Sapphire and Shadow (A Woman's Life) by Marie Ferrarella

and his way of dealing with problems was to throw pills at it.
    But pills were drugs done up in fancy ribbons, she told herself, her mind sliding into the darkest bottom of depression. It felt so black. She couldn’t live with this blackness eating away at her. The pain it created was unbearable. There was nothing to live for. Harry was lost, Paul was gone and Jocelyn, she had lost her too. She had lost her to Harry’s way of life, to the Megans of the world.
    “What’s the point?” she cried out into the empty room. “What the hell’s the damn point of it all?”
    She felt like breaking things, slashing them.
    Slashing.
    A razor.
    She had a razor in the medicine cabinet. Two slashes and it would all be over. She remembered reading somewhere about a woman who committed suicide in a bathtub because the pain was lessened that way. Two slashes in a hot tub and she could just let life dribble away, no pain, no regrets, only a cocooning warmth beckoning to her, enveloping her in its arms.
    In a trance, Johanna walked into the bathroom. The door clicked shut behind her and she pressed the lock. She stripped off her gown, kicking it into a corner. The diamond earrings and matching necklace he had once given her were thrown on top. She wanted nothing to do with Harry’s money. It had been the lure of money that had done this to him.
    Focusing her mind on only one thing, she took out the razor from the medicine cabinet and placed it on the lip of the sink. Slowly, she began to run the bath water. Steam began to fill the small, rose tiled room. It clouded the mirror.
    Mechanically, from some ingrained habit that had been with her before her memory had formed, Johanna cleared off the fog from the glass with the palm of her hand. The woman who stared back at her had haunted eyes. Eyes like her mother’s had been.
    “What are you doing, Mommy?” she had asked, coming into a bathroom just like this, only half way around the world and a quarter of a century ago.
    Her mother had jumped and pulled her hands behind her back. “Nothing, darling, nothing at all. Just go out and play.”
    And she had.
    She hadn’t seen the blood dripping down from her mother’s wrists onto the bare floor, hadn’t returned in time to see her alive again. She could have saved her if she had only seen. But she hadn’t.
    Her mother had had cancer and wanted the dignity to decide where and when she was going to die, not become some pin cushion for doctors, wrenching her family’s heart out as they watched her waste away day after day. She hadn’t wanted to drain them of their emotion or their money.
    She had only succeeded in one goal.
    Johanna and her younger sisters had been shattered by her mother’s death. Johanna could never bring herself to use the word “suicide.” She had been shattered by despair and consumed with anger. She had never totally forgiven her mother for leaving her behind, for not staying and trying anything that science had to offer, searching for a cure. She had never forgiven her for not trying to stay alive. For her.
    Ever so slowly, Johanna raised her head and looked back into the mirror, mists fading from her eyes. Was this what Jocelyn was going to think? To feel? Would Jocelyn someday be standing in a bathroom like this one, with the same deadness inside of her, treading the same path? Was she just continuing a cycle that Jocelyn would feel compelled to follow, because her mother had seen no use in fighting, in going on? Would this feeling of defeat be perpetuated by her if she gave in now?
    Horrified, Johanna threw down the razor. It clattered down to the tile as she covered her face with her hands. Tears fell, tears of anger, not at herself but at everything that had brought her to this place, to this moment, to this empty hopelessness.
    What had she almost allowed Harry to do to her?
    She let out a wrenching sob of despair and turned off the water in the tub. She opened the drain and watched the water swirl out.
    So