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The Suicide of Sandra Bland Is Still Alive in Me
My safe, small world keeps me well, but denies the feisty self I used to love
Sandra
She was 28.
She was black.
She didn’t blink when she changed lanes.
She didn’t blink for the cop who pulled her over.
She made noise. Righteous noise.
She was jailed, alone.
She changed lanes forever.
She knew depression.
She knew suicide.
She hanged herself after three days in a 15X20 foot coffin
I can barely “say her name.”
In 2015, I heard her name and as the words bounced off the TV and the elevator inside me dove from PH to Basement in a second’s fraction. All systems went on alert. The air was stingy to my lungs. My stomach rose into my throat. I turned off the TV. But it was too late. She was already embedded in a mind that is always on sentry duty. Nothing could be taken back.
Me
The news muscled its way into a brain I usually kept well insulated. Filed away in carefully wrapped memories, were the jagged endings in my large family. I found the stashed sympathetic horrors I understood as a psychologist, about…
