Emphasis on the Second Syllable
by David Laing Dawson
Margaret is frugal. She takes great pride in this. In season she survives on
the edible fruits, berries and mushrooms she finds in backyards and boulevards.
She would like to teach her survival skills to mental patients. In the winter,
she dresses in many layers and sleeps whenever and wherever she is taken in. She
will not accept a boarding home, or psychiatric treatment. She defaces her
family benefit cheques and does not cash them. These represent charity and are
abhorrent to her.
She would like to see the Premier, "The Highly Placed One," who could, she is
sure, correct certain past injustices, and then reissue her cheques as salary.
She is a woman of great dignity to whom God delivers explicit instructions,
which she is expected to follow and convey to others.
On one of her attempts to gain direct audience with the Premier, she spent a
full weekend hiding in a closet in the Ontario Legislative Building. When she
tells me this she smiles and seems to recognize both the comedy and tragedy of
her life.
When, in the past, she was hospitalised and treated, treated against her will
with neuroleptic injections, she spoke less of God, of herbs, elixirs, and the
Premier of the Province, and her conversation became easier to follow. But the
moment she left the hospital she stopped her treatment and recalled, bitterly,
the receiving of The Needle, as a wrong and immoral act, an assault on her
autonomy, her special-ness, and her humanity. At times she visits with her
mother, a short, stocky peasant woman now in her eighties living in a small
house not far from the hospital. Old photos of a small German-speaking Romanian
village sit on her mantle piece. She has little English but it is clear she is
bewildered by our inability to make everything right.
During a very cold January I give Margaret fifty dollars to buy a pair of
winter boots. She speaks to God for a moment before accepting. Apparently, He
tells her it is all right to take this money and go to the mall. When she
returns she shows me the boots she has bought and she gives me twenty dollars in
change, for she has found a bargain, which pleases her greatly.
Another day she arrives looking ill and tired, emaciated. I can smell acetone
on her breath. She has not eaten for days. She is capable of foraging for food
but this is a hunger strike, which only a word, a concession, from the Premier,
the "The Highly Placed One", will forestall. It is hopeless trying to convince
her that I have no access to the Premier’s ear. She has her own knowledge of how
the world works. And in her world, within her reality, it is not so far-fetched
that the Chief Psychiatrist of the Mental Hospital might stand very near "The
Highly Placed One."
Now Margaret drops in unannounced quite regularly. She usually stays a while
and sings a hymn. Sometimes she babbles incoherently. Sometimes her ramblings
are interrupted with asides to God. Upon His silent instructions she continues,
or alters her current discourse. Sometimes she brings jars of liquid, which she
claims she has distilled from berries and plants and herbs and which contain all
the nutrients any human should need. She gave me a jar, which remains on a shelf
unopened. She wants to teach the patients of the hospital her survival skills,
her nutritional knowledge. Sometimes when she has sung loudly I realize she is
drunk, and the ingredients in her jars are preserved in alcohol. I am always
fascinated by the way she constructs a sentence. She uses some combination of
Germanic inversion and schizophrenic association.
But this time she is dying. Or she will die within days if she does not start
eating again. I take her to a hospital ward, escorted by nurses. I tell her I
will be giving her a needle in the buttock and that she must start eating. She
pauses for a moment, then looks at me, and shakes her finger at me, and says,
"All right. You may give me the needle. But not as a husband to a wife." I can
feel Freud smiling down upon me. She accepts the syringe of anti-psychotic
medication. She begins to eat immediately. This is not the result of
pharmacological treatment, but the product of some kind of détente. She stays a
few weeks in the hospital, gaining strength and a modicum of sanity, and then
she departs.
It is another time, another year, and I find Margaret has been cut off from
welfare. Her purse is full of defaced cheques, yet some she has cashed and put
in her bank account, which now totals, to my amazement, eleven thousand dollars.
With a bank account that large she can no longer receive benefits. But she has
no money to use. She is destitute, again not eating. For, in her mind, the money
in that bank account belongs to God. She cannot use it. She speaks to God for a
moment and apparently He will not alter His policy: She cannot spend His money.
