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ed and refused to do anything. This is what is termed in
contemporary psychology as a nervous breakdown. My
mother was distressed and ultimately sought medical
experts to help and my aunt was immediately identified as
suicidal and hospitalized in the local psych ward. Despite
all the progress of modern medicine and study of the
human mind, specific labels are actually hard to pin down.
The experts labeled her as depressed and began the first of
a series of drug treatments to "bring her up." This period
ended with my aunt's first suicide attempt.
She had been released from the hospital and was
struggling through her days at home alone. She continued
to try working part-time for her boss's former legal partner.
One day at lunch, she drove her car out to the west side of
town and rolled it "accidentally" in a single car accident.
The roads were clear. There was no black ice and, more
significantly, according to the patrol officer, there were no
skid marks. My aunt was once again hospitalized.
Mood, in all of the depressive states associated with
manic-depressive illness, is identified as bleak, pessimistic
and despairing. A deep sense of futility is often
accompanied, if not preceded by the belief that the ability to
experience pleasure is permanently gone. There is a general
impairment of feeling. Suicidal thinking and behavior are
not uncommon.
In the silence of the winter, midday, there is little sense
of time. The sun is lost behind a pale white-grey sky. There
is light, but it seems sourceless. There are no apparent
shadows. Under the frosty impure and swollen creek ice, I
can see the black earth. The creek is only a half a foot deep
here so, even though it is only early December, it is frozen
solid through. Dark branches loom overhead, reaching,
stretching, framework forming a canopy high over my
head. The snap of a twig echoes throughout the woods. But
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