In Her Wake: A Child Psychiatrist Explores the Mystery of Her Mother's Suicide

This unabashed account of a daughter's lifetime of coping with the reality of losing her mother by suicide at a tender age is rendered with the tenderness of a true healer and the precision of a modern doctor. It runs unapologetically through a kaleidescope of emotional and practical responses of a survivor struggling to understand why and how a beloved family member could be driven to take her own life. Anyone who has suffered the loss of a family member, through suicide or other means, will be brought from tears to laughter, you'll find yourself smiling cynically at painful truths and celebrating life. The true gift in this book, though, is to the surviving family members of those who have committed suicide. To have this level of transparency and honesty shared poignantly by an obviously gifted writer and doctor is an offer not to be refused. Rappaort's decades of experience piecing together emotionally shattered children shines through every page, and you'll close the book a different person than the one who opened it.

So many parallels ... like the author, Nancy Rappaport, I grew up in the sixties (about 9 years before her), and went with my family to Expo `67 in Montreal. Like Nancy's mother, my mother had children (but only three not six) and worked outside of the home at a time when that was not the thing to do. Like Nancy's, the home I grew up in was filled with marital tension, one day escalating to the point that my dad threw a flower pot at my mom. Like Nancy's dad, my dad had a bit of a temper. One day when her three children were 5, 4, and 2, despondent over her marriage and the family's money problems, my mom decided to end her life. She parked her car on the railroad tracks, waiting for a train to end her misery. Unlike Nancy, I was lucky ... my mom did not follow through with her impulse. As the train barreled down the tracks toward her car, a vision of our faces appeared to her and she drove off the tracks with just a few minutes to spare. Perhaps because of my own childhood, I couldn't put this book down until I had turned to the very last page. Memories of the past swished by me like yard ornaments in a hurricane ... events and feelings I had forgotten in the haste of everyday living. Having never been to a psychiatrist or psychologist, I benefitted from the therapy indirectly provided by this prominent psychiatrist. I now understand my repetitive childhood nightmares, my own adolescent depression, and why my parents' marriage had to end, which it did just a few months after I grew up and moved away. This story of a woman's quest to find out why her mother ended her life is more intriguing than any best-selling paperback novel. Although I had never heard much about the family, I imagine my father-in-law (now deceased) ... who grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts, knew the family name well. Politically prominent and financially well-off, the Rappaports' made the news many times in the Boston area, as well as appearing in the March 1952 edition of Redbook magazine. Without spoiling the surprises unveiled in this memoir, by reading this book you will learn why suicide seems to run in families, why an overdose of pills does not make you gently go to sleep forever, and what one characteristic makes people more inclined to kill themselves (and it isn't the level of depression). I often think how different I would have turned out had my mom not been around to help me through my childhood, inspiring my optimism and determination. I now understand why Nancy Rappaport couldn't rest easy until she had turned every leaf in her quest to learn more about her mother. Like me, I wouldn't be surprised if Nancy sometimes wonders how she would have been different had her talented and brilliant mother persevered instead of succumbing to the darkness of depression.

In this remarkable book, Nancy Rappaport calls on her extensive training and experience as a child psychiatrist as she combs through secret journals, public records and painful memories to understand her own mother's suicide, which occurred when she was only four years old. She shares the stories of five generations of her prominent Boston family, as well as anecdotes from her many patients and scenes from her own therapy, to demonstrate how people cope with and understand mental illness and loss. Rappaport's thoughtful, eloquent book shows that while it is unbearably difficult to survive the loss of a loved one to suicide and to try to understand it, it is possible to nonetheless live a happy, productive and meaningful life. It inspires us to find meaning in the tragedy of loss and illness and carry it with us, but not allow it to define our lives.

Definitely a wonderful master piece. The author describes in a lovely way her thirst for understanding her mom's suicide, at the same time that shares with us her family history and way to cope with this sad incident. The family history, the author's experience as a professional psychiatrist, her research and her need to understand the family tragedy that shape her destiny really glued me to this book. Every page that I read would invite me to read the next one. At the end of the book I was proud of the author, proud of her strength to share with us every chapter. This book is a MUST READ, for every person who is interested in learning and reading about resilience, family strength, forgiveness and faith in life and in those who we love.

In Her Wake is a terrific book - I highly recommend it. I had a hard time putting it down - and that says a lot! (Though I am a former high school English teacher, I often start books and if they don't grab me within 30 pages I have a hard time completing them.) In Her Wake grabbed me on multiple levels - the drama of the large and complex family, the author/narrator's search for all she could learn about her mother who committed suicide when the author was 4, the impact of divorce and custody battles on individuals and a family and a psychiatric look at suicide. It was a great mix of a personal narrative coupled with psychiatric facts and anecdotes from the child psychiatrist/author's experiences with kids and families. Though you might worry that a book that centers on a mother's suicide would be depressing, quite the opposite is true. In Her Wake is actually uplifting - demonstrating the power of family (in all of its forms) to recreate itself in support of its members, and the power of people to persevere and thrive through tough experiences. Rappaport does a great job of bringing you with her on her search for her mother, and the growth that that search allows for her and for others. It is a profoundly personal view into a family - and it leaves us all wiser and more understanding for having read it. THIS IS AN ENGROSSING BOOK - GO BUY IT AND TRY IT FOR YOURSELF.