Others are angry and manipulative. A few cannot sit still and chatter incessantly, so we talk. Some hold conversations with people who are not there, or see things I cannot. Most are wrapped in a heavy, invisible shroud of sadness.

Mental illness is lonely. At the psychiatric hospital, a man in a white smock appeared with a wheelchair. I opened the rear passenger door. The young woman, her head bowed and covered, moved her legs tentatively.

The small sound came from beneath the hood again, and this time it swelled louder. I reached in and took her feet in my hands, first one then the other, and gently swung her legs out of the door. She put her feet on the asphalt of the parking lot, grabbed my hand, firmly, with a strength she’d not before shown, and pushed herself up out of the car.

The young woman moved to the wheelchair, as the cold winter wind buffeted her about like a faded, fragile flower. But she made it, and sat.

As the man in the white smock stepped behind the wheelchair, the young woman looked at me for the first time. In her face, pale and grimacing, I recognized the sadness and fear that had aged her far beyond her years.

“Good luck,” I said softly. She mouthed two quiet words in return, whispers on the wind really.

“Thank … you.”

Rick Wade is a freelance writer and Illinois Times contributor living in central Illinois who, the past couple years, transported psychiatric patients from emergency situations to behavioral health facilities for Illinois Patient Transport. He is returning to journalism full time as reporter/managing editor of the Macoupin County-Carlinville Enquirer-Democrat.