CNN | Kat Kinsman: Writer & Editor

Fiona Apple’s recent decision to postpone her South American tour to stay home with her elderly and ailing dog may have caused some upset among her fans, but she’s won a whole pack of new ones who thoroughly support and understand that decision all too well. I am one of them.

Mordred told us when it was time for him to go. I’d always heard that a suffering animal would do that, but he was my first dog, and I was thoroughly unprepared for how clear and desperate that message would be.
“Mordred” was a massive name for a mammoth dog, the Irish Wolfhound my now-husband owned when I met him. He became mine also, and I his — so fiercely that he escorted me down the aisle when Douglas and I wed a year and half later. We were not always so gracefully aligned.

The night I met Mordred, he tried to kill me. I tried not to take it personally, as he was being a good dog protecting his Dad from the strange lady who’d apparently come over to eat his face. It was our second date, and I was deeply enamored of the notion that in New York City, I’d found an attractive, single, straight 30-something man with the wherewithal to be responsible for the welfare of two animals who had to be escorted outside to poop.

Read Lean on me: Loving and losing a dog on CNN Living

I am 14 years old, it’s the middle of the afternoon, and I’m curled into a ball at the bottom of the stairs. I’ve intended to drag my uncooperative limbs upstairs to my dark disaster of a bedroom and sleep until everything hurts a little less, but my body and brain have simply drained down. I crumple into a bony, frizzy-haired heap on the gold shag rug, convinced that the only thing I have left to offer the world is the removal of my ugly presence from it, but at that moment, I’m too exhausted to do anything about it.

I sink into unconsciousness, mumbling over and over again, “I need help… I need help… I need help.” I’m too quiet. No one hears.

Several months, countless medical tests and many slept-through school days later, a diagnosis is dispensed, along with a bottle of thick, chalky pills. There is palpable relief from my physician and parents; nothing is physically wrong with me (thank God, not the cancer they’ve quietly feared) — likely just a bout of depression. While it helps a little to have a name for the sensation, I’m less enthralled with the diagnosis, because I know it will return. While this is the first time it’s manifested heavily enough for anyone else to see it, I’ve been slipping in and out of this dull gray sweater for as long as I can remember.

Read the rest at CNN: “Going public with depression”