One day, she would wake up and they would be gone.
“I must soon become,” she thought bleakly, “nothing less than a heap of putrefaction.”2
Despite her dismal thoughts, Elizabeth helped the other patients to bathe; she was still maintaining her cycle of care, notwithstanding the violence she sometimes received. Attending to their needs was the only thing that kept her going.
At 7:00 a.m., the breakfast bell rang, and Elizabeth followed the others to the dining hall, though she had little appetite. “I smelled and tasted these stinks so much after I entered this stink-hole,” she wrote of Eighth Ward, “that, for a time, I couldn’t taste anything else.”3 Nevertheless, she took her seat next to Mrs. Triplet and picked at her meal.
The asylum fare did not agree with her. Its lack of fresh fruits and vegetables and overemphasis on bread and potatoes at times caused constipation; she would beg for some “poor, shriveled wheat…to eat raw, to keep my bowels open.”4 It was almost as if her body was reflecting her new life: she was stuck fast in this painful place and could see no way to move forward. At times, in her very darkest hours, she even contemplated another way out—suicide. But thoughts of her children and her faith always stopped her.
“God says I mustn’t kill anybody, and I am somebody,”5 she thought, as though reminding herself. She credited the “miracle”6 of her continuing sanity to “God’s grace alone.”7
Cautiously, she lifted her eyes from her plate to glance furtively at her fellow patients. The longer she stayed on the ward, the more she was getting to know them—and their idiosyncrasies. When she’d first been transferred, it had been like moving to “some foreign country, whose inhabitants had manners and customs of their own.”8 Unlike on Seventh Ward, where all the women had been alike—and like her—here there was endless variety.
There were those patients who were dangerous or aggressive; these would cast furious glances at Elizabeth or curse in such colorful language it seemed to turn her own ears blue. Some would even rush at her and grab her petticoats, wanting to raise them to unmask her modesty. But other patients were much calmer. There was an elderly woman who would stare blankly at her for hours on end with her mouth wide open. A young girl “emaciated almost to a skeleton,”9 who took neither food nor drink except by force. A nervous, middle-aged lady with uncommonly fine skin who would constantly pick at her clothes, her restless anxiety venting itself “from the ends of her fingers…upon something tangible.”10 With insight, Elizabeth saw the woman’s relentless unravelling of her garments as an “act of self-defense from the overflowings of her pent-up mental agonies.”11
Even the violent patients had souls within, she was beginning to realize, spirits that were simply trying to be heard. Sallie Low, a patient with large black eyes and short curly hair who had “‘spells’ of excessive fury”12 was once put into solitary confinement after one of her outbursts. When Elizabeth, who’d been asked to check on her, looked in, she saw Sallie had “divested herself of all her clothing and was standing naked…with her hands both raised, with all her fingers spread, with her mouth wide open in laughter…she had written her marks upon the wall [with her excrement], as high as her fingers could reach.”13 Yet Sallie was just trying, in her own way, to express herself, to make her mark on an uncaring and unlistening world in any way she could.
That December, Elizabeth Packard decided she would be the one to listen. Slowly, she began to make new friends. With Betsy Clarke, a fifty-six-year-old housekeeper from Massachusetts. With a young woman named Emily Goldsby, who was epileptic. （Sufferers of the condition were grouped together with the insane in that era, with some doctors ascribing their fits to “gross indulgence in masturbation,”14 made worse by “the eating of English plum-pudding.”）15 And she made friends, too, with the nervous woman she’d seen destroying her clothes: forty-nine-year-old Emeline Bridgman. She became a special friend.
Emeline—like two-thirds of all the patients in the asylum—suffered from depression. Listening to her talk about her illness made Elizabeth’s heart ache. She tried to comfort her, “imparting genuine sympathy in deeds of kindness,”16 wishing she could find some better way to help. In Elizabeth’s opinion, the asylum was the worst place for Emeline. “She is diseased in her nervous system,” she explained, “and instead of treating her as a criminal, she needs unusual forbearance and kindness, to inspire her with self-confidence… All depressing, debasing influences, are deathlike.”17