I don't think Edna's death was suicide. I think the sea is a link between Robert and Edna, it pulls them together. And even though she knows she shouldn't be going to the beach, she is drawn, pulled by an unseen force. She finds comfort when she is there, or even when she is just thinking about it. She even compares the ocean to the grass she remembers walking through as a young girl in Kentucky. This brings her a sense of peacefulness and comfort that she associates with childhood. The sea offers her the freedom she felt as a young girl, from the constricting life that she leads as a wife and mother in the Creole society. A chance to get away from a life, and the demands that come with it, that she is not well suited to handle. It is a place where she can be herself to look within herself.
             When Robert leaves Edna with the note " I love you. Good bye---because I love you."(185), she feels lost and alone so she travels back to the sea searching to feel the comfort she felt in the summer with Robert. She realizes she cannot escape the feelings that have been awakened within her and her dream of a life with Robert can never be fulfilled. As she is standing by the sea the end of her life is reflected in the bird with the broken wing fluttering down to the water to its death. Edna strips off her clothing and is called back into the sea, "She felt like some new born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known."(189) She is finally drawn into the sea permanently because of the freedom it represents and the life she can never escape.
             Edna's final awakening, as she stands at the edge of the water, invoices the same lines as her first awakening in the beginning of the story. "The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in the abysses of solitude."(189) These lines mark the starting and
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