Advertisement
Diane,
 |
The Rev. Diane Martin of Trinity United Church of Christ and her husband Nathan are relocating the Colorado Springs. PETER THOSMON photo |
My faith is dead. I have no future with a woman of faith or with anyone. My deepest regrets for the loss and for my lack of courage.
So began Nathan Martin’s letter to his wife.
And so began Diane’s nightmare.
When Nathan never picked up his cell phone that day of Aug. 12, Diane, 49, worried.
When he didn’t show at the prayer service at Trinity United Church of Christ that evening, Diane knew something was wrong.
And when she found the note at home that night, with Nathan’s cell phone next to it, she sobbed.
The letter ended:
I will be in touch in a few days. I love you too much to continue the pain.
Nathan
To read the Rev. Diane Martin's sermon about depression, click here.
To those at Trinity, Diane is Pastor Diane. She has led the congregation off Hwy. 14/61 for four years.
But she was Nathan’s wife first. The two married 12 years ago.
On the night of Nathan’s disappearance, she had no idea what he planned to do.
She knew he was a man of his word, and the letter’s postscript — I will seek help — gave her hope.
But she also feared the worst.
Nathan, 54, had suffered depression before. Anti-depressants had made him sick, though, and like other men, he’d figured he could get through it on his own.
On the morning of Aug. 13, after looking for Nathan at local hospitals, she sat down at her computer after 2 a.m.
Hello, my love, she typed into the subject line of the e-mail.
My dearest Nathan,
Today is the saddest day of my life. I want you to know that I miss you terribly and I want you back, even if your faith is dead. I love you with all of my heart, and I will take you on any terms — faith or no faith.
She ended the e-mail:
Please come home to me, my love. You complete me. As you are. I ache for you.
Your devoted wife — forever, Diane
Days of not knowing
The waiting began.
Diane contacted family and friends to tell them Nathan was missing and to see whether anyone had heard anything.
She looked for clues in Nathan’s e-mail box, in their credit card account.
But Nathan had covered his tracks well. He’d taken his passport and $4,000 from their bank account and disappeared.
Dear Nathan, Diane wrote the morning of Aug. 14, and made two requests.
1. I need to know that you’re alive.
2. I need to know, within 200 miles or so, where you are.
She got one lead: Nathan had called his former employer in Viroqua and left a message.
But the phone system had only recorded seven digits, and Diane dialed those digits with every area code she could find.
The clue led nowhere.
Sunday, Aug. 17, 4:45 p.m.
E-mail Subject: Nothing makes sense without you.
Message: Please, please, please call me. I am in agony. We can work this out.
Nathan had been missing six days at that point.
Reluctantly, Diane had followed the advice of others and taken Nathan’s name off their bank account.
Out there on the road, driving west, Nathan contemplated suicide.
Although his depression had never crystallized as it had during those days, he knew he’d been suffering it for 30 years.
The past two years, he’d bounced from job to job.
The weekend before he left, he’d barely gotten out of bed.
On that Tuesday afternoon in August, he finally broke.
And then, on the seventh day, from a library in Colorado Springs, at 3:18 p.m., he e-mailed his wife.
Diane,
I have been agonizing, myself, over the last six days. I have too much to say over this medium, but know that I am safe. Please inform my family if you can. I will call you this evening at around 6 pm.
Love Nathan
Diane drove to a place in Coon Valley where cell phone reception was clear and waited.
During the phone call, the two agreed to meet in York, Neb., the middle point between their locations.
Driving through the night, Diane spoke with family and friends on her cell phone.
She prayed with them.
She became a new fan of energy drinks.
Driving from the other side, Nathan called from various points to assure her he was still on the road.
Diane arrived first.
When Nathan pulled up, Diane saw her husband looking downcast, unshaven, worn out and like he’d been through hell.
She reached through his car’s open window, and the two sobbed as they embraced.
“I knew who I was meeting,” she said later, “and yet I didn’t really know what he would be like, what kind of a person he would be after going through this, after being in this dark place.”
They spent the next four days at a Super 8 Motel in York.
They decided Diane would leave Trinity, and the couple would move to Colorado Springs, where they used to live and where their five children are.
Nathan’s heart led him there, Diane would tell people.
Talking about depression
At the end of August, Diane gave a sermon at Trinity.
She told of a man in his 40s who hanged himself in the Arizona desert, of a woman in her 30s who sliced her wrists open after her husband’s death, and of a man in his 50s who suffered secret guilt, who never felt good enough, who left a note to his wife before disappearing, and who planned to end it all if he could muster the courage and figure out a way his wife would be able to collect life insurance.
In her sermon, Diane spoke the words of Job, a man in the Bible who also suffered the depths of despair: “Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire?”
Before her husband’s disappearance, she’d shied away from talking about demons.
But she called this sermon “The Demon of Depression.”
“In light of my family’s recent crisis,” she told the congregation, “I wonder if those biblical scholars who tend to normalize these pathologies have ever met one face-to-face.”
But while the episode brought her to understand demons in a new way, she found the beginning of healing to be less dramatic than speaking in tongues or praying for an exorcism.
Nathan called her.
He told her his deepest secrets, things he’d never told anyone.
And immediately, Diane told the congregation, she’d felt “a rush of love and grace and compassion and mercy that could only have flowed straight from the heart of God.”
“And with my words, ‘I love you, and I forgive you. Please come home,’ Nathan’s healing began.”
The two left the Coulee Region for Colorado Springs on Wednesday.
Nathan has been seeing a therapist.
Diane said the two feel closer than they have ever felt before.
And ironically, she said, their marriage is stronger than ever.
“That’s the miracle of the whole thing,” she said.
On Saturday, they went to the park in Colorado Springs where they were married and repeated their marriage vows.
“So that our life together remains not only a union but a communion, I promise to you and to God, I will maintain intimacy with you by sharing my deepest thoughts and feelings,” they said.
It was their 12th anniversary.
SIGNS OF DEPRESSION
In her August sermon on depression, the Rev. Diane Martin listed signs of depression.
Source: Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center
