On the Death of Dave Batters

The onetime Conservative MP Dave Batters killed himself last Tuesday at the appallingly early age of 39, and his youth inevitably means that he left few political footprints, and his public life is condemned to mirror the sad incompleteness of his private one. Batters had declined to pursue reelection in 2008, informing the public that he was struggling with chronic depression, as well as trying to shake off a related prescription drug addiction.

One of the journalistic commonplaces that was trotted out on this occasion as on similar ones is that those who have never suffered from depression cannot really comprehend the nature of Batters's ordeal. I am not even sure that those who do are much better equipped. The term 'depression' obscures at least as it illuminates. In his searing memoir of his own battle with what we might better call (at least for the moment) profound despair, Darkness Visible, William Styron derides the timidity of the word, which in other contexts, he observes, can cover anything from an economic downturn to a declivity in a road. Joshua Wolf Shenk, in his splendid essay "A Melancholy of Mine Own," contends that it is not only too imprecise to be useful, but actually misleads in its attribution of essential similarity to what are often wildly divergent battles with an infinite variety of psychic demons.

A rather banal and obtuse piece by the political columnist for Batters's hometown paper in Regina speculates that public life added to Batters's burdens, and that the politician's trafficking in optimism weighed with particular heaviness on a man who, at his core, found himself so awfully bereft. In fact, those bearing grave wounds in their inner lives often find solace in the
acclaim that public life brings; if you will indulge the clinical jargon, it brings the affect which too often eludes them in the quotidian interactions of private existence.

Among political figures indisputably of the first rank, both Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill would almost certainly be diagnosed today as sufferers from chronic clinical depression. (This alone should suffice to disprove the canard that the ailment is rooted in weakness of character.) The latter referred to it as his "black dog", and often made a point of keeping some distance from the edge of the platform whenever he found himself in a train station. "I've no desire to quit this world", he remarked, "but sometimes thoughts, desperate thoughts, come into one's head."

Depression does not necessarily ennoble, any more than other afflection. It is more convincing to see adversity of any stripe as making people pretty much what they already are, only more so. But it does seem likely that acquaintance with persistent, intractable sadness and futility schools one in the inescapable tragedy of the human condition. The man who has chosen a political vocation may find that it leaves him better armoured for the emotional demands that public crisis imposes, demands that might crush others.

It is tempting to think that Lincoln and Churchill were able to rise to the awful responsibilities of wartime leadership at least in part because they had lived privately in the terrible night that the conditions of war turned into the national experience. At some level, others may have sensed this and half-consciously turned to them as the indispensable guides when an entire country sought the way out of Dante's "dark wood." A number of scholars have noted Lincoln's remarkable growth as a rhetorician in the years of his wartime leadership; circumstances summoned forth what now seems quite clearly the prose of the tragic poet, if you will, that the day required. As for Churchill, he was dismissed through much of the 1930s as an irredeemable anachronism, his mock-Augustan prose hopelessly out of place in modern Britain. Yet his imperishable speeches of 1939 and 1940, as Orwell perceptively wrote, now seemed to match the hour in their sense of the solemnity and gravity of events. There were, he went on, many Britons who could not necessarily follow Churchill's meaning word by word, but were moved and inspired by his words to meet his conception of their potential fortitude, rooted in his own experience of what one might endure and overcome.

The late Canadian diplomat, scholar and poet Douglas LePan was a friend of mine, a friend who was fortunate enough to lead a long, rich life. He wrote that nothing great in human affairs could be accomplished without courage, but that

Courage shadowed by weakness may be the most precious of all
since it carries sweetness into the heart of the building,
carries it like honey into the hollows of the honeycomb.


I don't know what David Batters endured or what the experience might, under other circumstances, have allowed him to do. None of us now will.