This paper uses the character of Miss Helen in Athol Fugard's moving play, The Road to Mecca, to examine many of the biopsychosocial systems and issues that are part of the aging process in women. The individual grows, develops, and ages within the wider environment of the surrounding community. This extended system limits, influences, and affects the ways in which its members grow up and grow old, and Miss Helen provides an especially intriguing case study of this process at work. Many of the issues raised by her case are useful in understanding the social worker's role in analyzing and designing a plan for care for older, widowed women in the community. Her case also suggests some of the kinds of clues that the caring, perceptive social worker might look for in studying and serving older individuals.
Fugard based his play, The Road to Mecca (1985), on an actual person, Helen Martins, who lived in the remote town of New Bethesda in South Africa. Fugard knew the woman only by her reputation in the town as an eccentric artist who had turned her house and grounds into a fantastical landscape. Martins eventually committed suicide by drinking lye, which corroded her intestines and killed her. In Fugard's fictionalization of her story, Miss Helen is still alive at the end of the play, suggesting the playwright's hope that, with caring intervention, she might have been saved.
The play takes place one night in Miss Helen's house, as Elsa Barlow, a much younger friend, a teacher with radical ideas and a close relationship with the reclusive older woman, has arrived unexpectedly. Elsa is upset by a dark, despairing letter Miss Helen sent her. On her arrival, Elsa discovers that Miss Helen is about to give in to pressure from Marius Byleveld, the local pastor, to leave her home and move into a senior care residence. The play reveals much about Miss Helen's isolated state and the ways in which the larger systems of the community ...