Last November, my father took his own life. I'm frequently aware of the fact that the depression which helped drive him to that dark fate lives on in my genes. That's a doozy of a legacy to inherit, but it's one that has not been wholly negative for me.

Getting to the point where I could write this article involved a series of debates. I debated talking about my father’s suicide; I debated “outing” myself as a depression sufferer; I debated not talking about it and what that meant. I decided in the end that I would be the worst kind of hypocrite if I believed that dialog about depression was essential but was unwilling to start that dialog myself. I hope that my story can help others understand why the traits that cause depression have been both a plague and a gift to so many.

Nothing's easy when talking about depression. Navigating this sensitive topic is fraught with traps and taboos that can make Israel the good option at dinner discussion. But this dialog is important, and hopefully we can lift the grim veil that hangs over this subject before disaster strikes someone we know and love. Even as it goes underreported, suicide now kills more people than car accidents in the US.

Robin Williams’ recent suicide has seen many people chime in about the agreeably cliché link between creativity and madness—if I hear one more Van Gogh reference, I’m going to torch a windmill—but, in my father's case and in my own, I believe that depression and creativity are indeed linked. The same traits that tend people toward depression can also contribute to the type of creative crucible that people like my father and I created for ourselves. Whether we were art directing magazines, building boats of our own design, coding Python scripts, painting on canvas, building CNC milling machines, or writing techie articles, my father and I were/are motivated by a desire to be alone with our work and by an unrelenting drive to learn. Plenty of Ars Technica readers—many of them fellow excited introverts—can certainly understand that. Those drives have shaped my life in hugely positive ways, but of course they also seem linked with the worst of potential downsides: full-blown, dark depression, the kind that can drive someone to suicide.

While I can’t tell you what other people are feeling, I can tell you about my own battles with depression. It has become my oldest frenemy. And though I can’t say that I’ve found all the answers to how to live a life with depression, I have managed to strike a balance that has allowed me to lead a happy life.

Before I get to my own experience, I'd like to share with you a better picture of my dad, the quintessential, self-made engineer who died last November. While his accomplishments may seem small, I think his ingenuity and love for ideas will appeal to Ars readers. His example—and genes—have made me who I am.

This is a version of his eulogy that I posted on my blog and that was published in the Reader’s Digest Father’s Day issue. I am proud to say that it does him justice.

In memory of John Girard

If you wanted to get to know my dad, you just needed to look at his hands. They were large, leather-bound tomes that were always stained and scarred from the merciless demands of his brain. Dad’s hands made the words “skilled” and “rugged” back away without a fight—and this despite an increasing essential tremor that complicated his love for coffee, which preferably ended up in his mouth.

Dad’s hands were the reason I learned to value the signs of time and hard work on people’s faces. In my father’s universe, you would be congratulated for achieving another set of lines under your eyes because they told a story about love for ideas and late nights chasing that next great thing that you treasured. In my father’s world, a smooth face well-preserved by a lack of work, passion, and laughter was merely fool's gold.

His clothes were not about display. Time spent thinking about them meant less time doing what mattered—being with his projects or with his family—but at least clothes helped keep your wang out of the milling machine, which was a plus. Predictably, this view took its toll on his fashion sense. Socks and sandals weren’t a bad cliché for my dad; they were a way of life. He rocked that magic duo like a champ, elevating the combo to an art form.

Dad left high school because formal education got in the way of his ability to work with the ideas he already had—and urgently needed to develop further. There’s a great Marcel Duchamp piece of a door that closes one room but opens another—sooner or later, you have to pick which room the door opens and step through, leaving the other room closed. Behind the door that my dad closed early were diplomas, eating right, and anything done in moderation. But the room that he entered led to a frenzy of discovery and applied hands-on learning that was treasured and used more than a piece of paper could have been.

His ability to reverse engineer and solve problems shamed people with more credentials—literally. His degree-toting engineer managers at Pratt & Whitney, along with his union bosses at earlier jobs, hated him because he made everyone around him look bad. He worked too hard and too well, and he instilled in me a love for learning through self-sufficiency and a disdain for the superficial aspects of academia. If it wasn’t for this gift to me, I would probably be trudging through an expensive Master’s degree instead of happily working directly with a painting mentor.

