Results of My Depression Screening Three Weeks After Dad Died
Indiana University Health
Patient Questionnaire
PHQ-9 and GAD-7
Date November 29, 2023 Patient Name: Sarah Hare x
Over the last 2 weeks, how often have you been bothered by any of the following problems?
Please select one of the following and share your experience with your provider:
Last week, I found the energy to take my three-year-old daughter, Olive, to the cheapest box-grocery store in town. We usually pick up groceries from the comfort of our car, a stranger placing apples next to antifreeze in the chaos of the trunk. I’m not sure what we were shopping for; I can’t manage to cook since Dad died. Instead, our friends leave double batches of creamy black bean soup and crumbling cornbread on our front doormat in simple acts of love.
But when I was Olive’s age, Dad always took me to that grimy Safeway in northern Ohio, the one with the rust-colored tile floor and sticky bagging stations. His baritone hum fills my head while I watch his gaze travel from shelf to shelf. I sit in the back of the cart, my crossed legs leaving little room for much else, my eyes level with lemon-flavored animal crackers and neat stacks of canned green beans. Dad pauses to ask what I want once we’re in the cereal aisle. My heart races when I see the chocolate puffs.
“Yeah baby,” he says, his crow's feet lifting into a smile before his grin appears.
Olive’s tiny frame danced with energy as soon as we arrived. She gasped when she saw her favorite Baked Lays, her fingers summoning my attention as she said, “We need chips too, Mommy.”
As we walked into the store, I gave her a quarter and showed her how to put it in the slot to unlock a cart. Just like Dad and I did twenty-five years ago. Every other technology is now unrecognizable, but the carts are still there, the coin slots are still delivering order and nostalgia.
Some days I move through my routine like nothing ever happened, stopping at red lights and paying bills by their designated due date. Then the kids say something cute, or I hear Collective Soul on the radio and the trance is broken, a sudden rumble of thunder on an otherwise bright summer day. I think: I should tell Dad.
I remember I will never tell him anything again. I won’t hear his famous one-syllable reaction, a short huh that rose from his diaphragm whenever someone said something amusing or off-kilter. I won’t witness his outstretched hand whenever he met someone new or his insistence on using the waiter’s name. I want to wrap my arms around him like I did when I was a child, and cry until my tears soak the coarse hair covering his gut.
I open the coroner's report and check that it still says the right name at the top: Brad. I skim until I find the description of him—“wears stubble, gray-brown mustache and beard”—just to make sure that all of this isn’t a dream.
I feel hopeless googling “how many nanograms of fentanyl/milliliters of blood cause an overdose?” again, skimming through medical journals that I’ve already read but still can’t decipher. I feel hopeless typing “did my dad love me?” in the search box.
I was helping Olive fall asleep when she asked me why we couldn’t get medicine for my dad if he was really so sick. What do you say to a three-year-old who has only ever known sticky grape Tylenol dispensers and the common cold? Lying shoulder to shoulder with her, her cool quilt up to my chin, I filled my lungs with air and closed my eyes to hold back the tears.
“It isn’t that simple,” I said. “He was too sick for medicine.”
She paused for a moment, considering what I said. “Well, then can’t you just get a new daddy?”
My voice broke when I told her he was the only dad I will ever have. I couldn't sleep after that. I lay in the pitch black of her room all night, the noise machine whirring as I listened to her breathing slow.
Last week, a friend brought over a meal from Bob Evans. The kids devoured the half-baked dinner rolls while I served the fried chicken strips and the green beans decorated with bacon. I opened the Styrofoam cylinder of sauce and noticed it was Wildfire ranch, the kind that I used to drench my salad in whenever Dad took me out to eat.
We sit across from each other, the booth’s faux-maroon leather firm against my back, as I smatter sickly-sweet banana bread with warm butter. I ask him if he wants more bread.
“That’s affirmative,” he says.
