Waiting Out the Noonday Demon
Waiting Out the Noonday Demon
Farley Reynolds
On Reading the Psalms Amidst Death and Depression
In the year of our Lord 2020, on the hottest day of summer, my next door neighbor was found dead. It was the kind of day that invites you outside to celebrate the sun only for it to push you back inside with an oily sheen on your face and guilt gnawing on the back of your brain over missing the nice weather. The only escape on days like that, when the sheer density of the heat seems to close in around you, is rescue.
His name was Clyde Etheridge. He kept to himself—never answered our neighborly hellos when my wife Kelly and I spotted him taking the trash out or walking to the grocery store, which were the only times we saw him. We later found out that he was severely autistic and had lived with his family in that same house for about seventy years. Eventually he was the last one left.
His mailbox was overflowing: Each visit from the mail carrier left more and more fliers for pizza deals and lawn care services and real estate agents for the scant breezes to scatter around his azaleas. And then it occurred to us that we hadn’t seen him take the trash cans out on trash day in nearly a month. Kelly and I stood wincing in the sun, speaking in low voices about what to do—we dared to speak the thought that he might be dead when the kids playing in the street were out of earshot. It was decided that I’d go up and knock. I was as afraid of him answering—in the way children are scared of the gnarled hands of the elderly— as I was afraid of the implications of him not answering. After several knocks and doorbell rings went unanswered Kelly called the non-emergency line for the police department.
The first cop that came by looked in the windows, told us we’d smell it if there was a body, then went on his way. Another trash day went by and we still hadn’t seen him, so we called again. This time, the officer who answered the call went inside and found the house to be remarkably clean, the TV on, and Clyde Etheridge lying in his bed with mold growing on him. It was about this time that the Noonday Demon came to call at my house.
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The Noonday Demon, the personification of major depression, gets its name from Psalm 91:6— “the scourge that rages at noon” in Robert Alter’s translation. Psalm 91 has been called an “amulet psalm” for its bold depictions of God’s providence, the idea being that it could be recited to invoke protection. The psalm names lions, vipers, pandemics, warfare, stubbed toes, the fowler’s snare, and depression as the harms we shall not fear if we dwell in the shelter of his wings. Its most famous appearance happens in the Gospels: Satan quotes it when he tries to convince Jesus to commit suicide. Noonday Demon, indeed.
One of the so called vegetative symptoms of major depression is constant and overwhelming exhaustion. I spent more time languishing in bed than anywhere else after the shelter in place order was issued in Virginia. Etheridge’s death marks the beginning of that time for me, despite when the order was handed down. Even walking to the bathroom or to the kitchen for life’s essentials felt like trying to run underwater or punch in a dream. Joan Didion, in her essay In Bed, wrote about the “physiological error” of migraines. She deferred medical care and tried to win “the respect of mankind and the grace of God” by beating migraines on her own terms. Apparently “physiological errors” are birds of a feather. You could take her essay, swap “migraine” for “depression,” and the picture would remain complete. I resolved to beat my own affliction with what she called “character over chemistry.” After Etheridge died, I hypothesized that I could exorcise the Noonday Demon by sweating it out.
*
Shrubs along the front of Etheridge’s house grew as tall as the gutters. The ones in his backyard grew over the fence into mine. Seeds fell where they did and saplings grew up between the shrubs. The grass was knee high and littered with pinecones. Vines grew up the siding. I threw myself into the yardwork like a man possessed. Altogether it took me a few hours a day for about a week before I gave up. I mowed the yard, cut saplings down to stumps, trimmed back the shrubs to waist high, raked pine straw and pinecones, pulled weeds and vines, mowed again, and sprayed fungicide on some bushes that were covered in powdery mildew. I flinched every time I came around the corner of the house to see a white sheet hanging off the window unit and jumped when the hulking, overgrown shrubs stabbed me with their dead branches. After I looked on my work and wondered if it was good I took a nap to congratulate myself and stayed in bed for some time.
A few weeks later, when I got a chance to serve as an ad hoc chaplain for a weekly Bible study, I revised my hypothesis to state that if I was serving God, surely he would grant me a reprieve (at least for the duration of the good works I was performing) that would allow me to preach with a clear head and strong limbs. I did pretty well at our first meeting, reading Jonah from The Jesus Storybook Bible and the W.S. Merwin poem Finding a Teacher. In the poem, the speaker asks a question of an old friend that never gets answered and at the end of the last line they’re still waiting for the answer though the question has changed. I tacked on a quaint postscript after the poem about how the fishing friend is Jesus. The next week, in an anti-climactic turn that any sufferer of depression will recognize, my cortisol levels peaked as the sun set and I called off my appearance. While the anxiety over failing my friends increased, I drank whiskey sours (equal parts Jim Beam, lemon juice from a bottle, and agave nectar) to calm my nerves.
