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Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide Kindle Edition
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMilkweed Editions
- Publication dateSeptember 13, 2022
- File size5651 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for Sinkhole
“Mixing autobiography, academic psychology, and an ecological history of Kansas, Patterson, a poet, examines the suicides in her family, beginning with her father’s.”—The New Yorker
“A soulful odyssey . . . [Patterson’s] bewilderment and edge-of-the-sinkhole grief is palpable . . . Though the memoir doesn’t solve the riddle of suicide or offer a neat narrative arc, it does show the value of remembering and the importance of paying attention to, for example, a ‘rack of suits and ties,’ . . . or a Lite Brite message left glowing in the dark after her father left for a business trip that said: ‘Be good. I love you. See you soon.’”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Patterson marvels at the pervasiveness of some of her family members’, on both her paternal and maternal sides, dying by suicide . . . Tying together environmental, political, and historical facts in her family tree, the author imagines what it means to take one’s life and shares what it’s like to be the one left behind. As fascinating as it is upsetting, Patterson has intersected the past and future, imagining the silent crisis happening among the men in her family, as well as the persistent fear of her own potential demise through self-harm, all while considering genetics, societal pressures, and prescribed antidepressants. The end result is an elegantly tragic work of research, history, and creative nonfiction that seeks answers, closure, and ultimate peace.”—Library Journal, starred review
“A spare, sensitive evocation of Patterson’s experience of grief, paired with an insightful work of family and regional history . . . The poet’s sensibility is evident in these pages, as she excavates her own raw emotions alongside passages of clear-eyed journalism and creative nonfiction. Sinkhole is a painfully honest and sobering work that may provide insight and comfort to those facing a similar tragedy.’”—Shelf Awareness
“After her father took his own life in 2009 at age 77, Patterson delved into her family’s legacy of suicide—the result is a stirring look at how history, environment, and cultural pressures all played a role . . . Patterson’s lyrical and discerning treatment of a global ‘psychological crisis’ will keep readers transfixed.”—Publishers Weekly
“A pensive memoir about mental illness, suicide, and the quest to uncover often hidden family secrets . . . Apart from the personal, [Patterson] 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.”—Kirkus Reviews
"Along with the environmental history braided throughout, Sinkhole offers a master class in how extensive research can add depth and breadth to personal writing."—The Washington Independent Review of Books
“Patterson’s poetic sensibility informs her prose as she weaves together ideas about family and research about land in a lyrical way.”—Book Pages
“Sinkhole is a literary triumph. Juliet Patterson brings us to a brave, smart, and compassionate understanding of suicide. Anyone who has lost someone to suicide knows the haunting that follows. You are buried beneath an avalanche of questions that can never be answered. But in Patterson’s adept hands, we not only enter ‘the natural history of suicide,’ offering insights to an erosional state of mind, we are taken into societal patterns that foster an atmosphere where suicide becomes the end point of isolation and despair. The somber connections Patterson makes between her father’s death by suicide and the family legacy that precedes his death, tied to a history of coal mining, exposes the fact that our health and the health of the planet cannot be separated. The violence we inflict on ourselves is a mirror of the violence we inflict on land. Juliet Patterson is a soaring writer who has chosen to not look away. We are the beneficiaries of her gaze. There is poetry in this elegiac book, with an uncommon beauty and stillness radiating between each sentence. Sinkhole resurrects our dead from the sorrow and silences surrounding suicide and gives voice to the whys of their voiceless acts.”—Terry Tempest Williams, author of Erosion
“In confronting her family’s dark legacy of suicide, Juliet Patterson does far more than plumb the depths of human despair. Sinkhole is a master class in the way truth can pry open the deepest cellar, how language can calm a raw, ragged soul. To read this unflinching look at darkness is to find a way toward the light. After so much darkness, so much light!”—Margaret Renkl, author of Late Migrations
