A personal Haibun poem on depression – (a poem which incorporates text, an image and haiku)
We all have a wide span of emotive feeling. That is the natural way of life. It is just that some have very high extremes at both ends of the scale. And this can be quite devarstating to all concerned. This is especially so if medical intervention is required.
The following happened in the early nineteen fifties in England.
When we were growing up; I can’t remember exactly how old I was but still at primary school. I was probably around about nine or ten years old. I was behind the garage wall with my younger brother. We peeped around to the front of our house and saw our mother being taken out of the front door on a stretcher to be put in the back of an ambulance. We were young and did not recognise that it was in fact an ambulance.
She was taken to a ‘Fair Mile’, then called a Lunatic Asylum, near Wallingford in Berkshire and for many weeks our Father would drive us to visit her; mainly at weekends. I can remember summer days when the fields were full of wheat. Quite often my brother and I spent a lot of time in the grounds waiting for the return trip home in the Morris Isis. It is funny how you remember little things in life and I can remember the number plate. On the home front we children were looked after by one of my Father’s sisters, Auntie Gwen.
What is relevant to this text is the fact that something had to change with Mother so that she could recover and return to our home. Many years later Mother told me that she went into an empty church nearby and when she came out of the stillness something had happened inside, both in the church and in herself and it was the beginning.
damp afternoon
reaching for the light switch
depression
Richard Scutter May 2021
