The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order » (Reprint)

JOAN WICKERSHAM is the author of the novel The Paper Anniversary. Her work has appeared in the Best American Short Stories series. An excerpt from The Suicide Index earned her the 2007 Ploughshares Cohen Award for Best Short Story. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

When you kill yourself, you kill every memory everyone has of you. You’re saying “I’m gone and you can’t even be sure who it is that’s gone, because you never knew me.”

Sixteen years ago, Joan Wickersham’s father shot himself in the head. The father she loved would never have killed himself, and yet he had. His death made a mystery of his entire life. Using an index—that most formal and orderly of structures—Wickersham explores this chaotic and incomprehensible reality. Every bit of family history—marriage, parents, business failures—and every encounter with friends, doctors, and other survivors exposes another facet of elusive truth. Dark, funny, sad, and gripping, at once a philosophical and deeply personal exploration, The Suicide Index is, finally, a daughter’s anguished, loving elegy to her father.

The Washington Post - Reeve Lindbergh

Instead of turning her back, novelist and short story writer Joan Wickersham chose to impose a kind of formal order on her father's suicide. He shot himself at the age of 61, and she writes beautifully, in her slightly scattered Suicide Index, about the amount of sheer space a suicide takes in the lives of surviving family members, from the moment of death through the weeks, months and years afterward. Rather than using chapters, the book is organized as index entries under the heading of "Suicide," with subheadings such as "attempt to imagine," "items found in my husband's closet," and "romances of mother in years following." The format seems intentionally arbitrary and idiosyncratic, perhaps reflecting the quality of Wickersham's experience…Bleak, strong and fiercely honest, this book will help anyone going through that process.

Suicide:

act of

attempt to imagine, 1

bare-bones account, 5

immediate aftermath, 7

anger about, 35

attitude toward

his, 36

mine, 43

belief that change of scene might unlock emotion concerning, 44

day after

brother's appearance, 48

concern that he will be viewed differently now, 54

"little room" discussion with his business partner, 56

search warrant, 59

speculation relating to bulge, 61

deviation from chronological narrative of, 67

factors that may have had direct or indirect bearing on expensive good time, 72

Suicide:

factors that may have had direct or indirect bearing on (cont.)

pots of money, 88

uneasy problem of blame, 103

finding some humor in

ashes, 105

Valentine's Day, 106

glimpses of his character relevant to, 107

information from his brother sparked by, 116

intrafamilial relationships reexamined in light of

Munich, 124

my grandmother, 139

items found in my husband's closet and, 152

life summarized in an attempt to illuminate, 157

numbness and

Bullwinkle, 196

chicken pox, 199

duration, 201

food, 202

husband, 204

psychiatric response, 207

various reprieves, 212

opposing versions of, 214

other people's stories concerning, 216

other shoe and, 224

philosophical conundrums stemming from

first, 229

second, 230

possible ways to talk to a child about

family tree, 231

full disclosure, 234

not yet, 236

rational approach, 238

weapons god, 243

psychiatry as an indirect means of addressing, 247

psychological impact of, 256

readings in the literature of, 274

romances of mother in years following, 278

"things" folder and, 297

thoughts on method of, 302

where I am now, 305