Lizzie must have known it was high enough before she jumped from the 7th floor of her apartment in Paris. Experts claim a psychotic break from reality occurs suddenly sometimes, even in middle age. Lizzie was about to turn 55, happily married, we thought, with a cushy government job and two successful daughters, both beautiful and smart like her, and her husband Pierre, a winner of the Legion
d’honneur.
            If you’re psychotic, you can’t tell what’s real and what is not, like reality TV, or plastic surgery, or who our enemy really is. You may enter the realm of doubt, darkness and depression—dash out to the balcony and leap, though leaping takes a kind of courage, a sort of faith or lack thereof. You see yourself at a dead end—no way out but down.
            Yet Lizzie loved life! Sure, she loved to drive fast, yet chose not to turn off the road over a cliff near her gite in Corsica. Instead she threw herself off the balcony as Pierre lay in bed, leaving us to puzzle it out, put it into words, make sense of it, to pull us back from the edge.