Michelle's Reviews > The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend

Beautifully written mini-memoir about a suicide (a close friend of the author left a mental institution and killed himself before the day was out). I was not surprised to find this writer is a poet. Her feelings, conflicted and straight-up, are palpable. “I tell everyone I know that my friend threw himself under a train.” It’s a simple fact yet conveys so much. She also touches a bit on 9/11 and there are some parallels between the grief felt that day on a massive level and her own, more localized grief. In one part she talks about all the people who went into the city to give blood: “Everyone gave blood then, too. It felt so good to help the dead people who weren’t coming.” A very powerful sentence, at least for me.

I’m not sure why I don’t rate this higher than three stars, perhaps because of the length, perhaps because it seems so deeply personal that it’s hard to “enjoy” it per se. I think this would be a worthwhile read for anyone affected by suicide or mental illness.