A Dying Woman's Last Wish: To See Her Sister Before the End
Mabel Burnside, a Seattle mother who waded into the tide flats seeking death, lies gravely ill at the House of the Good Shepherd — holding on only in the hope that her sister can reach her bedside in time.
Mrs. Mabel Burnside, the cocaine and morphine user who tried to commit suicide in tide water near the Union Electric Light Works, is dying at the House of the Good Shepherd. The attending physician has announced that the thread which holds her in this world may break at any moment. Mrs. Burnside fully realizes that death stares her in the face, but is perfectly calm, and with a cross in her arms waits for the end. Yesterday morning she was baptized.
Police Matron Taylor was called to her bedside last evening and had a long talk with her. She said her one hope was to be able to live until her sister, Mrs. Frank Seaburg, of Sheridan, Wyo., arrived at her bedside. Dispatches were sent to Mrs. Seaburg and Mrs. J. W. Stout, another sister living in Clallam county, stating the condition of Mrs. Burnside. It is hardly possible for Mrs. Seaburg to reach Seattle in time to see her sister in life.
The disease is typhoid pneumonia, and without doubt it had its start the night she threw herself into the waist-deep, dirty water on the flats and groped around for a half hour to find a deep hole. When she was taken out, her condition was pitiful, and for a long time she lay at police headquarters insensible but in such agony that even those who knew her history could not help pitying her.
The efforts of Agent Gilmer, of the Bureau of Associated Charities, in Mrs. Burnside's behalf have already been spoken of at length in the Post-Intelligencer.
The history of Mrs. Burnside is that of an intelligent woman who has been so unfortunate as to have acquired a taste for morphine. Then came cocaine and sooner or later the grave. It is an easy thing to form the habit, but to break away from the seductive influence of the insidious drug is so difficult that thousands who try fail.
Eva Burnside, the 4-year-old daughter of the unfortunate woman, is at the House of the Good Shepherd.
“She said her one hope was to be able to live until her sister... arrived at her bedside.”
Long before fentanyl, Seattle's papers were already chronicling people dying in the grip of addiction — and the matrons, charity agents and religious homes that tried to catch them. Mrs. Burnside's story keeps her dignity at the center: addiction was a public-health crisis then as now, and the person at its heart is more than a diagnosis or a headline.
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