I cover every vegetable on my plate in the smoky, syrupy sauce as he talks about our ancestors. His chest puffs up as he describes the family farm in Pennsylvania, his brown eyes lighter when he tells me what it felt like to belong somewhere. When we talk about his own dad drinking himself to death at fifty-one, his lips tighten. We move on to great-grandma Bessie.
“You would have loved her, Sarah,” Dad says, and I nod. “She would have loved you,” he adds.
Two days later, after the Wildfire runs out, I make an excuse to go back. I order another family-style platter, but this time I request an extra pint of sauce. Even when food tastes like tissue paper, I eat it. As long as it’s swimming in Wildfire.
Blankets of soft snow accumulated effortlessly one night when I was eleven, with several inches on the ground soon after the storm started. The snow was porous, the kind that soaks through your gloves before you can completely shape your snowball. We were in the cab of Dad’s blue Chevy Silverado, headed to plow small business parking lots.
The beat-up plow on the front of the Silverado was Dad’s main source of income in the middle of the winter, when his landscaping business came to a standstill. I sit next to him as he shifts, cold air hitting my skin when he rolls down the window to flick out a cigarette butt. My chest hums with excitement—we’re together, just the two of us. Even if my hands freeze shoveling snow, I’m with him. He didn’t want me to come, but I pleaded.
When we arrive at a tan apartment complex, tiny, frosted windows stacked in rows, the parking lot lit up by streetlights, I’m ready to get started. But when I start to unbuckle my seatbelt, he tells me that he’ll be right back.
“Where are you going? I’ll come with you,” I say, trying to catch up with the fact that we won’t be plowing this lot.
“I’ll be back, it will only be a second,” he says. He holds my forearm gently as his pleading eyes meet mine. I nod.
I watch his boots wade through the snow, the crunch, crunch, crunch audible even from the cab. His face scrunches in pity as he looks back at me a final time before knocking on the door. I lock the truck’s doors, suddenly realizing that I am alone in a place I don’t know. My chin quivers before the tears form, before I can try to blink them away. I see my breath as my chest starts to heave, sobs overtaking me.
If you’re asking me to admit the truth about how I’ve failed in the bright lights of a doctor’s office, it’s this: I couldn’t stop my dad from using.
As a child, I thought that my good grades and compliance might tip the scales in my favor, but it was never enough. I still have the letters from each time Dad attempted AA’s eighth step. I still revisit the sentences that tell me that he’s sorry that he made me feel unworthy. Most days I think I’m breaking the cycle of generational trauma instead of blindly handing it down like another tattered family heirloom. But I can’t help but grind my molars whenever my teething one-year-old son asks for medicine multiple nights in a row. Acid fills my stomach when my daughter asks for a second dessert or more candy. When she says that she hasn’t had enough.
I stumbled upon Judith Grisel’s Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction last week. The word “Enough” filled the cover, the letters reverberating across the page in navy blues and fuchsia pinks. The colors initially caught my attention, but the fact that the author is both a neuroscientist and a recovering addict held it. Once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. There was something comforting in making physical what I had only seen as emotional. The facts about addiction laid bare within those pages became a kind of mantra for me: homeostasis is the goal. Homeostasis is king. Dad's brain wanted him back to normal just as much as the rest of us did.
I learned that when heroin floods the brain, it stimulates the receptor sites meant for endorphins, and the nervous system responds by trying to create the opposite state. A peak answered with a valley. Over decades of use, Dad’s nervous system would have become so adept at this counterresponse that it would have predicted the drugs coming before they were even snorted or injected. I pictured Dad’s brain, a pink blob behind a crooked widow’s peak just like mine, seeing an old friend or a paycheck or some other signal that was too benign to trigger anyone else. His mind suddenly flooded with the counterresponse—an invisible tsunami that made him miserable—before the drugs were even in his hands.
The hair on my arms stood on end when I read the author’s words: “The opposite of addiction,” she wrote, “is not sobriety. It’s choice.”
