the gas was heavier than air and descended.
  When Sylvia was 8, her father committed an unforgivable sin. He died. Refusing to see a doctor because he thought he had (untreatable) cancer, he finally succumbed to (theoretically treatable) diabetes.  Sylvia stayed angry. She found some success submitting poems to a variety of publications through her schoolgirl days, but she was also battered by rejection slips. In her early twenties, she evoked serious concern. One day she missed an unscheduled luncheon meeting with Dylan Thomas and stalked the poet all through his favorite drinking  dives. (Just an aside: In 1953 Thomas, heavily into the Bottle, was found dead at the Hotel Chelsea, 222 W. 23^rd Street, New York).
  One day Sylvia's mother saw scars all over her legs and Sylvia said she wanted to die. Psychiatric help was obtained, including Electro-Convulsive Therapy. On August 24, l953, Sylvia pretended to run away from home, hid in a sub-basement of her mother's house and ingested 40 pills. While the story of her disappearance ran in local papers, she lay close to death , finally let out an audible moan, and was rushed to the hospital. Later, at a mental hospital, the treatment was more ECT plus talk therapy.
  Sylvia traveled to England on the QEII to study at Cambridge. She met friends, found and lost some relationships, and each loss seemed to throw her mind back to the loss of her father. At one of the literary parties, she met Ted Hughes. Later, they married but kept it a secret for awhile, not knowing how it would affect Sylvia's student stipend.
  Sylvia and Ted had a healthy interest in the occult: astrology, seances, ouiji boards, evoking spirits.  Living in a small flat in London in l960, Sylvia and Ted had a special highlight; a dinner with T.S. Eliot and his (2^nd) wife. Sylvia was having some literary success. She had already written The Bell Jar,  about a bright young woman who had a breakdown and had ECT. She was now working on another novel, about a bright young woman from America who moved to England  and got married.
  It all began with a phone call. Ted Hughes dashed to grab the phone first, but Sylvia got it. It was Assia, and she was not ringing for Sylvia. Sylvia overreacted a bit. She jerked the phone from the wall, tore up and burned the only copy of her fledgling novel, burnt 1000 letters from her mother. , burnt boxes of Ted's letters and some drafts of his poems. He moved out and began acting ugly.
  Then came that cold, cruel February day.
  Assia tried to take Sylvia's place and did a pretty decent job of it. She sought out the same friends. She looked up the same doctor. She and Ted went to live at the home where Sylvia had stuck her head into the oven. And in l969 she did the same thing.  Ted Hughes took a bad rap over the fact that both his wife and his lover had committed suicide. In the eyes of some, it made the man look bad…
  On March 16, 2009, Plath's son, age 47, committed suicide by hanging.  Dr. Nicholas Hughes had worked as Professor of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences at the University of Anchorage in Alaska until shortly before his death.  Hughes was unmarried. His sister, Frieda, said that her brother had had problems with depression, a disease not unknown to Frieda herself.   Frieda is a successful writer, poet and artist. As of 2007, she was living in Wales with her artist husband, Laszlo Kukacs.
  In a past interview, Frieda stated that she had not learned the mode of her mother's death until age 14, when she and a friend were studying Sylvia for a literature course. Frieda, as an older child, sometimes denied her identity, later noting in a poem that her mother's suicide and people's fascination with it had frozen her  and her brother's ages forever at 2 l/2 years and 9 months old respectively.