All the things that people think when they learn of a suicide passed through my mind. Mostly I wondered if she had been telling me the last time we spoke. Worse, I wondered if she had been asking for help. Sad in so many ways, that I had been too tone deaf to hear her message or her plea, and that, even if I had understood her, no one was more incapable than I was to offer comfort or help.

Und den Kopf ich drehe

coda

Man hat sie hinaus getragen

Why do people speak of things coming full circle? If a thing does not come full circle, then there is no circle at all. It is like past history or a hot water heater or end results. Things do not traverse a full circle of meaning so that we discover their proximity to their opposites.

Across the long and very old Stanton Street Bridge from El Paso, Texas, is a not-so-little town in Mexico called Ciudad Juárez. Friendship Bridge, Puento Rio Bravo, Puente Ciudad Juárez-Stanton El Paso. Hundreds of women had been hunted there, on the other side of that bridge, pursued, raped, imprisoned, tortured, and killed. They were mostly dark haired and of slender build, as was my beautiful Sarah.

Time slipped away. Cliché, yes. True, yes. Days, months, life not marked by clock or calendar but by the decline of my daughter’s health. The seizures became more severe, far more frequent. Sarah would forget where she was going, what she was doing. Her friends fell away quickly; they were children. That was just as well, as their names were more and more often a mystery to her. She had not yet misplaced her mother or me in her memory, but it was coming. She would sit for hours just staring. We hired a nurse to sit beside her and stare into space with her. The stress of it all, the sadness of it all, the inevitability of it all drove a fat wedge between Meg and me. She withdrew into manic exercise, yoga and cycling. I failed at burying myself in work but succeeded at staring for long periods at the return address of the packages that had delivered the handwritten notes pleading for help.

PO Box 219

Bingham, NM 87832

I would go there.