I See You Everywhere (229-287)

SUMMARY:
In August of 1993, Clem killed herself. Louisa and her parents had flown out to Florida to collect all of Clem's things and arrange a funeral for Clem. The first day Louisa was in Florida, Buzz acted as her chaperon, taking her where she needed to go and getting her settled in her motel room. Everything that Louisa did and everybody that Louisa met reminded her and made her think about Clem. She knew her sister was having an affair but she did not know with who and that is one thing that Louisa was trying to find out how the mystery man was. Then she met R.B she knew it was he who had an ongoing affair with her sister. But now Louisa wanted to know something else, how did she do it? R.B said she turned on her truck in the garage and also used some of the medicine they put the bear to sleep to set up her own IV and that's what killed her. Louisa and their parents scatered her ashes all over the ocean, the only place they thought Clem was happy.

In August of 2005, Clem is taking care of her godson. Henri, Esteban's youngest. She had remarried to a man that deals with real estate, lost a loved one, his wife, to sucicide and had 2 kids already. She was still living in New York when she ran into Ralph, one of the guys Clem met in Vermont years ago. Louisa invited him to dinner hoping to find out why her sister took her own life. Although Louisa has thought of hundreds of reasons why and played out millions of different scenarios in her head, she can not ever know and Ralph could not answer those questions. Dinner ended, and even though her questions have no answers, she still learned a lot.

QUOTE:

"He tells me then that he's positive; he found out years ago--but just in time to take drugs that are keeping so many people alive. He'd been on the verge of accepting a major position at a wildlife fund that would have given him administrative power yet kept him in the field. 'I said no, because I figured I wouldn't be alive for a whole lot longer," (Glass, 281).

REACTION:

This was the state of mind of Ralph when he found out something horrible in his life. Even though nobody really knows what was going through Clem's mind that would make her want to kill herself it was probably somewhere along these lines. In the time of AIDS/HIV Clem enjoyed sleeping around. What I think based on Ralph and Louisa's dinner talk, is that Clem found out that she was positive and the virus began attacking her immune system and she could not handle it emotional so she decided to end her own life with a boom, like she had told Ralph she wanted to go out back in the summer of 1980 when she was taking care of her Great-Aunt Lucy.