Mary on her poetry:

'I’m not really much of a poet.  When I sit down and try to write poetry, it usually comes out pretty lame.  On the other hand, when I am upset or pissed off about something, it’s like a faucet gets turned on inside my head and the poetry pours out.  Once I’ve expressed my feelings, the faucet turns back off.

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 During the first few years with Chris, I did write some poems to help cope with the situation.  But they seemed to be more about expressing Chris’s feelings than my own.  The experiences that Chris had been through were so far from anything I could imagine that it sometimes felt like I was dealing with an alien lifeform.  Every now and then, he would say something that resonated with my inner poet, and it would crystallize into an expression of his feelings.  This process helped me conceptualize what he was trying to describe to me; it also seemed to give him a sense that he was being listened to and understood.  

 Two poems, “it’s Been A Long Night” and “Stasis,” came out of this process.  The first poem was about Chris’s suicide attempt, which was covered in the book.  The way he described it to me, simply and almost casually, seemed to distill all the fear, pain, and hopelessness into a few simple lines.  I wrote the poem that night. Two other poems, "Every Day You Stay Alive" and "Graveyard in My Head," were written to encourage Chris at times when he was dealing with really upsetting or discouraging occurrences.'