“Like medieval lovers, they ended up dead, side by side, their corpses rotting, undiscovered.
I understood it as a suicide, a shared action, shared despair—“ego despair,” I said at first and several times throughout the day. I elaborated: not despair at the state of the world they had struggled so long and so hard to remake; if that had been the motive, they would have killed themselves in public, their deaths a statement, immolations. This suicide was private, secret, hidden—ashamed—it left not even a note.
This image I made of their deaths, their bodies, was wrong, but I didn’t know it yet. The first news was too slight, too incomplete.”
―
Catherine Gammon,
The Martyrs, The Lovers
