About three years ago my aunt got postpartum depression after having a baby girl. It wasn’t just depression, though; I’m pretty sure it kind of messed with her head. Not only did she lack the desire to be a mother, but she started acting erratically and became hostile to the family she once loved.
One day I was staying over at my grandparents’ house (her in-laws) and I overheard them talking about an email that my aunt had sent out that morning to the whole family. They sounded upset about it, so I thought better than to ask. But later, my grandma’s email account was still open on her computer, so to satisfy my curiosity I found the emails (as it turned out, there were two) and printed them out while nobody was looking. I regretted it soon after I read them. Each of them was a very macabre, depressing, sickening poem with the general theme being the desire to die. The poems used several obscenities as well, which just made me sick at heart. I hid the two sheets of paper inside my SAT prep book and no one ever found out that I had read them. What’s disturbing is that the poems had a sort of elegance in their rhyme scheme and “sound.” They would have been beautiful had the content been different, perhaps about love instead of death.