Myrrh (n.) A gum resin, usually of a yellowish brown or amber color, of an aromatic odor, and a bitter, slightly pungent taste. It is valued for its odor and for its medicinal properties. It exudes from the bark of a shrub of Abyssinia and Arabia, the Balsamodendron Myrrha. [Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary]

Myrrh is a word that will not quit. Its liquid syllables ooze like the sap, making their way forward in an endless descent. You cannot say it quickly or forcefully. It is a door that will never snap shut, a sky that rumbles but never matures into cracks or peals. For most, it is a word reserved for magi, biblical scholars, and essential oil peddlers. For some, it is the season that defines their lives.

In 1857, John Henry Hopkins, Jr., a rector at Christ Episcopal Church in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, wrote “We Three Kings of Orient Are” for a Christmas pageant in New York City. His fifth verse–a verse I can never recall actually singing–can hardly be sung with lustful good cheer:

Myrrh is mine: it’s bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom.
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb.

According to some sources, myrrh is actually more musky-smelling than bitter. Still, most will agree that its identification as a perfume is an exaggeration. Unless you consider Vicks Vapor Rub, WD-40, or mimeograph solvent as cologne, that is. Named the perfume of the dead, its use as an embalming ointment is noted in John 19:39. Myrrh mixed with wine (Mark 15:23) was also used as a type of anesthetic to dull pain. Associated with pain and death, then, myrrh is not the stuff that naturally spawns joy, peace, and goodwill.

And oh, how Hopkins characterizes myrrh with his string of dreadful present participles: gathering, sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, and dying. Now that’s a cheery string of verbs for you! And the pièce de ré·sis·tance, the final blow? A past tense sealed coupled with a stone-cold tomb. 

The season of myrrh is a stone-cold tomb. Those who live there, sealed in gathering gloom, are sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, and dying. Theirs is a one-season existence in which spring never comes, never gives way to summer. In her poem, “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” Sylvia Plath writes as one who is well acquainted with the season of myrrh:

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

Plath lived in the Season of Myrrh until she did not. Live, that is. She owns the season as one of complete despair, she identifies it as her home, and she ultimately writes that “the message of the yew tree is blackness–blackness and silence.” In one way or another, Plath was perpetually sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying. The slogan of her life could clearly have been myrrh is mine. Although she ultimately took her own life, her greater death occurred daily, moment by moment, when life ravaged and spit her out, tattered and moorless, to breathe again, to live another day. For Plath, her life was, indeed, a dark crime.

In Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary,  he presents a woman who is trapped in a banal and provincial life, a life in which she is convinced that nothing was going to happen and in whose future, there was nothing but a dark corridor and at the far end the door was bolted. Through a string of adulterous affairs with men she believed, she hoped beyond hope, would rescue her, she tries to turn winter to spring. Through a wanton pursuit of luxurious things, she tries to force spring into summer. Like Plath, however, she is far too aware of the futile means she had chosen to save herself and finally swallows arsenic. Her death, like her life, is agonizing. Though the trappings of Bovary’s life have glittered with promise, in the end, she realizes the truth of her earlier fears: she has lived solidly in the Season of Myrrh which imprisons its inhabitants in dark corridors with bolted doors.

Edna Pontillier, Kate Chopin’s protagonist in her novel The Awakening, suffers from a similar provincial malaise. With cooks, maids, and nannies to staff her winter and summer homes, she drowns in daily social and familial obligations that leave her passionless and purposeless. Tragically, she awakens to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her only to finally discover this awakening to be more curse than blessing. In the Season of Myrrh, bitterness comes in a variety of forms. Perhaps the worst is the kind of painful self-awareness that culminates in the desire to simply cease to exist.

At the end of the novel, Chopin offers present participles that appear in sharp contrast to those Hopkins uses in verse five of his carol:

The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water. [The Awakening, Chapter 39, pg. 151-152]

As Mrs. Pontillier walks into the sea whose voice is never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude, however, she walks to her death. The sea’s seduction–like the seduction of gas or poison–is a major theme in the Season of Myrrh. In the abysses of solitude, you will feel no pain. You will unload your bitter burdens. You will cease to exist.

In Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard’s book, The Sickness Unto Death,  he defines his concept of despair. Writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, he begins with a reference to John 11:4 [This sickness in not unto death.] This is the story in which Jesus raises Lazarus from death. Anti-Climacus posits that the Christian concept of death is one that leads to eternal life. He argues accordingly that death is nothing for the Christian to fear. What does he claim should be feared then? The inability to die.

Those who live in the Season of Myrrh know this fear. Intimately, incessantly, intellectually, and spiritually, they know this fear. They fear that the well-intentioned but ultimately cruel platitudes of others will never end: this, too, shall pass; tomorrow will be a new, a better day; time heals all; look on the bright side; see your cup as half-full; take account of the blessings in your life, blah, blah blah. They fear they will drown in positive words and rescue efforts but will not die.

Although some desperate, depressed individuals do take their lives when they cannot find a way forward, most who live in the Season of Myrrh do not. They may wish to cease to exist, but they are often unable to die. Some are bound by ethics of service and/or love for others whom they do not wish to hurt or disappoint. Others are bound by a faith that affirms the worth of even a wretch like me. Still others are simply cowardly, unable to fathom such a deliberate and final act. Whatever the reason, depression’s scent lingers like myrrh, a sickly and bitter reminder that there are things far worse than death.

Every day, I hear or read of the mental health crisis in our country. I have lived this crisis in the workplace, in my family and in my friendships. Though I cannot say that I know depression of this magnitude, I have had seasons in my life when I skirted along its edges and felt the compulsive pull of despair. I am more than grateful that antidepressants have helped me keep this despair at bay. Now, I can actually sleep at night, I no longer hold my breath or tense my muscles uncontrollably, and I can tame my guilt and worry into something I can manage most days. My altered brain chemistry has transformed my life, and I can fully experience spring and summer.

But what of those who have tried it all–antidepressants, counseling, self-help programs, ECT, new relationships, new careers, no relationships, no careers? Theirs is a relentless Season of Myrrh, of gathering, sorrowing, sighing, bleeding. And the type of dying reserved for the living who must find the courage to drag their desperate corpses through another day.

There are far too many who suffer this way, and it goes without saying that we are failing to provide the necessary and compassionate services for them. We pay lip service to their needs and to our concern for them, but in the end, theirs is a messy problem that brings us all down. So we turn to the living and assuage our guilt with occasional donations to organizations must better equipped to handle such issues.

As one individual, one who is neither a trained counselor or doctor, I realize how little I can effectively do for those who walk the Season of Myrrh. It is this helplessness which has plagued me my entire life. What I can do and what others can surely do is to show genuine compassion.

The ecclesiastical Latin definition of compassion is to suffer with. Suffering with others is a messy, painful business. But if it is messy and painful for us, imagine what it is for those confined to the Season of Myrrh. While we ultimately walk into stories with happier endings, they wander dark corridors  of stories that conclude with bolted doors. And on the other side of these doors? There are the fruits of summer that they can only imagine and will never taste.

The Season of Myrrh is real. It knows no social, economic, or racial boundaries. It disregards age and education, reputation and faith. If I could wish or pray it away, I would. If I can offer a glimpse of summer to those in darkness, I will. And if I can suffer with another, I hope to have the courage and stamina to do so.