Last night Lynn and I left the house at about 6:30. We both gasped as the garage door rolled up and we saw the whole landscape beyond bathed in an ethereal white light. We walked out to the edge of the driveway and saw the moon nearly full glaring like a spotlight among the bare branches of our big walnut tree. It was mesmerizing, and we stood there together for a moment, as if under a spell.

"I've never seen the moon quite like that," Lynn said.

"I have," I replied.

I haven't told Lynn about the vision I had last month of the moon as somehow reflecting the energy of the dead, their perpetual light. I had the experience, I wrote about it here, and then retreated into it, suddenly aware that it was more profound than I had at first thought. I turned it over and over in my mind and my imagination, calling up the image repeatedly, sure after a while that I had been touched by something not of this world.

I had a good deal of time to do this. Just after New Year's Day I felt myself sinking into a depression, the kind that visits me most years during the winter months, exacerbated now I knew by what psychologists call "situational increase." No matter how many times this happens to me, no matter how familiar I get with the symptoms and the conventional wisdom surrounding what to do, I react the same way. Instead of welcoming Melanie, the dark visitor and asking her what she wants, I fight against her, deny her influence, fail to take the measures (light, exercise, nourishing whole grains and fresh fruits) that I know will help us both.

And so, on the Feast of the Epiphany, my resistance lowered and my resources spent in an unwinnable fight, I got sick.

And I stayed sick, with a stubborn strain of the common cold that laughed at Vitamin C, robbed me of rest because I couldn't breathe lying down, and stole my joy, my optimism, and my concentration. I knew there was no alternative except to wait it out.

I was sick for almost three weeks. Last week the clouds parted and I realized I was down to less than a full box of tissues a day (from a high of two plus), and I was beginning to enjoy things again. I worked very hard last week on my new fiction project (in the midst of the fog I did manage to start something promising), and then took myself out for a "getting current with yourself" retreat on Friday. I visited an art gallery, had lunch at a place where they serve Diet Dr. Brown Cream Soda (the food of the gods, mysteriously unavailable for months now at the otherwise well-stocked kosher section of the Giant), took a deep breath, and felt like myself, like the pre-Christmas self, again.

The brilliant moon reminds me that it has been a month since Brandi's funeral. My mother often referred to the "month's mind," the date one month after a loved one had died. It was important to her to attend Mass on that day, even to visit the grave again for the first time since the burial.

I chose to look up at the full moon, to remember my young friend, and to remind myself that it is time to get back to where I once belonged.