"Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust." It is the language of funerals. No wonder you may think, as did Dante, that your fate is "no more memorial/ Than foam in water or smoke upon the wind."

   Good news. Your choice to be a caregiver, whether professionally or elsewhere in your world can save your life as well as that of the one who needs you.

   But, what about those sensitive souls that suffer depression over things others toss off? Can you save them? A while back I saw a film about a woman who killed herself because her lover forgot her birthday.  What if she had called you in need of help? Could you have understood her pain well enough to hold back the hand she raised against herself?

   Depression is the illness no one likes to approach. Those who suffer depression are caught in smoke the wind will not blow away.

   Some acquaintance tells you "I'm depressed." How much longer do you want to spend amid their self-hatred? I'm not talking about your patients. I'm talking about your suffering friends or family. Or maybe you.

   There are other choices than pills. Novelist Graham Greene's answer was art. "Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness…the fear which is inherent in the human situation."

   Yet, the creation of art can also lift some of our finest to altitudes where the air is too thin to breath. "As an experience, madness is terrific," Virginia Woolf wrote, "and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about."

   Through her writing she left great gifts. To capture them for us she engaged her madness until the lava consumed her.

   So many around you are enduring life rather than celebrating it. "The human heart is always hungry," my colleague Minton Sparks mentioned recently during her story-telling  work. 

   Can we feed that hunger with enough Love to stay Death's hand awhile? Ultimately, no one could do that for Woolf. Her suicide note to her husband included these lines:

   "Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone."

   Or do we? Can we be companions that illuminate both our life together and the part of our path that is solitary?

   Is the sun entering the clouds or emerging from them? Either way, she dazzles us with her wild beauty.

-Erie Chapman