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When Jane was 12, Frances spiraled into a fatal depression. Grandma told me many years later that .. Mother had been moved to the Craig House sanitarium in Beacon, New York. The doctors said that her emotional deterioration and suicidal tendencies required that she be under constant guard. . . . One day Mother came home accompanied by a uniformed nurse. I was playing jacks with Peter upstairs when she arrived in a limousine.
… She must have known it would be her last time home. She'd come, I guess, to say good-bye – but also to get the small razor that she kept in a black enamel box given to her years before by her friend Eulalia Chapin. Apparently, she had rushed upstairs and just managed to slip the razor into her purse when the nurse, who'd been sent to make sure such a thing didn't happen, caught up to her.
A month later, in April, on her forty-second birthday, Mother wrote six notes – one each to Peter, Pan, and me; one to her mother; one to her nurse, and one to the doctor, her psychiatrist: "Dr. Bennett, you've done everything possible for me. I'm sorry, but this is the best way out."
Then she went into her bathroom in the Craig House sanitarium, carefully withdrew the razor she'd managed to keep hidden, and cut her throat. She was alive when Dr. Bennett arrived, but she died a few minutes later.
