When I was a kid, my Dad taught me all about werewolves. Little did I know he was preparing me to understand his depression.

Decades later, the werewolf analogy still helps me make sense of my father. Because, as with a werewolf, it is impossible to peel the man and the depression apart when you’re talking about him. They exist forever co-mingled, not in tooth-and-claw but in temperament.

I think about my father’s generosity a lot. My father was generous, but he was also depressed, and the nature of depression is to be selfish: to starve those who love you of the best of you, in the relentless feeding of that which can never be nourished. In that, he—the most depressed person I ever met—was also the most selfish. For my entire life, he would give me anything I asked for, as long as it was a movie or a book. But when my mother and I begged him half a dozen times to go see a doctor if he loved us, he wouldn’t lift a finger. How do generosity and selfishness co-exist like that in a person without destroying him?

In 1989, my father—bullied at work for his mental illness—quit his job and became, for all intents and purposes, a shut-in.

Read more on Folks.