It’s just a miniscule braid, no more than a half inch at its widest part, and brown. I remember that she wanted her hair to be blond when she was a child. I remember her dying it ash-blond when she was a teenager. It had suited her; she’d looked like a model. Her hair had begun graying so the braid is dyed, too, but close to the color she was born with. A nurse let me snip it off when my daughter Bonnie was on life-support. We were waiting for the rest of the family to arrive so they could say goodbye. We were discussing donating her still usable organs.

I haven’t held this bit of Bonnie’s hair for nineteen years. It’s that long since I grabbed the phone on my bedside table expecting to hear a doctor or nurse at a New York medical center say, “We’ve got a match!” for her sister Catherine, who was waiting for a pancreas transplant, and instead heard a pastor in Lehigh Valley Medical Center in Pennsylvania ask, “Are you alone? Is someone with you?” He didn’t have to say more. Bonnie lived in Pennsylvania.

A few years earlier, she had been given a dual-diagnoses of bi-polar disorder and alcoholism. I’d been so relieved; at last, there would be medicine to help her. Catherine and I had driven to see her. It was October, the Pennsylvania hills flamboyant with color. I remember that Bonnie was buoyantly hopeful, too. She got a pass to leave the hospital for the afternoon, so we’d gone to McDonalds for lunch, strolled over crisp leaves, bought huge pots of purple chrysanthemums, the three of us happy and laughing.

Bonnie was the second of four daughters, born before her sister Laura had turned two, and not happy with her position in the family. She wanted to be first to date a boy; to wear a fancy gown to a prom; to take the town-sponsored guitar lessons she longed for. (She would later master the instrument, playing a twelve-string acoustic Gibson by the time she was twenty.)

Once I crocheted matching scarf and hat sets for my girls, automatically making them in order: the first for Laura, then Bonnie, Catherine, Beth. I had been careful to make Bonnie’s striped set, in colors I knew she liked.

“But I want the first one you made,” she’d cried, “I never get the first!”

So, I gave her the set I’d made for Laura. At least I did that. Usually, I was annoyed with her for wanting what no one could give her, what I couldn’t give her.

Now it’s clear that all she wanted, needed, was to feel as special, as loved, as her older and much younger sisters did. I don’t know why she didn’t. I don’t know if that would have helped the roller-coaster emotions that developed during her teen years, but if she had felt as loved as she was, it might have made her mountainous path easier to climb.

After Bonnie’s tumultuous teens, her road had seemed fairly level: She’d dropped out of college, found a good secretarial job, married, and created a cozy home in a small basement apartment, hanging plants in macramé holders she’d made, throwing a bright afghan she’d crocheted in her unique left-handed stitch, over a second-hand couch. When I visited, there was often a homemade cake in the center of a bridge table covered with a tie-dyed scarf and set with her best dishes. I was proud of her. I think she was proud of herself.

But at some point, she began drinking. There were riotous fights. Police were called. Then there was divorce and, eventually, six weeks in an alcohol rehabilitation facility, which helped for a time.

A second marriage followed, and the birth of a son, then a daughter. I thought there would be no more drinking, no more wild behavior now that she had the children she’d longed for. But within a few years of her daughter’s birth, Bonnie began a revolving-door round of rehabs and hospital psychiatric wards, interspersed with periods of hope, and despair.

By the time she was forty, she had lost her second home, her second husband, and custody of her children. She had been arrested for public drunkenness. And I’d been glad because at least in jail she would be sober.

I’m not sure when talk of suicide began, but when it did Bonnie would telephone to gleefully tell me she had lain across train-tracks at a crossing near her apartment, jumping up at the last possible moment as a train bore down. Each time, I felt as if that train had struck my heart.

