I am helping clean out my friend Sandy’s apartment after her suicide when I open an envelope addressed to me. There are five poems inside. Here is the first:
My friend wrote this poem and four others the week before she killed herself. A year earlier she had tried — with what she’d hoped would be a lethal cocktail of drugs — to end the agony she had suffered for decades. She had chronic pain that nothing seemed to relieve: no drugs, no diets, no physical therapy, no holistic doctors, no spiritual practice, no counseling. Most days it hurt her to move; some days it also hurt her not to move, her skin sensitive even to the softest fabrics.