“Juliet Patterson writes with a poet’s precision and a poet’s heart too about that most devastating moment, the loss of a parent. Devastating twice over by the terms and manner in which he died. Survivors are left to ask ‘Why?’ and normally one says there is no answer to this question. But Patterson keeps asking. In this text that has the feel of a police procedural but the emotional weight of a desperation to know, Patterson delves into familial and social history and brings us, the readers, along on a perilous journey. By the end we realize we each too might be—physically, socially, psychologically, spiritually, medically, environmentally—in the midst of life but on the lip of death. As a parent, a wife, a poet, a daughter, a human, Juliet Patterson makes the most courageous foray yet into answering that last unanswerable question: ‘Why?’”—Kazim Ali, author of Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water
“With deft fingers, Juliet Patterson digs below the surface of inherited illness, generational trauma, and societal notions of grief. Like its namesake, Sinkhole explores what lurks beneath seemingly stable ground. After the suicide of Patterson’s father, she is driven to investigate his death. What’s uncovered are multiple lifetimes of repressed emotion and internalized perceptions of failure. With two successive generations of patriarchs committing suicide Patterson reckons with what’s a coincidence, and what’s a pattern. In thoughtfully rendered passages she delves into creative nonfiction, imagining what those final hours were for her father and grandfather— what thoughts were on their minds, or weren’t. Sinkholes can be exacerbated by reckless natural resource mining, and Patterson ties a delicate net lulling the reader into a conversation between the two. If toxic lead levels can be discovered as a hidden byproduct of rampant capitalist practices— what other concealed ailments can be tied to a lack of respect for nature? What feelings of failure can epigenetically alter seemingly placid inner worlds generations later? Gracefully and languidly, Patterson illuminates what typically is seen as a void, and asks the reader to ponder: how do our outer landscapes reflect our inner worlds?”—Mathuson Anthony, Book Club Bookstore, New York, NY
“When I started this lyrical exploration of suicide, inheritance, and place by lesbian poet Juliet Patterson, I had no idea that my home state would play such a central role. As it turns out, both of Patterson’s parents grew up in the former mining town of Pittsburg, KS, now ravaged by sinkholes. In an obsessive unearthing of family history spurred by grief for her father, Patterson investigates the lives and suicides of three family members: her father, and each of her parents’ fathers. As Patterson delicately processes her own experiences as a suicide survivor, she opens up a dialogue for readers—we can talk about suicide, and we should talk about suicide. Sinkhole is a beautiful, fascinating read.”—Mary Wahlmeier, Raven Book Store Lawrence, KS
“The author takes us on her journey to learn the unknowable, to understand what is not understandable, in an effort to break the patterns of the past - escape a metaphorical sinkhole. Along the way you'll learn about the history of a region and the violence wreaked against its people and environment that persists today - literal sinkholes.”—Alana Haley, Schuler Books, Grand Rapids, MI
“Great storytelling; Patterson has a soothing and inviting voice even while discussing the hardest parts of her father's suicide. A lovely blend of family history and grief.”—Lauren Nopenz Fairley, Curious Iguana, Frederick, MD
“I had to wait to read to read this book, because in the last two years there has been so much loss both personally and collectively. I love Juliet's straight forward writing and research; I think it's something that we all want to be able to do. We're all on a journey and Juliet's book has helped me breath once more.”—Jayne Rowsam, Mystery to Me, Madison, WI
Praise for Juliet Patterson
“Juliet Patterson’s poems are entirely themselves; they use time and the eye and tongue—all the body, as thought and insight, inside and outside history.”—Jean Valentine
“Patterson’s work is rich with compression, power, and a precision I’d like to steal for myself.”—Joni Tevis, Orion
“Spare, pastoral, intimate, and probing, [Patterson’s] musically exacting poems offer arresting insights. . . . They question, invent, refer, divert, take flying risks. They are fluid, considered, dignified. They celebrate the human eye, mind, and tongue.”—Olga Broumas