She was gleeful—it made me so angry that once, when in a high, happy tone she told me of her latest adventure with a train—I’d yelled, “If you’re determined to kill yourself, no one can stop you! Go ahead, do it!” and slammed the phone down before she could respond. Then, sobbing, I’d called her back. She didn’t answer her phone but she didn’t kill herself, either, not then, and not during the next year or so when she continued to play ‘chicken’ with trains.

I began to think those mad shenanigans were unconscious screams for help, for attention, that she hid her pain (perhaps even from herself), behind that unnatural elation. Often, she landed on a psych ward for thirty days. I thought that was what she really wanted. I thought she would never act on those suicidal threats.
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I had always thought of my four daughters as little women, like in Louisa May Alcott’s book of that title. Even as they neared middle-age I held that image. So imagine my shock when I answered the phone to hear Bonnie, who had stopped taking her bi-polar medicine because she couldn’t stand the way it made her feel, tell me that she was in jail for lewd behavior in front of children. Drunk, she had removed all her clothes except her bra and panties, and jumped into a stranger’s backyard pool where children were swimming. It was serious. It meant prison. A court hearing was scheduled.

A week earlier, Catherine had been called for the transplant. At the last moment the organ had lacked viability and the procedure had been cancelled. But now I didn’t want to be far from home. If the call came again, I wanted to be with Catherine during her surgery.

At the same time, I was frantic for Bonnie. So, I wrote to the judge who would preside over her sentencing, explaining that she was ill with bi-polar disorder as well as alcoholism, that she was not a criminal but a good daughter whose behavior was perfect when she was in a normal state. I begged for his compassion.

Instead of prison, Bonnie was sent to a six-week wilderness camp designed to instill trust, confidence, and self-esteem. There were mandatory Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. We were both high on hope, again. She phoned me every week:

“I love it here, Mom, it’s like summer camp.’”

“Today I dropped into a net the other guys were holding, I actually did it, Mom!”

“Oh, mercy me, what a pity party I had today,” this she said with a shade of sorrow in her sober, gentle voice.

A few weeks after she was released on probation, Bonnie’s ex-husband brought my grandchildren for a visit. That same afternoon, Bonnie (home from the camp, but on probation in Pennsylvania), phoned to chat. “I’m so glad K brought the children to see you,” she told me.

We talked a long time. She said she had definitely hit her rock-bottom. She was in a local AA group, was taking her medicine, and felt fine. When we had already said goodbye, she added with the deepest feeling I’d ever heard from her, “And Mom? I love you, Mom.”

The Lehigh Valley pastor called five days later. He didn’t tell me how Bonnie had died, but I knew. Later, a Pennsylvania newspaper article said the train engineer thought he had seen a pile of rags on the tracks until he saw them move. How do you get over that image? You don’t. I didn’t. I flee from it.

I donated Bonnie’s organs. And I cut off her braid. And I came home and put it away; I couldn’t stand to see it.

Catherine got her new pancreas two weeks later. Did I grieve for Bonnie once her sister came home from the hospital? I’m sure I did, I remember feeling as if a bucket of ice-water had been dumped over my head whenever I had a moment to breathe and remembered that Bonnie was gone.

But I didn’t fall apart until four years later when Catherine, finally on her feet, moved to her own apartment. Then, suddenly I had to force myself out of bed in the morning and into it at night, when I cried raging tears—angry at Bonnie for what she had done, angry at myself for whatever I did or didn’t do—I was her mother, for God’s sake!

It was the beginning of healing, just the beginning—sometimes I thought I was healed, but as a friend of mine, who also lost a daughter, said, “You think you’re over it, then it circles around and bites you in the ass.”

That may happen again, that bite in the ass. But today, nineteen years after that terrible loss, I can summon the exact timber of Bonnie’s sweet voice saying, “Oh mercy me, what a pity party I had,” and not feel intense pain. I can hear her last words to me: “Mom? I love you, Mom,” and feel gratitude for that gift. And I can hold her hair in my hand—this miniscule brown braid—and stroke it against my cheek like a caress.

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