an Elderly's depression

There are some pictures of Miss Brown in our possession that, I can tell you, are not very pleasant to see.

 

They are not pictures that we want to print, frame, and proudly hang on the walls. 

 

They are not pictures that we flip through albums and excitedly show to others.

 

And they are not pictures that we will look at with a smile.

 

They exist- purely for archival purposes, documentation purposes, consultation purposes,  and nothing more.  

 

In one of them Miss Brown is seen wearing a baggy white faded tshirt, sitting huddled on her chair in the hall, her eyes gazing at the TV on the wall. One side of her face is covered with blue-black bruises, some turned a sickly shade of yellow. 

 

In another, she is lying prone, face down, in the hot sun, on the pavement outside a couple of shops in a residential neighborhood. Her face is partially shielded by the hat she wears, and her brown jacket insulates her from the heat of the ground.

 

There is one of her sitting upright on a red tiled floor next to a drain pipe. Her faded white tshirt- the same one mentioned earlier- hangs loose on her. Her hair is matted. In this blurred picture, Miss Brown is seen sitting there, her back leaning against the whitewashed wall, her face a picture of resignation and abject misery.

 

And there is one where she is seen lying prone, face turned to the side, on a grass patch in the middle of the road. Her hat shields her partially upturned face from the glare of the sun, her long-sleeved blouse covers her arms from the pricks of the twigs and the bladed grass, and she lies near the edge of the patch where her feet are on the road.

In all of these pictures she is haggard, drawn, sallow, thin and unhappy. Her hair, once neatly tied up and dyed a proud youthful black, has become locks of limp, greasy and unwashed streaks of grey that cling to her head.

What you see, however, is not what really is.

 

Because if you were to ask me what happened to Miss Brown after these incidents, I can tell you that after a seemingly long while, and after a bit of passive-aggression, she hauled herself up and continued on her own way as if none of them had occured.

 

Yes, there is more than what the picture captures.

 

You would not have known that a few days before she was sitting huddled on her chair with a bruised face, she had dumped raw egg yolks into the (unlined) hall dustbin and left them for an entire day there. The bin stank of rotten eggs. The house stank of rotten eggs. And it took her caregiver an hour over to clean out the split, sticky egg residue from the bin, and Glade spray the hall back to normal.

 

Neither would  you have known that a couple of minutes before sitting on the tiled floor of the building, she had in fact dropped down on her back on the rough concrete slabs of a canal covering, and had it not been for her caregiver's quick response by holding her neck up with some resistance, she would have a split second after banged her head on the concrete to let her head bleed.

 

What I'm saying is that all of this was deliberate- yes, the falling down, the accidents, the location of the event, the crowd, the props, everything- was calculated, planned and executed to a degree where she might have felt pain and hurt and discomfort- but it would have been bearable and she would not have died.

 

What I'm also saying is that all of this was done deliberately for a singular purpose: That either a member of the public would see her, take pity on her, offer her aid, and then she could appeal to them to ring up her daughter, or that she would be injured sufficiently to be admitted into hospital and then have the hospital staff contact her daughter (previously on record) whom she was sure they would then make her come down to take responsibility for her mother, and then once mother and daughter reunited, all would be well.

 

It is hard to imagine that these (might) have been the plans of an elderly to reach her desired goal.

And one could say that this is pure imagination, that they were genuine accidents and she might have had a physical issue more than a mental one.

 

But if you understand that at that point in time Miss Brown had been suffering from a condition of (what would later be diagnosed as) clinical depression where infliction of self-harm is a common behavior, you would understand that at that point in time, her heart and mind were fixated on only a singular person, a singular goal, a singular purpose, and nothing else.

 

Did she want to feel pain?

 

I don't know- Miss Brown has a notoriously high endurance for pain- and I have no idea whether she wanted to feel it, or whether she wanted the physical pain to numb away the emotional.

 

Did it think she might overdo her carefully planned tactics and hurt herself further?

 

Unlikely so- a person who is going through depression has either a wish for the problem to be entirely resolved (where their unfulfilled longing is met) or for them to be entirely removed from the current scenario and situation. (like a runaway of sorts)

 

In other words, she wouldn't have cared.

 

She wouldnt have given a d*** if, instead of merely lying strategically with half her body on the grass patch and half her body on the road, a car or motorcycle might whizz by, miss seeing her, and run over her.

 

Neither would she have given a d***  when having slammed her head on the rough concrete slab, that instead of just a mere external head injury, she might have sustained a more serious concussion and a much more serious internal bleeding problem.

 

All of this didn't matter  to her by then.

 

To Miss Brown she had nothing more to lose.

 

What she cared for most, what she held on to the most (for half a century, no less) was already gone. If she could get her back to her side never mind what risks she took, Miss Brown would have deemed her strategy as a success. If she couldn't get her back to her side and the reality outweighed her risk, there was nothing for her to lose either.

 

If we understand what clinical depression, or any form of depression for that matter, is, then we will understand that life to the person is meaningless, pain to the person is more of a neurotic than a trigger, and it doesn't matter to them what they are, how they look to others, or how they look to themselves.

 

They don't give a flying f*** to their lives or the conditions of it, and that's as plain as it sounds to be.

 

Fortunately for Miss Brown, the frequent falls and the dangerous situations that she was placing herself in, were very worrying to her caregivers who felt she had to seek clinical psychiatric help.

 

And so she did.