Her happy fantasies, conjured by cemented expectation, crumbled cruelly into ash. The burning hope she’d felt that morning burned itself out. “I never felt so much like despairing of all human help as I do now,” she thought desperately. “I feel desolate and forsaken…in this my hour of midnight darkness.”9
She was blind. No moon. No light. She could see no way forward. Because the trustees, she was convinced, thought her sane. Yet they had “shut their ears to the cry of the oppressed. They have coolly and deliberately dared to perpetuate my imprisonment indefinitely, in open defiance of reason, truth and justice.”10
But this rational rage came later. That day, she simply realized bleakly, “There is no hope of my ever receiving justice at their hands.”11
And so she slumped, all fight gone out of her. With it, too, went her icy fortress, so long sustained as a bastion against emotion. The locked tower that she’d kept herself inside, the better to keep her sanity, melted away to nothing. Hope, so long deferred, now “sickened”12 within her, so that all her former glories became poison in her veins. Thoughts of her children caused agonies, their memories no longer sweet but rancid.
She had no hope she would ever see them again.
“If grief can kill,” she thought, “it seems as if I should be killed of overmuch sorrow.”13 Her heart was “broken and crushed from hope of seeing them once more.”14 Her hope had become a too-heavy weight. It should have been something to buoy her, but everything in this world was out of joint. Sane women stayed in asylums. A sure release became indefinite commitment. And hope became a hard, hard rock, dragging her below the water.
She did not fight it. The weight of that water squeezed out through her eyes. Silently, she sobbed before McFarland, little caring anymore what he thought of her tears, whether a cry for home and children might lead to punishment.
She could not be punished any more than she already had.
In vain, she waited for an apology or some kind of explanation. It seems McFarland did not share one with her.
But the trustees did later provide one.
“It is proper to state that this reluctance to discharge the patient, at the thrice repeated request of the Superintendent,” they wrote, “arose from the remonstrance of her friends; not the least urgent of whom were her father, brothers, and other relatives [including her husband].”15 They said further, “In the…retaining of some [patients], the selection is made of those…whose discharge would be most injurious to their families.”16
They had taken her husband’s side.
Eventually, after time had eclipsed itself, until she did not know what was forward or back, Elizabeth’s tears dried into the silence surrounding her and the doctor. Though she felt “very much grieved”17 that McFarland had not managed to arrange the publication of her book in time for the meeting—she felt strongly that if such public evidence of her sanity had been available, the trustees would not have dared keep her—she knew she could not blame him for this calamity.
“You will not leave me, will you?”18 she asked him.
The doctor responded simply, “No, I will not.”
Elizabeth sniffed. “May I go on writing my book?” she asked.
McFarland smiled expansively. “Yes, you may.”
She could do nothing but trust him. “My all of earthly hope lies in the decisions of Dr. McFarland.” He was, truly, “the God of my earthly destiny” and she “utterly forsaken of all men, except Dr. McFarland.” In his promise she could keep writing, she saw a subtext—a promise “not to leave me desolate.”
It was something at least. To write was something. To write gave her a voice. To write potentially gave her a chance to help others. And if she died in here—as she now feared she might—then perhaps, in the end, she would become a martyr for woman’s rights. “It shall be my dying prayer,” she thought to herself, “that some champion for the truth shall dare to publish my posthumous writings as they were penned by me for the world’s benefit, so that, being dead, I may yet speak in defense of…the inalienable rights of woman.”19
She had no idea what was in store for her now. She’d spent the past three months anticipating her release, but now there was just a blank emptiness where before there had been a whole world. “Perhaps I am to die a prisoner in my cell—forgotten—unknowing and unknown,”20 she thought darkly. Perhaps she would end up on the “dead cart”21 she heard rattling around the hospital at night. She’d long ago learned that patients’ corpses were taken away on this. Once encased in a cheap shroud and placed in a rough box, they were laid out under turf dug up with “hasty spade”22 and buried like “a beast”23 with no funeral service, in an unmarked grave, the whole operation carried out “in the dead of night by lamp-light.”24 How that dismal future haunted her now.