An honest account of depression from poet and psychologist Joan Cusack Handler.
Lights in Cold Rooms shares Joan Cusack Handlers personal experiences with depression as a licensed psychologist with forty years of experience treating patients. For many, including Handler, quarantine precluded the preferred treatment of psychotherapy. Handler turned to her own pathology to teach herself and others how to navigate both isolation and depression. Feelings of anxiousness and impending mortality intensified as she faced the death of her older sister and grappled with the guilt that erupted when she learned that an in-person memorial service was impossible. Opening both her personal history and pathology to public view, Handler chronicles her confrontation with eighty years of family dynamics and explores the path she took to return to a place of hope.
Preface
Depression & the Stories That Came with It
Patient Clinician
I. The Body, the Culprit
The Worst Day
Looming
Morphing
Twisted, Tilted
Homes
Tall Falls
Greedy
Lazy
Love Affair
Fractured
A Kindness
Fantasy
II. Heart Sick
The Heart Thing
The Falling
Pink Cheeks, Soft Silver Hair
8
On the First Night of Enforced Quarantine
Complicit
Unthinkable
Chained
Peace Be With You
All That Mattered
Regrets
Bereft
III. A House Divided Against Itself
Close Watch
Dark House
Selfish
Siblings
Another Look
Brothers Escape
Resentment Deepens, Guilt Festers
Peace, Finally
Still
No Room at the Inn
IV. Banquets & Cameos
Sustenance
The Crown
Reprieves
Integrity & Love in Abundance
Transfixed
Then the Poems Came
9
Finding Balance
Nesting
When Does the Gratitude Start?
Another Good Mother
Orchids in Tall Vases
Its Still Not Safe to Return to Brooklyn
V. Keep Them Close
Privileged
Back to Square One
Silence
Another Fissure
X-Rays & Scans, Past & Present
Possessed
Preordained
When the Water Is There
Self-Parenting
A Birthday Picnic
As Long as Theres a Needle Holding On
Coda
Joan Cusack Handler is a poet, memoirist, and psychologist. She has published three verse memoirsGlOrious, The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making, and Orphans, and one prose memoir, Confessions of Joan the Tall. With Gabriel Cleveland, she coedited Places We Return To, an anthology of selections from the first one hundred books published by CavanKerry Press, the press she founded twenty-five years ago, and where she continues to serve as publisher.
