While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

by Meg Kissinger

Once, I even laughed nervously. Like Peter in the garden at Gethsemane, I knew instantly that I had just betrayed the one person in my life who most consistently modeled love and compassion, and I was bitterly disappointed in myself for being so weak.

I’d reach out and take one of his scraps even if I didn’t want it, just to make him feel better, to put an end to the awkwardness.

Our father’s sudden mood changes and our mother’s melancholia made us tense, like little deer teetering through the forest, vulnerable and unprotected. We fretted that the tigers could come bounding toward us at any second. Or, maybe, they’d creep up on us slowly, slinking through the glades, as tigers often do.

wasn’t as convinced. Maybe she doesn’t want to be rescued again and again, I thought as we made our way toward the hospital. Maybe we’re being selfish by working so hard to keep her alive when what she wants most of all is to be out of her pain.

I’m pretty sure we didn’t have a full deck of cards in the house, a metaphor lost on no one.

I’m glad I could set the record straight. Nancy deserved to be remembered for the way she really was, not for how we wanted her to be.

Family members of people who die by suicide have a higher risk of killing themselves. So are those who’ve spent time in jail.

To lose one sibling is a tragedy, I said, paraphrasing the old Oscar Wilde quote. To lose two looks like carelessness.

We’d both read plenty of stories about people with cancer who had battled to the end and what noble warriors they were. How was Danny’s campaign any less heroic?

When someone dies suddenly, especially if it’s by suicide, you don’t get to grieve them in the same way that you do for someone who’s lived a full life or battled a long illness. You might strain to recall an amusing anecdote or two, but to assuage the guilt or dull the shock, you constantly remind yourself how sick they were and that they are much better off now that they are dead.

Prevention experts have identified several factors that add to the risk of suicide: violence in the home, financial insecurity, access to lethal means, lack of coping skills, isolation, previous attempts. We had all of these. Suicide is preventable, the experts say. It starts by talking about it.

Tell them it is going to hurt, she said. That’s how the healing starts.