On the telephone, I explain to the Welfare Officer that Margaret has no
money, that she cannot access the account of eleven thousand dollars. It belongs
to God, and God alone can release the funds, and He has chosen not to. The
Welfare Officer, it seems, lacks the capacity to imagine parallel universes with
different immutable laws. I then appeal to common sense and economic reason. I
explain that unless her office releases Margaret’s welfare money, Margaret will
not eat, I will have to put her in hospital, and this will cost the taxpayer
seven hundred dollars a day rather than seven hundred a month. But the welfare
officer is adamant. She will not release funds until Margaret spends the eleven
thousand dollars in her bank account. Margaret returns to a diet of boulevard
berries and the discarded foods she finds in bins behind grocery stores.
Another year and it is the dead of winter once again; the temperature has
dropped to 35 below zero, record lows. It is even colder than that, they say,
when the wind chill has been factored in. Margaret is living on the street. She
makes her way through the city to the hospital and then to my office and spends
the day in a chair in the corridor keeping warm. The deep freeze is not letting
up. Non-essential employees are allowed to leave their work an hour early. We
worry that our cars won’t start, that pipes will freeze and burst, that black
ice will make the roads impassable. A storm is coming.
At the end of the day, Margaret is still sitting in the corridor, bundled in
her coats. I offer to admit her to the hospital so she might spend the night in
a warm bed after an adequate meal. She refuses. She will not allow me to assign
her patient-hood. She is not mental she tells me several times. But when I
broach the idea of sleeping at the hospital as a guest, rather than as a
patient, she accepts, after her usual aside with God. The wards are full though,
and the best we can do is offer her a mattress on the floor in an empty room.
The institution sputters here. On the ward that I have chosen as the most
suitable, the nurse in charge tells me that moving mattresses is the job of
Housekeeping, not Nursing, and the Housekeepers have left for the day to avoid
the coming storm. On the telephone I tell the nurse in charge that I will come
over and place the mattress myself if I have to, and this appears to motivate a
temporary change in job description. They agree, reluctantly, after first
warning me of various legal consequences should anything go wrong during the
night, conjuring images of Margaret attacking somebody, running amok, or simply
dying. The mattress and blankets are placed in a side room on the ward. Margaret
finds her way there. She stays a few days, behaving well. She remains quiet,
polite. She tidies up after herself. When the cold spell dissipates and a thaw
is in the air, she puts on her coats and leaves.
A month passes before I receive a formal letter from the president of the
union, copy to the Ministry of Health, demanding that I write a letter absolving
the nurses of any responsibility for allowing a non-patient to sleep on one of
the wards. I had some sympathy for their concerns before the events in question,
but now it is over, without tragedy, without incident, without lawsuits, I have
trouble understanding the motivation for their request. For a few moments I
contemplate their attachment to specific words and how these word symbols can
accrue more substance than the physical reality to which they refer. Much like
Margaret. As Margaret will only accept my help as long as it is not called
‘treatment’, or ‘counsel’, or ‘charity’, and as long as we don’t call her
‘mental’, or ‘patient’, with the same rigid eye on symbol and definition, the
nurses, or their union, can only offer help and charity to someone called,
officially documented that is, ‘patient’.
I write the letter they have requested. It is not hard to do. In fact, I find
myself taking some perverse pleasure typing in bold, "I and I alone take full
responsibility for allowing a homeless woman to sleep in the hospital when the
temperature was 35 degrees below zero, Celsius."
Margaret disappears for months at a time. Occasionally I might see her bent
against the wind in her kerchief and multi-layered coats, making her way along
an urban street. And then she would appear again, in my office, asking again if
I would put her in touch with The Highly Placed One.
I have been calling her Margaret in this writing, but my secretary and I
never addressed her as Margaret. She would correct us. It must be ‘Ms.’ followed
by her last name. Ms. Rossel. With emphasis on the second syllable. "Ms.
Rossel is here to see you." Or "Ms. Rossel is
singing in the corridor." In turn, she always addressed me as "Chief
Psychiatrist Dawson." Sometimes she added the modifier, "a highly placed one."
Not "The Highly Place One", a title she reserved for the Premier of the
province.
When I left the hospital I had not seen her for some time, and I have not
seen her since. It is pleasant to think of her camped out somewhere, cooking her
herbs and roots and fruits over an open fire, distilling her elixirs, singing
her hymns, communing with God. Or It would be nice to think she found a way of
accepting patient-hood, organized housing, welfare cheques, food banks, and
social workers as "highly placed ones" who might direct her life in a less
eccentric manner. But between these two hypothetical outcomes, I must confess, I
am most fond of the first. | 
