Peering Into the Sinkhole of Family Suicide, With a Poet’s Eyes
A review of Juliet Patterson's memoir, "Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide"
On the occasion of an online reading by the author Juliet Patterson on Sunday, Nov. 12, I am posting my review of her memoir, which was released by Milkweed Editions in late 2022. The reading has been recorded and is available on YouTube here.
What are the images and the clues to your life left behind when you die? How will your loved ones remember you when they pick up those traces? “Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide” drew me into the search to pore over the physical and metaphorical evidence as the author sifts through the lives and deaths by suicide of her father and both of her grandfathers.
The careful observation that illuminates their history is heightened by the fact that the writer, Juliet Patterson, is a poet who turns a meditative gaze onto the lives of “the fathers” in her family, imbuing her memoir with compassion and universal context. Full disclosure: Juliet and I attended college together and she is still a friend.
She stands on the edge of a “frighteningly deep” sinkhole as she considers the last days of her father and grandfathers. Her imagined re-creation of her father’s last hours, rooted in actions and borne out by the historical tidbits left in the wake of a violent end, echoes not only a life purposely cut short, and what tragedy that reveals, but a life played out and the fragments floating in the ripples.
Considering the bridge where her father committed suicide leads her to contemplate the many bridges surrounding her, in Minneapolis, and the famous writer who committed suicide from another span. Seeing a flock of robins in winter triggers a memory of her mother tending a floundering baby bird and how the bird would return to their home after it matured. Such meditations help the reader drill into the moment, glimpse inside a person grappling with heartbreak.
Just as each image holds multiple levels of power, so do the carefully chosen words (a note slid “under the lip of a door,” a book’s passage “underlined with the nose of a pen”) add emotion and human agency to her searches and observations. She would sit with artifacts that might carry the weight of a talisman, such as she found in a rusty aluminum box: “Inside, a newspaper clipping with details of my grandfather’s death loomed atop a folded white handkerchief.”
She delves into the work of Edwin Shneidman, a psychologist and pioneer in starting suicide prevention centers who had read thousands of suicide notes. She’s stuck by a phrase in his writing, “the known details of a life” that serves to hold the grief over her father’s death in check. “This is the phrase that sticks with me,” she writes. “What do I really know about my father? There are sharp limits on my understanding.”
Her search takes her to Kansas, where her paternal grandfather was a politician and a revered member of the community yet died by his own hand on a rural road. What she uncovers there is not only a reimagined life, but also the history that shaped the state and inevitably also her family. Early settlement of Kansas led to a mining boom, of which a destructive legacy exists: sinkholes appear in the landscape above where the mines were burrowed. They swallow the land, make it uninhabitable. Her grandmother’s former home, in fact, had to be moved off its foundation as a sinkhole appeared below.
Patterson relates a geologist’s description of a sinkhole as “the creation of a void which migrates toward the surface.” The metaphor upwells in her family life as she considers the attitudes of the women who were married to those men, how they handled the suicides but also how they conducted their lives. And she grapples with life-changing decisions for herself, a gay woman committing to a partner as they consider having a child. How do you go forward in life with a load of grief and loss bearing down?
Sinkholes are a byproduct of our attempt toward progress, mining and undermining the very ground on which we stand. They signal an effect on our fragile environment as clearly as a suicide note can frazzle our psyches. They embody the lesson of history: how an action from the distant past can violently surface.
Considering the loss of a loved one is perhaps the ultimate conundrum of human nature, an endless rowing toward the unglimpsed shore of why. This poetic memoir brings such a point into view impactfully. Perhaps the best way to face a sinkhole is to mine the history.
If you or someone you know is grappling with the idea of suicide, contact the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988. It’s 24/7 free and confidential support for people in distress.
Wow, I think about family banes as it were. Suicide not among them in our family as far as I know but depressive mental health It seems to me needs to be bred out of a family over many generations. Or no. This book deserves a read. This sinkhole analogy is rough.