cont.)

I SAT SILENTLY AS THE VAN whisked down snow-packed West Hopkins the ten or 12 blocks to Castle Creek. I worked over in my mind whether he really could have done it this time. His first bout of depression hadn't struck until midlife. By then he'd completed Dartmouth and married my mother, Judy Zentner, also from a respectable Milwaukee family and an attractive sophomore at Smith College. She equaled him on the ski runs and tennis courts and was a far more conscientious student besides.

They embarked on a life that was both romantically adventurous and cozily domestic. Reconstructing the ruins of a Swedish pioneer's 110-year-old cabin in the Wisconsin woods, they had four children in quick succession: Kate, me, Sarah, and Ted. Once the four of us were old enough to go to school, my mother finished college and got a master's degree in landscape architecture.

"Here's where I let him off," Parker, the van driver, said, pulling up to a snowbank at the street's end, with a path wending past it.

I leaped out and sprinted down the snow-packed path. I could hear Parker, now fully understanding my urgency, sprinting right behind me.

My father was in charge of the "fun factor," as my sister Kate once put it, when he wasn't working for his father at the candy factory or writing books and articles about local history. I remember delicious Indian-summer days when my father and grandfather would appear at my grade school with a canoe strapped to the car roof and pluck me from class for a spontaneous overnight river trip. There were also family canoe trips and Aspen trips, and my parents embarked on many of their own adventures: riding bikes through Norway, canoeing the Danube, skiing the Bugaboos.

"Your father has style," my mother used to say.

It was, in many ways, an idyllic life—until the dark, Watergate-era autumn of 1973. Then in his mid-forties and president of the candy company, my father had come to believe (with some reason, as sugar prices had surged) that the family firm, and he, were headed for bankruptcy. He swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. Having second thoughts, he woke my mother; he spent the next three days hospitalized in a coma. She bore it stoically and quietly, cut expenses to ease his financial worries, and made sure no one outside the family found out. None of us, including my father, realized he was manic-depressive.

I was a sophomore in college—at Dartmouth, like him—during this first suicide attempt, and it so shook me that I eventually left school for nearly a year and spent months traveling overland across Asia, as my father had done before me. Instead of a windjammer's berth, I aimed for the Himalayas to find some kind of clarity, some perspective on my life, now that one of its central pillars had suddenly and inexplicably crumbled. In different ways, his depression left a mark on all of us.

Five years later he lay down across the railroad tracks that ran past his office. Again he feared he was going broke. In the instant before impact, he flattened out between the rails while 17 cars of a freight train, its brakes locked, screeched over him. Though he suffered head contusions, he was alive. This time, the papers got hold of it. He was hospitalized for several weeks, finally diagnosed as manic-depressive, and prescribed lithium. The medicine slowed him—no longer could he keep up with my mother on the tennis court—but for the next 25 years he lived a relatively happy and productive life. Meanwhile my mother threw herself into her own work, starting a successful landscape-design firm.

Despite the lithium, thoughts of suicide remained.

"I plan to kill myself long before I start falling apart," he confided to me a few years after the freight-train incident, when he was anything but depressed. "I don't intend to spend my sunset years sitting in a rocking chair in a nursing home." He was 56 years old. "Here's where I let him off," Parker, the van driver, said, pulling up to a snowbank at the street's end, with a path wending past it.

I leaped out and sprinted down the snow-packed path. I could hear Parker, now fully understanding my urgency, sprinting right behind me.

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