Broken, But Mendable; Some Things Bloom Again

In the last chapter of Drawing with Whitman Cat’s legs that were broken in a car crash are out of their casts. She has returned to the place where the accident happened—and to the tree. It has been broken in half by the impact when the car hit it, and so the top is resting on the ground now. 

This tree in Riverbend looks like how Cat’s tree would have been positioned: “…the severity of the bend had not been visible. With this angle…it looked like an arrow marking the whole horrible experience. The sight hit Cat’s chest like a heavy rock” (114). 

With depression sometimes how we see it doesn’t look so bad. It looks like the person is merely sad. She’ll get out of it. It’s just the rainy day. She’s just feeling down. She’s just tired…But then it seems to last longer, and it seems she sleeps longer than she used to, and she’s not enthusiastic about things that before made her excited. Then, hopefully, those around her who care about her will realize—and she’ll realize—that her moods are more severe then upon first appearance.

The person with depression can feel broken like Cat’s legs and the tree. Her legs have healed at the end of the story; the tree will always be different. “You broke once, but I have broken two times” Cat tells the tree. “I guess no one can fix you…But you look all right,” Cat concludes (115). Healing takes many forms that are visible. But we have to remember that for people with depression the inside is where the havoc turns and swirls if not treated properly. Like the “broken tree back there” that has “flowers growing out of its head” (115), the girl wearing the bike helmet with the shiny mohawk tells Cat about, there’s a internal, chemical struggle in the brain, even when it looks beautiful on the exterior. This chemical imbalance in the brain is a part of what causes depression. It is why someone with this mental condition cannot simply snap out of it. 

Cat learns about art which helps her focus on something other than her mom’s depression. Art therapy is a field I am going to learn about. In Drawing with Whitman when Cat finds the tree, she studies “its shape, its injured sides and ragged crown. It reminded her of a form she’d seen recently” (112), then she remembers it’s Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night.