“Thrilling . . . [Patterson’s] poetic realm has been that of the precise image . . . placed in short and striking lines. Through these images, she has revealed the path of the mind, often playfully.”—DIAGRAM
“[Patterson’s] poems are driven by a voice that I think would define the world clearly and unequivocally if it were possible. Instead, the poet is forced (like most of us) to offer up images, the correspondences that connect them, and the humanity behind what life leaves for us. . . . Creating a world where there are no easy answers, Patterson asks for active reading.”—Painted Bride Quarterly
“In Patterson’s vision, nature rarely gives without taking some small token in return. . . . She laments the looming destruction of nature even as that destruction portends the creation of something new.”—Publishers Weekly
“Direct and tough, lush and erect . . . [Patterson] will bring you tears, bend your branch, twist your mind.”—Twin Cities Daily Planet
“There is a kind of communion . . . between what is said and what is not said, that reminds the reader of walking through the very December fields that Patterson describes, noting the dry, brittle landscape and yet—and also—the spry and determined life that persists within it. . . . [Patterson’s] quiet poems . . . are more like finely chiseled ice sculptures than gleaming, luxurious gems. But the truth they express is no less radiant—in fact, it may be even more so, borne as it is out of a season of less rather than plenty.”—Shannon Gibney
“Patterson’s ear is at once impeccable and exciting. . . . We understand the poet’s vision and language as a form of querying, a kind of existential question conditioned by existence’s constant opposite, nonexistence.”—Ryo Yamaguchi
About the Author
Juliet Patterson is the author of Sinkhole, as well as two collections of poems, Threnody and The Truant Lover, a finalist for the Lambda Award. Her poems and essays have appeared widely. She has received fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Minneapolis-based Institute for Community Cultural Development. Her other awards include the Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize in nonfiction and the Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize. She lives in Minneapolis.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Tuesday turns to Wednesday. December 17, 2008. The moon is almost in the last quarter. The sky is clear but pitch black. The temperature dips near zero, and already a foot of snow covers the ground in Minnesota. Coming home from work past midnight, my father swerves into the driveway somewhat carelessly, leaving his car pointed at an angle, a glove caught in the door. He enters the house through the garage door and descends into the basement, while my mother sleeps in the bedroom upstairs. He empties the contents of his pockets (keys, coins, cell phone) and removes everything from his money clip except his identification, which he leaves in his right rear pocket. He stands at the laundry utility sink and removes his dentures. He sits at his desk and writes a farewell note. He slips the note under the lid of the laptop computer on his desk and stacks several three-ring binders next to it.
He changes clothes. He pulls on a pair of long underwear and two sweaters, then an old winter coat, slightly torn at the sleeve. Before going out the door, he retrieves a small black sack that contains plastic bags, two box cutters, a pair of scissors, duct tape, cotton balls, and white nylon rope.
He walks outside, leaving the house through the garage, past the car in the driveway and into the street. He walks a block on Roy Street and turns left at Highland Parkway. He walks a half mile down a long sloping hill, near two water towers and a sprawling golf course buried in snow. He turns right and walks another mile, along the east side of the golf course and into a park. Just before he reaches Montreal Avenue, he enters a small parking lot adjacent to a playground and a bridge that extends over the road. Here the snow is deep, and it slows him as he walks to the bridge’s railing. From his sack, he takes one of the box cutters, the rope, and a plastic bag. Left inside is a note specifying his name and address. As he cuts the rope into two pieces, he accidentally nicks the thumb of his right hand. He makes two nooses. He ties the ropes to the railing and wraps the knots in duct tape. Then he climbs over the railing and stands on the concrete ledge, no more than a foot wide, overlooking a steep ravine. Below, to the left, a winding set of stairs is obscured by trees and snow. He pulls the plastic bag over his head and secures the nooses around his neck, tightening them just below his right ear. All of this takes only a matter of minutes.
