A powerful article about my friend Sarah (Sally) and the tragedy of suicide.

James Island family faces holidays after death by suicide

Jennifer Berry Hawes

Caroline Ball, the baby, loved to paint and draw and dance ballet. She and her sister, Sarah, sang in the church choir. Theirs was, in so many ways, an ideal childhood.

Yet, today Sarah Ball Damewood and one sister are all who remain with their father in a family robbed of its pieces by physical and mental illness. In 2009, they lost their mother to complications from a stroke.

In 2010, they lost the oldest of the four sisters to breast cancer. She was just 54.

And this year, they lost Caroline, the youngest daughter. They lost Caroline to herself, to the emptiness she had yet to fill.

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