SINKHOLE

A pensive memoir about mental illness, suicide, and the quest to uncover often hidden family secrets.

Death by suicide may bring an end to a person’s psychic and/or physical woes, but it reverberates among those left behind, sometimes in the form of shame or regret that one could not do more for the deceased, sometimes in the form of getting rid of every reminder that that person ever existed. In Patterson’s sometimes-overwritten but forceful account, the suicide that set her on a yearslong quest for understanding was her father’s. He died by hanging himself from a Minneapolis bridge on a frozen night. Her grandfather also ended his own life. “Even before my father’s death,” writes the author, “I felt keenly the psychological burden of such an inheritance.” Since her father rarely spoke of her grandfather, Patterson had much to uncover, visiting his hometown of Pittsburg, Kansas, in a region where, in a profound metaphor, sinkholes abound. One in particular, near her grandparents’ home, “was frighteningly deep. From where I stood, it looked as if the lawn had been punched with a massive awl, exposing the ground’s secret interior.” Both father and son, it seems, had been methodical in preparing their own deaths while staring into their own abysses. Once inside her grandmother’s home, Patterson retrieved a wristwatch that, though its wearer was long dead, had been regularly cleaned ever since. This served as a sign that while the dead sometimes go unmentioned, they live on in things. Although her own mother removed almost all her father’s possessions from their home, Patterson writes, she kept a few things, including the suicide note. Apart from the personal, the author weaves in results from her research in thanatology and suicide, including the provocative thought from psychologist Edwin Shneidman that “the person who commits suicide puts his psychological skeleton in the survivor’s emotional closet.”

A searching, often elegant meditation on loneliness, pain, and redemption.