Beatrice

Beatrice is a 64-year-old woman admitted to the PAAZ for a second period of severe depression. First presented as stiff, judgmental, and difficult to approach, she gradually discloses the losses and isolation beneath that guarded manner. Her story gives shape to the long duration of depression, the complicated place of family and faith in illness, and Emma’s slow recognition that another patient’s abrasive exterior does not make her suffering easy to understand.

Identity and First Impressions

Beatrice enters the ward as another new patient, but her appearance immediately distinguishes her from the group. She is in her sixties, wearing a tailored suit and pearl necklace, and sits rigidly in her chair. Emma reads the set of her mouth and the way she surveys the other patients as signs that Beatrice regards them as contemptible, perhaps even contagious. That first impression frames their early encounters: Beatrice seems to arrive not as someone seeking company but as someone protesting the indignity of being among the patients.

When Leny invites her to introduce herself, Beatrice instead tells the nursing staff to do their jobs. She insists that, had they listened to her, she would not have spent a night on the PAAZ locked ward among people she calls mad. Her complaint is both forceful and revealing: she resists the position of patient and objects to having been placed somewhere against her will. Another patient answers that she should be grateful to have been taken back at all, making clear that Beatrice’s return is already being judged by the group.

That judgment has a history. Other patients say Beatrice had been admitted for less than a week, left against advice after getting what she wanted, and returned the following week. Iefke attributes the apparent difference in how staff treated her to connections, saying Beatrice’s husband works at a university as a professor of psychiatry; Linda corrects her that his field is anesthesiology. The correction complicates the accusation without erasing the resentment. Beatrice’s short first stay and swift return make her an object of suspicion before the reasons for her departure are fully known.

Depression, Faith, and Family

Beatrice explains that she experienced a severe depression ten years earlier. It lasted three months, which she remembers as the worst period of her life. At the time, she could not understand why God had subjected her to it; when the depression eventually passed, she gave thanks. Now, after years in which she believed the illness was behind her, it has returned. She says she spent three months in bed unable to do anything before coming back to the PAAZ. The return is especially frightening because her earlier recovery had seemed to close the episode, only for the same disabling state to reappear without warning.

Her understanding of that suffering is inseparable from faith. Beatrice later tells Emma that she no longer feels God’s presence. She had felt it throughout her life, including during an earlier depression and after losing a child; that sense of presence had been a source of companionship in grief she felt unable to share with anyone. During her first week on the ward she took medication for the first time in her life. After three days, she says, the feeling of God’s presence was gone. She went home believing that stopping the medication might bring it back, but it did not. With that loss added to her continuing depression, she found herself with nothing and returned to the PAAZ. Her account establishes what she believes happened and how she experienced it; Emma suggests that depression, rather than the medication, might have dulled her capacity to feel, but Beatrice does not affirm that explanation.

Family is another source of attachment and pain. Beatrice has a husband who has recently retired, children, and grandchildren, and she refers to plans they had expected to share. She also speaks of having lost a child, a grief she says she could not share with anyone, even while she continued to feel God’s presence. At one point she says that children are a cruel gift: they are given to their parents, but cannot be kept. The remark interrupts the group’s ordinary conversation and exposes how much her bluntness may conceal.

She resents being told that family visits should be a comfort. When Emma asks whether seeing her grandchildren had been enjoyable, Beatrice replies that she has been depressed for three months and hospitalized against her will at her family’s request; she cannot imagine how she could find anything enjoyable. She says that when she sees her family, she wants to die. In a later group discussion about self-stigma and work, she objects to the conversation’s focus on employment: at 64, she is not working or applying for jobs, but sitting in the ward. She wants to discuss how people around a patient respond, especially relatives who do not understand and would rather stay away. Although some relatives visit every day, she says not all of them come, and those who do seem motivated by obligation rather than pleasure. She feels she has sacrificed her life for her family and even postponed her death for them, only to find herself questioning what it has all been for.