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Another neighbor of mine came home from the hospital recently with skin grafts from cadavers covering a third of her body. The details are unclear. What I know I gleaned from her husband whose main state alternates between drunk and hungover (but for the porch railing, he would have fallen off his front steps while handing out Halloween candy to my sons last year). His wife had been more or less confined to bed for the past year or so due to an accumulation of health issues she topped off with a chain smoking habit. She was on oxygen and he’d been trying to keep her from smoking even though she ended up with one of his cigarettes from time to time. From her bed she would call out to him incessantly for minor complaints. He grew so weary of attending to her that he drifted from hurrying to her every beck and call to lumbering in to see what she needed when he had time. On one particular day he was in the living room playing guitar when she called out his name. He made a mental note to check on her in a few minutes. Before those few minutes passed her calls turned to shrieks of pain and he ran to the bedroom to find her bed, and her, engulfed in flames. Apparently she had fallen asleep with a cigarette in her hand. The cigarette had melted through the oxygen tubes running up to her nose.
After the fire department left, I offered to help in any way needed. I suspect that he could tell by the gleam in my eye that it was me who needed the help. But alas, they have an able bodied son who comes over several times a week to rake, mow, and trim hedges: whatever’s needed. Physical therapists make house calls. She’s expected to be out walking any day now.
*
Despite being unable to work, I have been able to keep my early morning appointments with God. I used to take pride in my ability to wake up early: I found out recently that early waking, despite exhaustion, is another hallmark of major depression. So I come lurching out of my bedroom between four and five in the morning to slug down coffee and pester God to give me things. I read the prophets and I try to goad God into speaking to me like he did to Jeremiah. I blather at him to show me a work worth my time by some atavistic, Old Testament signal. I brag that I’m worth a holy edict or a burning bush. I call it prayer. When Satan tried to seduce Jesus with the protection afforded in the 91st Psalm, Jesus responded, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” I have this sneaking suspicion that God is leaning over the balcony to look down at me. He asks one of the angels: “What does that kvetch want now?”
When I read Proverbs, I like to think I could be the son seeking wisdom, obtaining favor from the Lord. The early Christian monks who called depression sin would probably say that I’m the sluggard smelling of vinegar but safe, at least, from the lion outside. It’s worth pointing out that Joan Didion and I agree with the monks: “All of us who have [depression] suffer not only from the attacks themselves but from this common conviction that we are perversely refusing to cure ourselves… that we are making ourselves sick, that we ‘bring it on ourselves.’” I despair about the consequences of inaction. And yet my brain can’t convince my body to get up. I languish in dim lighting with heavy eyelids and closed curtains. On my worst days I lay in bed until my lower back falls asleep even if I don’t, asking myself the same question over and over again: Am I a sinner or am I sick? Am I Zimri, looking over my shoulder to see Phinehas coming at me with a spear? Or am I Lazarus, four days dead and unable to hear the weeping outside? On days like these, the only escape is rescue.
God gets the final word, as he often does, in Psalm 91: “With length of days I shall sate him,/ and show him my rescue.” These surely are long days. When will he show me his rescue? He knows I’m ready. Joan Didion never did learn to beat her migraines by “character over chemistry.” She learned to live with them. When my own character ran out, the only thing left was the grievous fact that something to be rescued from is the precondition to God’s rescue. The Noonday Demon still comes to lodge in the corner of my room sometimes. It comes when troubling dreams have kept me up all night and the humidity peaks. And like Joan Didion, when it comes, “now that I am wise in its ways, I no longer fight it.” I’m smothering under my weighted blanket. My joints ache. My hair is matted and itchy. I am terrified of how utterly incapable I am of saving myself. But what scares me even more, what holds me in this catatonia, what can only be described as true fear, is the premonition that one day when I fall asleep by the light of the afternoon sun glancing through my upturned blinds, I’ll be awakened by the sound of a grinding stone and a voice speaking the words: “Come forth… Unbind him, and let him go.”
Farley Reynolds
Family Man & Essayist
Farley is a writer living a quiet and intense life in Norfolk, Virginia. He writes to share what he’s learned while pioneering the wildernesses of marriage, fatherhood, work, and life in the Body of Christ.
Photography by Vinay Tryambake