Nobody has ever measured, even the poets, how much a heart can hold. . . . When one really can’t stand anymore, the limits are transgressed, and one thing has become another; poetry registers itself on the hospital charts, and heart-break has to be taken care of.
On this date in 1948, she and eight other patients died in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, NC. Because they had been locked in their rooms for the night, the patients were unable to escape the flames.