My father chooses to die on the north end of the bridge. There, the canopy is so dense that, from the street, the structure appears to grow from the hill. In the dim light spreading from the railings, the crown of its arch bestows darkness.
When my father is found, nine inches of his right hand and wrist have frozen, though his trunk is still warm. The official time of death, 8:48 a.m., marks the moment when the police are dispatched to the scene, but the medical examiner estimates the actual time of death to be sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. My father hangs for nearly six hours through the night.
***
On the day my father died, a bitter cold wave swept across the northern regions of the country—snow and sleet fell from the Twin Cities, where we lived, to states on the eastern seaboard. It was midwinter, near the solstice, a time marked by the shortening of days.
I woke that morning feeling drowsy and hopeless, largely a side effect of the Vicodin I’d been given to relieve pain from injuries I’d sustained in a car accident. One week earlier, my car had been rear-ended by a taxi in a bottleneck stretch of the I-94 freeway; the driver hadn’t noticed that traffic ahead was slowing. I’d seen him careening toward me in the rearview mirror and knew I was going to be hit. Though I was lucky not to suffer any fractures or injuries to my spine, I had strained the upper vertebra known as the axis and damaged ligaments in my neck, chest, and upper and lower back. No bruises or cuts, just invisible and severe soft-tissue damage. It was difficult to sit; to stand; to concentrate, reason, or think. Without hydrocodone, I could feel the torn edges of muscle and tendon, the path of nerve needlelike in my arms.
As I cautiously rose, I realized that December 17 felt like a significant date, but I wasn’t sure why. The only explanation was that, for the first time since the accident, I was planning to leave the house for something other than a medical appointment. I worked for a publishing sales group as an office manager, and my job involved not only clerical and administrative tasks but also physical labor—the office was a storehouse for the company’s sales materials, including catalogs and books. After the accident, I’d had to take leave. Lifting boxes had become impossible, and sitting, at least for long periods of time, problematic. I was slated to return for a few hours that day. By the time the phone rang, however, I had already returned to bed with an ice pack, resigning myself to the fact that this wouldn’t be happening. Listless, I could feel my body warming slightly from the morning’s dose of medication, my heart slowing.
My mother’s voice was strained. My father was missing from the house. I remember feeling an acute awareness of the burden that sometimes comes to an only child; she had no one else to call. I heard panic in her voice—a dire uncertainty—as though perhaps she already understood the meaning of his absence before the facts could be pieced together.
A few minutes later, she called again, hysterical; she’d discovered his suicide note underneath the lid of his laptop computer. I have chosen to go on the north end of the footbridge over Montreal Avenue . . . near the steps I used to exercise on with the Beagles, it said, delivered in an oddly casual syntax, as if he’d just gone out of the house on a quick errand.
My partner, Rachel, had already left for work. I called her office. She hadn’t arrived yet, even though the walk was only a few blocks. Rather than waiting for her to receive my message, I rushed out of the house to find her. I took the rental car I’d been given following the accident, driving erratically under the influence of painkillers, and going only one block before I recognized the silhouette of Rachel’s backpack and her familiar stride. I have no memory of what I said to her as I climbed out of the driver’s seat and she buckled herself in, nor do I have a memory of my 911 call, except that when I asked the dispatcher to summon police to the park, he told me they were already on the scene. I knew then that it was too late.
The police arrived at my mother’s house moments after we did. No knock or bell—they simply walked in. One officer escorted my mother to the dining room table. The other stood with me just a few feet away in the kitchen, asking a battery of questions: What’s your relationship to the deceased? Any other relatives need to be notified? Are there other people you’d like us to call? I stood with my father’s suicide note in my hand, not reading, exactly, but rather occupying myself as I answered these questions, flipping the paper one way and then another, as if to make physical sense of it. Only in this moment, on the day he died, was I allowed to see and touch the note. The police would take it with them when they left, as evidence.
