I reach out to embrace her. I am Mary. Teetering on the brink of death, I step back. I am not Mary.

In the manic psychosis before her suicide, she immersed herself in making arrangements like altars and taking pictures of them, stacks and stacks of photographs. "What I want to know is how did she know all this," my Aunt Ellen said. A true Catholic, was my Aunt Ellen hinting darkly at occult knowledge? I could have told her, later, after my own periods of bipolar mania, what that deep, intuitive knowledge is like. How in the deepest recesses of our psyches, we all have an instinct for ritual and pattern that binds the disintegrating world together. How every glittering fragment of what we've ever learned rises to the surface when we need it. "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance, pansies, that's for thoughts, there's fennel for you, and columbines, rue for you..., daisies, and withered violets." Tra-la-la. The mad Ophelia strewing her flowers, drifting down the river unafraid, slowly sinking to a watery death. Tra-la-la. As the stream of remembrance rises up to overwhelm her.

Was it as a lone priestess of a forgotten religion that Mary lay down to die? Or was it later, the mania behind her, when the dark river of shame and doubt and fear and despair rose up?

I summon her shade. Talk to me, Mary. Tell me what it was like. Rise up from the depths of twenty years in all of your watery splendor. Tell me.

Jacqueline Doyle teaches writing, memoir, and American literature at California State University, East Bay.