39adamstrand:Barbara in mask, Washington, DC, 1953.How calmly she behaved that day,Bought a knife, s
39adamstrand:Barbara in mask, Washington, DC, 1953.How calmly she behaved that day,Bought a knife, still had a price tag on it,Asked when the next Boston Ohio train passed through,Found a spot, a blind curve.I was told she lay down and waitedThe death-record says she layIn front of the train5:38 on an April afternoon.During cherry blossom season,On a day pass from a mental hospital,Some boys saw her,Tried to help her,She threatened them with her knife.Died of multiple injuries sustained,By being dragged by the train,And ‘from depression’ reads the death certificate.She was almost 19.The conductor came the next morning.He tried to stop the train.He quit his job.When the police came to inform us,I knew.A Monday night, dinnertime,I’d been waiting all my conscious life for this momentBecause I always believed her.Two officers talked to my father on the lawn alone.Then he howled, like a wounded animalOn the front lawn.Inconsolable sounds from beneath the deepest recess of the soul,Beyond any human sound I’ve heard since, way beyond the sound barrier,Beyond language or tears tearing into shreds, piercing the air.Every suicide kills more than one person, they say.My mother said to the police:‘Tell the children it was an accident’Who was she trying to protect?That was my moment of clarity that defined my life,My break from my family, I was 11.The tyranny of revisionism even at the moment of greatest anguish.Rewrite history immediately before it can be written. Nan Goldin, 2004. from the exhibition Sisters, Saints and Sibyls, a tribute to her sister Barbara, who took her own life on 12 April 1965. -- source link
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