Morning news flared on a countertop television, mixing with the muted sounds of the officer’s two-way radio. The moment unfurled in slow motion, the odd visual constraints of the kitchen shifting into a disjointed and chaotic landscape of sound—television, radio, the furnace fan bursting through a heater grate, the whisper-scrape of the police officer’s jacket, and then his voice again. You’ll need to make arrangements with the coroner’s office. Here’s my card if you have any questions.
The first officer went outside, and I left the kitchen and sat down on the dining room floor. The room spun. My mother sat at the table still dressed in a nightgown, leaning forward out of her chair. I heard the second officer, a woman, say, I’ve seen a lot of these kinds of things—hundreds of scenes—some awful stuff.
I felt bodiless and strange, as if I had lost contact with the ground. I watched yellow light unravel on the carpet and against the second officer’s black shoe.
—He looked peaceful out there, she continued, very clean. Peaceful.
The house went quiet with an endless pause.
—Maybe that will help put your mind at ease.
I turned my face to the window. Across the yard, a neighbor’s Christmas lights blinked in a row of junipers.
The day unraveled from there. A police chaplain came and went. A friend of my mother’s arrived. Rachel made a trip to the store and brought back food to the house. I couldn’t eat. By early afternoon, arrangements needed to be made. I telephoned the coroner, the funeral home. I answered questions I cannot recall. As the sun began to set and the day dimmed, I returned to the floor, lying on a pack of ice. Then, as we left my mother’s house in the darkness, I asked Rachel to drive toward the park. We turned left on Montreal Avenue, down the hill that led to the bridge. The rise of the structure loomed on the horizon; the crown, haunch, and ribs sallow in streetlight. At the sight of it, I wept.
In the weeks that followed, I returned to my feeling that the date was a significant one. December 17, I found, was both the Christian feast day of Daniel the prophet as well as Saturnalia, the ancient Roman festival honoring the deity Saturn. The biblical flood began on the seventeenth day, and in Greek superstition, it’s considered the best day of the month to harvest timber for a boat. A haiku was often written using seventeen onji, or sound-symbols. Seventeen is an ominous number for Italians, considered the numerical equivalent of the Latin expression meaning “I lived,” and, by extension, “I am dead.”
***
Over the next few months, I realized that I didn’t know my father very well; I had not spoken to him about things that mattered. There was a silence in him, and I had known, even as a very young child, that this was far more complex than a simple refusal of the past. It was, instead, a response to unthinkable grief, a coping strategy that forged a collective bond between my parents and placed large parts of the family history under taboo. We were all children of suicides. My father was eight when his father, Edward Patterson, took his own life, and my mother was thirty-two when her father, William McCluskey, did the same. If we rarely talked about important things, it was next to never that I heard them discuss their childhoods or my grandfathers. I knew little about those men or about the ways they had died.
Even before my father’s death, I felt keenly the psychological burden of such an inheritance. My mind was drawn to sorrow and shame; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow and shame; into the belief that everyone labored under sorrow and shame. My own vulnerability to depression had led me to therapy years ago, where I had begun to understand the elusive nature of trauma between generations and the messy collusion with history. After my father was gone and I felt his violent absence, I knew I needed to break open my family’s silence. Who were these men? What led to these deaths in my family? What did my family’s history of suicide imply? And what did it mean for my own future?
I can see now that, above all else, I was driven by a need to untangle myself from the strong ties suicide had attached to my life. I wanted to bring the past closer, to excavate a wound. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that if I did nothing else, at least I needed to uncover the stories long ago sealed in rock. Through the layers of sediment I began looking, grasping at dust.
Product details
- ASIN : B09Y9J4T7R
- Publisher : Milkweed Editions (September 13, 2022)
- Publication date : September 13, 2022
- Language : English
- File size : 5651 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 260 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #967,162 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #132 in Psychology eBooks on Suicide
- #1,184 in Coping with Suicide Grief
- #1,287 in Death & Grief (Kindle Store)
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I found myself drawn into the story from the beginning, hoping, as I always do (when reading yet another survivor's memoir), that she would ultimately make sense of these tragic, familial deaths. Curiously, she does not.
