Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [73]
My father was especially upset that I confessed to having periods of depression. As a retired Air Force colonel who had gone on to earn his doctorate at MIT, and had become a successful aviation executive, he no doubt thought that my admissions were trivial matters that should be kept private. One would think that we had received enough wake-up calls in our family. After all, my mother lived many of her days struggling with the effects of depression, and eventually ended her life rather than face another day. I can’t imagine that my father’s obsession with my being the All-American boy surpassed his desire for me to be well.
But he was reluctant to admit that my problems were internal, psychological, rather than something I acquired, something imposed upon me as a result of going to the moon. Even after Wayne’s articles and my book came out, he preferred to blame my difficulties on external influences. In one interview in which a reporter suggested that possibility, Dad concurred. “We have to have an open mind,” he said. “Who is all-seeing to know what effect the moon might have on people? It has to be explored more. If the moon can affect tides, why couldn’t it influence someone’s judgment? We may be afraid of the answers, and Buzz deserves credit to come out and face that situation.” My father even suggested that perhaps other astronauts had been adversely affected, too, and just weren’t telling. “Maybe more guys are hiding things and won’t admit them,” he said.
I COMMUNICATED WITH few friends during this time, at least not on any meaningful basis or about anything other than potential space projects. I can’t recall ever sharing my pain with another male friend or confiding in anyone that I was struggling to hold life together. Nor was I in touch with any of my fellow astronauts during this period; we had all gravitated away to new phases of our lives. There was little esprit de corps among the third group of astronauts, and certainly very little other than superficial interaction away from the workplace. While some of them, I later learned, had heard that I was having problems, I never heard from any of them, and frankly didn’t expect anything to the contrary.
More and more, I turned to alcohol to ease my mind and see me through the rough times. Because I could handle my drinking—or so I thought—and could consume a lot of alcohol without becoming uncontrollably inebriated, I refused to see it as a problem. I had been relatively open about my battle with depression, but I was not so forthcoming about my drinking problems. As far as I could see, there was nothing wrong. It was a time when almost everyone I knew was drinking heavily, so why not me?
When I was not drinking, my thoughts tended to lead me to a deeper sense of self-evaluation and introspection. What am I doing? What is my role in life now? I realized that I was experiencing the “melancholy of things done.” I had done all that I had ever set out to do.
Worse still, when I left NASA and the Air Force, I had no more structure in my life. For the first time in more than forty years I had no one to tell me what to do, no one sending me on a mission, giving me challenging work assignments to be completed. Ironically, rather than feeling an exuberant sense of freedom, an elation that I was now free to explore on my own, I felt isolated, alone, and uncertain. Indeed, as a fighter pilot in Korea, making life-or-death decisions in a fraction of a second, and then as an astronaut who had to evaluate data instantly, I consistently made good decisions. Now, as I contemplated asking Joan for a divorce, I found that I could not make even the simplest decisions. I moved from drinking to depression to heavier drinking to deeper depression. I recognized the pattern, but I continually sabotaged my own efforts to do anything about it.
By Christmas 1974, I had mustered enough will to divorce Joan. We had planned to take our three children to Acapulco for the