I keep circling bare forests and decomposing piles of leaves as I try to make my feet match the way that my mind races. If I stop, I’ll have to remember how they found Dad: dead and alone, his body in the room but his soul elsewhere. I’ll have to remember that the men that found him dead rolled up the rug his feet touched and threw it away in a dumpster, as if they could neatly package our shame and dispose of it overnight. So, walking has been my refuge, one of my only constants. To be in motion is to grasp peace.
I spent last Sunday’s church service on a cold toilet seat in the largest stall in the women’s bathroom, rocking myself the way I swayed my kids when they were infants, hoping to find a rhythm that would impart peace. I'd tried to stay and admire the soft melody of the hymn, but my chest tightened, and my jaw locked when the soprano continued to repeat that God makes beautiful things out of dust. I'd looked around the room, at rows of people I knew, sunlight breaking through the gold and cobalt stained glass, and felt alone.
In the bathroom, I stopped crying long enough to write down my feelings on a paper towel, the pen marks bleeding through as the words spilled out of me. I started a poem about Dad with “you’re a fucking coward,” and all of the burdens he left me to deal with alone spilled out: outsized tantrums, endless mortgage payments, mistakes without second chances. I stared down at my hands, my cuticles swollen and torn, my fingertips decorated in ink.
I’ve spent the last week convinced that a white-tailed buck I’ve seen every few days since Dad died is a cosmic sign. He is small but proud, his posture tall, and his eyes clear. It might be a simple coincidence, a confluence of the overpopulation of deer in this area and the fact that I’m always outside. I feel better with the sun on the bridge of my nose—like I can picture Dad alive again, walking the green of the golf course as he adjusts the sprinklers and wipes sweat from his brow. His leathered skin is covered in sunspots and poison oak scars, his gait is more of a staggered limp.
I become anxious that the buck is following me, like Dad has unfinished business to communicate. I change my route, but the deer’s beady eyes find me while he chews through the thick webs of clover in my neighbor’s yard. Another time, I stare in awe as the buck crosses a bustling street to make his way to my side of the road, his head held high as he nods at passing cars.
The buck makes me think of Dad’s hunting trips, the ones I never understood. I was always uneasy about killing animals, always embarrassed by the worn NRA card proudly displayed in his wallet. But seeing the deer, remembering the old photos of Dad holding another buck’s rack, his nails filled with dirt and his eyes lifted in a smile, summons the taste of venison backstrap, grilled with such skill that it tasted like filet mignon. I replayed Dad showing me his father’s guns—before he sold them in a moment of desperation—describing those early hunting trips as his inheritance, sacred and endowed. I thought of what Dad’s old friend said to me a few days ago and felt something close to peace: I enjoyed hunting with him because he was safe, and he always respected the animals.
When I see the buck a few days later, the same black eyes at the edge of our backyard, I don’t look away.
When I feel like I can’t go on anymore, I imagine a parallel reality, one where Dad did a similar screening to this one at thirteen and walked away with a bottle of Prozac instead of self-medicating through the lows that are served to each of us. A reality where I have even one memory of my dad when I know he was sober. Where I can be sure that I really knew him—the real him, his disposition intact.
A reality where the coroner's time of death estimate is wrong. Where that last text, the one I sent Dad before anyone knew that he was gone, was opened. It was simple—the words “how are you?” and a link to a video of two toddlers shouting one of Nirvana’s hits, swaying on the concrete porch like tipsy teenagers, repeating “as a friend” and spinning in circles. When my grief consumes me, I imagine Dad opening it, the bright glow of his grandchildren filling the screen and a grin moving across his face before everything goes dark.
SARAH HARE is a writer living in Southern Indiana. Her work has been published in River Teeth's Beautiful Things, Mutha Magazine, and Five Minutes. In 2024, Sarah received a scholarship to attend the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.