It pains Amanda Groen to think of how her mother died.

Knotting a sheet to a bunk bed ladder and around her neck, Nancy Jean Calder, 49, let her body dangle, her feet touching the prison cell floor. By the time her cellmate saw what happened, resuscitation was futile.

Groen, 27, a graduate student and mother of two, watched for her entire life as her mother struggled with a mental illness that made her feel worthless and, at times, delusional. Her mother sometimes questioned living another day.

Calder was wrestling with those issues July 12, the day before she took her life. She wrote her daughter that day, saying, "I'm going to try to call you tonight. I think I need to talk to you once a week as I am so lonely and homesick. I think of suicide all the time."

Groen received the letter the day of the funeral, and what she read made her grief turn to burning anger.

Her mother's death should have been prevented, she felt, but the state prison in Muncy, where Calder had been incarcerated since May, failed to protect her.

Cries for help

Calder's illness and history of suicide attempts were well documented. She was put in prison because she had set her own mobile home on fire, a fire she did not try to escape. Why didn't the authorities recognize the danger Calder posed to herself? Groen wonders. And why was she in a prison rather than a hospital?

"I had so much faith in our system," Groen told me. "I thought they were going to be watching her."

Groen now thinks she was just naive.

While Calder's last letter mentioned suicide, its overall tone was not dark. Rather, Calder rambled on about everyday annoyances. "I have this huge pimple on my right cheek," she wrote. Later in the letter she said, "It's so hot, I'll be glad when summer is over." She also told her daughter, "I quit smoking."

Her letter was filled with the common thoughts of a person who expected to wake up the next morning and the morning after that, and so on.

"Please send me some books," Calder wrote. "There's nothing to read here."

The mundane complaints and simple desires expressed in Calder's letter reinforce Groen's belief that her mother did not want to die.

While Calder over the decades made multiple attempts at suicide, usually by taking overdoses of pills, Groen, of Montgomery County, believes the attempts were more her mother's way of saying she needed attention than a true desire to end it all. One night a few years ago, Groen recalled, her mother, who lived in a trailer court on Columbia Avenue, called her to say she thought she was going to die because she had swallowed all of her pills. "Could you call 911?" she asked.

Raw emotions

Groen believes her mother resorted to the improvised rope in the presence of her cellmate in hopes of getting special treatment.

"I want to go home," Calder wrote in the letter to her daughter. "Could you get me a pardon for health reasons? I feel sick all the time and depressed and anxious. How will I get through this? How long will it be? Please help me in some way. I love you. I miss you."

As Calder's only child (a son was stillborn), Groen took the brunt of her mother's irrational behavior.

But Groen recalls, too, times of peace and clarity when Calder was like any other mom, taking her out for ice cream or spending the afternoon with her at the pool.

Now Groen is left with uncomfortable emotions.

"I just feel sad," she said, "that this is the way she died — alone, not with people who loved her."

And when Groen rereads the letter, anger is rekindled.

"She was really sick, but to die like this … " said Groen, not completing the sentence. "I don't think I'll ever get over it."

E-mail: jhawkes@lnpnews.com