"Now I see you've broken a feather..."

Edna St. Vincent Millay died at age 58 in her beloved Steepletop. She had spent the last year of her life grieving the loss of her devoted husband, Eugene, and battling her addictions to alcohol and morphine. She was found at the bottom of her main staircase, having apparently fallen during the night. Her wine glass was placed carefully on one of the top steps, and then (as is alleged) she accidentally tumbled to her death. This has never been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. Was the emotional and physical pain too much for her? Could she simply not endure another day without her other half? Were her friends aware of her despair? We will never know, I suppose. But she left behind a wealth of unpublished manuscripts and poems, some of which were made public after her death, and in these writings she leaves clues about her frame of mind in her last months on Earth. We are grateful she left us so much to read. And we are still, so many decades later, "mixing her" with our talk, and remembering what a passionate creature she was. And how broken this little sparrow had become.