What she does instead of plumbing the depths and finding answers, she goes off on seemingly unrelated historical and environmental tangents, which, for me, felt like diversions from the more relevant social/interpersonal environments that actually created the conditions for suicide. She reads, quite often, like a transcendent historian, rather than a memoirist or amateur suicidologist. Only briefly and, to my mind, disappointingly, does she venture into the explanatory literature and science of suicide, which might have helped her find a more compelling thread winding through her labyrinth of exhaustingly historical and generational complexity.
In the end, it felt as if I, too, had fallen into a sinkhole, one created by undermining the very human story with too much, well, mining for long-forgotten trivia about Pittsburgh, Kansas. Incongruously, she alludes to the possible contribution of environmental pollution to her progenitors' ultimate self-destructive denouements, which struck me as peripheral at best, grounded in nothing but speculation.
I suspect, of course, that Ms. Patterson's ultimate failure to find the answers she sought so obsessively led her to adopt a more literary and poetic alternative, founded on the admittedly interesting analogy of a sinkhole.
By the time I finished her book, however, I felt rather angry, not at her, but at the field of suicidology itself for failing, rather spectacularly, to empower loss survivors like Juliet, to make more well-founded sense of such unspeakable tragedy, when, in fact, there is an unacknowledged consensus emerging today that suicide is largely a social phenomenon, caused dominantly by an individual's growing sense of becoming trapped in “social pain"—which I could see, rather dimly, taking place in her father's and grandfather's lives, just beyond Juliet's purview.
The book is a little too beautifully written, perhaps, without ultimately offering any guidance to other suicide loss survivors, who may be embarking on their own obsessive, potentially fruitless quests. I feel bad giving this finely crafted piece of creative nonfiction a rather mediocre rating, but it left me frustrated and (as another reviewer noted) wanting something more. As I see it, she did not dig deeply enough into the toxic ground of her family's psychology, despite her Herculean historical research into so much distracting minutiae over so many years.
I do want, finally, to say that the single most important line in Patterson's memoir, to me, is found at the end of chapter 25, where she nicely summarizes the real, emotional and existential value of embarking on such a quest, regardless of whether one does or does not find answers:
"Slowly, a flickering insight arrived: the search I'd undertaken—set off by a death, set off by a trail of things left by my father—had helped me not only to feel my grief, but to transform the pain of it."
That, ultimately, was the value of my own quest to understand my daughter's suicide. Unlike Patterson, though, after an intense, three-year forensic investigation, a biopsychosocial autopsy, an epic Homeric odyssey, I believe I found the answer to my own rather cosmic Why Question. I made sense of my daughter's death by delving even more deeply into the literature of suicidiology, comparing her life and death with the science and psychology of social pain, thereby unraveling the Gordian Knot. Writing my own book, crafting a coherent and literary narrative, was how I, too, transformed my own social pain into something else entirely: a thread for others to follow through the labyrinth of life and death, if they so choose.
Her story is a sad one and really doesn't seem to answer her questions, but it still is interesting. I very rarely read a book a second time, but I do think I will read this one again in the near future. My family history were miners in this area also, so that part of the book was especially interesting to me.
The author was in our area and did some book signings and even gave a presentation, but I was unable to attend. After reading her story I wish I had been able to meet her.
I was absolutely blown away by her depth of research into southeast Kansas and the way she seamlessly intertwines this complex history of this heavily mined area with her own reflections. It is not a self-help book, nor does it have a resolution where she wraps up her grief with a tidy bow. Instead, she realistically shows the messy and non-linear process of grief, especially after such a traumatic death. I loved this book and really treasured being able to hear Patterson's thoughts about her work. Highly recommend.