Emma’s Changing Understanding

Beatrice’s relationship with Emma develops through a series of difficult conversations rather than easy sympathy. Early on, Beatrice’s sharpness and apparent entitlement make her hard for Emma to approach. The group’s suspicion about her departure reinforces that distance, and Beatrice’s refusal of familiar consolations can make Emma’s attempts at kindness misfire. When Emma asks about the grandchildren, she is trying to connect through her own experience of depression, in which a visit may at least provide a distraction. Beatrice’s answer makes clear that the same gesture can have a different meaning when family itself intensifies despair.

Their conversations also give Beatrice room to speak about experiences that the group’s habitual routines leave aside. In the discussion dominated by work and self-stigma, she redirects attention to family, visitation, and the pain of being misunderstood. She does not present herself as a lesson in resilience or as someone comforted by the mere fact that relatives are present. Instead, she describes how care can feel compulsory and how the expectations attached to family life can deepen isolation when a person is ill.

The clearest reversal in Emma’s view comes when Beatrice reveals the loss of her felt connection with God. Emma remembers having treated her without making much effort to understand her, and recognizes that she had not grasped how central faith was to Beatrice’s life. Beatrice’s pearls become a small, repeated physical detail in these conversations: she fingers the necklace while describing the absence of God and, later, while asking about Emma’s family. The gesture accompanies speech that is hesitant and vulnerable, in marked contrast with her combative first appearance.

Christmas Deadline and the Crisis in Her Room

Beatrice’s depression becomes a direct suicide crisis. She tells Emma that, after overhearing staff on the locked ward discuss suicide and annual figures, she recognized herself in the subject. She had never imagined she would belong among those statistics, yet she is now waiting until Christmas to end her life. Emma answers that these are not merely figures but names. Beatrice mentions the number five per day, making the statistical scale of suicide collide with her own fixed deadline and the singularity of the person facing it.

Later, after most of the ward has gone to bed, Emma notices that Beatrice’s door is the only one left open. She finds Beatrice sitting motionless on the edge of her bed, head bowed, holding a white paper bag tightly in her hands. Beatrice says that she no longer recognizes herself: she can do nothing, her family is carrying on without her, and she cannot imagine how her depression and despair feel to someone else. She says that she wants it to stop and cannot endure it any longer. The scene makes the risk immediate, while the bag and the stillness in the dark room give Emma concrete reason to be alarmed. Emma tells her to return the pills. The account establishes the intervention and Beatrice’s suicidal distress, but does not establish here what ultimately happens to the medication or how the crisis is resolved.

Narrative Significance

Beatrice’s role is not simply to mirror Emma’s depression. Her story shows how an illness can alter the meaning of ordinary sources of comfort: family visits may feel obligatory rather than sustaining, medication may be experienced alongside the loss of a defining spiritual connection, and a past recovery may offer little protection against recurrence. Her explanations remain specific to her experience, even when Emma offers another possible account of what happened to her faith. The difference between those accounts is part of the encounter, not a problem the narrative resolves for her.

She also changes the way Emma reads the people around her. Emma initially sees Beatrice chiefly through the ward’s irritation and her own dismissive impression. By listening to her talk about her child, her family, and God, Emma recognizes both the limits of that judgment and the importance of attending to what a patient says illness has taken away. In turn, Beatrice offers Emma a generous interpretation of Sergei’s reluctance to remove Emma’s stockpiled medication: perhaps he is protecting himself from acknowledging how close he came to losing her. That observation does not settle their disagreement, but it shows Beatrice looking beyond the immediate conflict toward the fear underneath it.

Beatrice’s presence also sharpens the book’s treatment of time and depression. After hearing Beatrice speak about depression, Emma reflects that depression can swallow the past and future into a single expanse of hopelessness, while mania is seized by an overpowering present. Beatrice’s three months in bed, her memory of an earlier three-month illness, and the Christmas deadline all give that reflection a human context. Her character remains without a stated resolution in these scenes: the ward has received her again, Emma has reached her in a moment of danger, and the reasons Beatrice gives for her despair remain painfully alive. The movement is not from illness to recovery, but from misjudgment toward recognition and a moment of intervention.