Still: The paintings for my supposed third show languished, growing thicker, and stranger, but never complete.

Then—Carey Logan committed suicide.

The obituary, “Carey Logan, Artist Known for Death Practice, Dies at 37,” reported that in the thirteen years since her show on Grand Street, the “dirty-blond Wednesday Addams for the Marfa set” had exhibited at the Venice Biennale as well as the Basel and Frieze fairs; she’d held solo shows at the Kiasma in Helsinki, the mumok in Vienna, and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. A slideshow of her extremely prolific career showed dozens of sculptures identical to corpses; a marble pyramid engraved as her own gravestone; the tomblike interiors of a house; and her more recent performance work.

Her early life was summarized as briefly as always: A native of Wappingers Falls, New York, Carey Logan had no formal training. An unnamed source referred to a “long-term mental illness” leading to her suicide. Tyler was quoted: “We have been devastated,” he said, “by the loss of Carey Magnolia Logan, who was the heart and soul of Pine City.”

My immediate thought was: So soon? Before I truly knew you? How could you go—how could you leave me behind?

I felt, deeply and urgently, betrayed. There were only so many successful female artists who were my age, and even fewer tiny little women making big work, sincere work, in a time when everyone else was telling a long joke. Carey was supposed to stay ahead of me. To lead the way. She wasn’t supposed to quit. It was, quite honestly, the last thing I expected, even though to the rest of the world it seemed reasonable that a woman whose artistic career focused on death would commit suicide.

Yet what I saw was that Carey had, for reasons that were not clear to me, given up on her compulsive behaviors and traded them for something that broke her in two.

In the weekend magazine they printed more photographs, under the headline “Perpetual Persephone: Carey Logan at Home in Pine City.” Greasy-haired, with purple shadows under her eyes, she held a bottle of gin in one hand and the bow handle of a canoe with the other on the shores of a black lake. In the next photo, in a white dress, embroidered so heavily with flowers it looked almost as though she’d been dipped in a cartoon field, she smeared handfuls of ripe fruit over the tattooed skin of a bearded Tyler Savage. After that, she lay on a table, her clothing and skin coated in honey and crawling with clouds of bees, while Jes, Jack, Marlin, and Tyler stood behind her in white beekeeper suits. The last image showed her staring directly into the camera. It was painful to look at. I suppose that’s what made her special.