I wrote down these thoughts about my sister and guns after a Seattle shooter in June. I find myself wanting to share them again now.
Last spring my younger sister Kathy jumped off a freeway bridge in Phoenix. For better or worse, she lived. Kathy made her first suicide gesture in high school, when she took a handful of –I think—aspirin in reaction to a bad haircut. At the time, she was already, obviously, mentally ill. In middle school, anorexia had drawn her down to a skeletal thirty-eight pounds. Her hair fell out. Her sunken face took on a plastic texture from fat soluble vitamins that her body couldn’t process. Force-feeding brought her back from the brink but couldn’t heal her. In the years since, even during three pregnancies, she has never topped a hundred pounds, nor has she ever been free of compulsions, body-loathing, or debilitating bouts of depression.
Since that first handful of analgesics, Kathy has made an effort to die somewhere between twelve and fifteen times: prescription pills, threatened jumps from an apartment balcony and a communications tower, an attempt at drowning, a car set on fire. Kathy is alive because even in the heart of Arizona’s Wild West no one will sell her a gun, a fact that she finds immensely frustrating at times that her bipolar illness takes her into another trough of despair.
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