Family was first on his list of priorities. He frequently expressed his love for us through his work. He built my first toolbox, furniture for my sister, and my first drafting table. He fixed our cars, he made my newly purchased home safe by replacing the bad wiring that was hacked together by a megalomaniacal yoga instructor, and he rigged up a safely slowed-down golf cart so he could watch the grandkids happily poke around their land in it. He even helped me turn an uninsulated shack appended to our apartment into a proper painting studio:

But his magnum opus was the boat. After he built our home in Old Chelsea, Quebec, he then did what only my father would have done: he built a wooden racing-style boat hull in our basement. He invited a party of family and friends to help move it:

It was one of the few times I saw my dad need aid for his work. This was how you’d usually find him:

Then he outfitted that boat with the 454-horsepower Chevy car engine you see above:

Needless to say, this wasn’t a stock design you bought out of a catalog. But when he made something, it worked:

Dad’s boat unified his love of family and work. My parents divorced when I was young, and we lived with our mother, so camping and bringing us to the lake was what he lived for. I got to spend my summers pulled behind a roaring, bad-ass motorboat that my dad built—it didn’t get any better than that. It comforted me greatly to fall asleep to the hum of that engine through dad's handmade leather seats. I hope he knew that.

My relationship with him developed more deeply through the later years, and I also grew to understand his presence in my genes. Frequent late-night painting sessions, the giddy feeling I get when I develop my own custom tools for my 3D software, a love for being alone with my work and for being with my few close friends, my career as a painter, an art director, a 3D artist, a coder, and a tinkerer are all my father’s gifts to me. His ability to be a loyal friend, a voice of reason, and a force for good are qualities I try to emulate.

But his biggest unspoken lesson was about humility. When someone would come up to admire this boat, which was, even the crankiest of coots would agree, a beautiful work of craftsmanship and creative engineering—he shrugged it off, with a clear disdain for egotism. Today, when I read the word “humble,” I actually think of one of those moments. I could show him some simple computer script and he would always say “you got me beat,” like I was the one making magic. He was animated when he talked about the inner workings of any project but never gloated about his accomplishments. Still into the final days of his late sixties, he gushed with enthusiasm about the next thing he was working on, however small.

He frequently talked over our heads about his projects, but it wasn’t condescending, it was just that he couldn’t contain his excitement for his ideas. Not long before his death, when he visited, he talked about building a high-speed, water-based cutting tool, and, if he hadn’t successfully built the other marvelous contraptions around him from scratch, you would have been tempted to write these off as the pipe dreams of a big talker. But my dad didn’t just buy tools, he built them. He made a circuit-board printer out of a hacked plotter, and his friend John wrote the software for it. That thing built boards for other projects. He made a little mock solar panel that would turn and roll to seek out the most light. (It wasn’t hard to spot my school science projects as a dad-job.)

The last of his finished tools was a CNC milling machine that took him a year to complete. He was proud that it got 1/4000th of an inch accuracy—something that would cost $200K if you bought a similar machine from a manufacturer. He was using this milling machine to develop parts for his last project—an industrial air filter. He e-mailed me the Solidworks sketches of it, but it contributed heavily to his growing sickness, so I can’t stand to look at it again.

Dad described his own father as incredibly hard working, and it terrified me to think of what that meant, considering my father's work ethic. That would explain why my grandfather was always financially strapped—medical bills combined with ulcers back before there was public healthcare in Ontario. One of the few things I remember about my grandfather was his workshop, which was littered with empty Tums antacid canisters.

But my father had his own ills that were more severe. It seemed like his passionate affair with ideas could not be stopped—but his sickness sadly beat him. In the end, the only thing stronger than dad’s will to create and love was his need to escape the opaque charcoal cloud that drifted in and out of his world. He left us on the blackest of Fridays in the darkest of ways, outwitting our best efforts to keep him alive. If he wasn’t so damn good at what he did, he might have failed on his first attempt and given us a chance to help him. But dad was successful, even in his tragic failure. He should have given the job to a lesser person—which would have been easy to find because my father, John Leslie Girard, was extraordinary.

Listing image by Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock