Sinkhole

Juliet Patterson

Description

A sublimely elegant, fractured reckoning with the legacy and inheritance of suicide in one American family.

 

In 2009, Juliet Patterson was recovering from a serious car accident when she learned her father had died by suicide. His death was part of a disturbing pattern in her family. Her father’s father had taken his own life; so had her mother’s. Over the weeks and months that followed, grieving and in physical pain, Patterson kept returning to one question: Why? Why had her family lost so many men, so many fathers, and what lay beneath the silence that had taken hold?

 

In three graceful movements, Patterson explores these questions. In the winter of her father’s death, she struggles to make sense of the loss—sifting through the few belongings he left behind, looking to signs and symbols for meaning. As the spring thaw comes, she and her mother depart Minnesota for her father’s burial in her parents’ hometown of Pittsburg, Kansas. A once-prosperous town of promise and of violence, against people and the land, Pittsburg is now literally undermined by abandoned claims and sinkholes. There, Patterson carefully gathers evidence and radically imagines the final days of the grandfathers—one a fiery pro-labor politician, the other a melancholy businessman—she never knew. And finally, she returns to her father: to the haunting subjects of goodbyes, of loss, and of how to break the cycle.

 

A stunning elegy that vividly enacts Emily Dickinson’s dictum to “tell it slant,” Sinkhole richly layers personal, familial, political, and environmental histories to provide not answers but essential, heartbreaking truth.

Sujets

• Vie de famille
• Soutien psychologique et conseils familiaux
• Kansas
• Minnesota
• Saint Paul (Minnesota)
• Death
• Suicide
• MI
• Minneapolis
• MO
• SD
• MN
• OH
• NE
• IN
• ND
• IL
• Pittsburg
• Middle West
• KS
• United States
• Grief
• The Women
• Psychology
• Paul the Apostle
• Woman
• Midwestern United States
• Mensajería instantánea
• Medio Oeste de Estados Unidos
• St. Paul
• Women
• Sociologie, société et politique
• HISTORY
• LGBTQ+
• Bereavement
• LGBTQ
• Midwest

Informations

• Publié par: Milkweed Editions
• Date de parution: 13 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781571317476
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Also by Juliet Patterson Threnody The Truant Lover
SINKHOLE
A Legacy of Suicide
JULIET PATTERSON
MILKWEED EDITIONS
© 2022, Text by Juliet Patterson
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415. [phone] milkweed.org
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Published 2022 by Milkweed Editions
Printed in Canada
Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker
22 23 24 25 26   5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Patterson, Juliet, author.
Title: Sinkhole : a legacy of suicide / Juliet Patterson.
Description: First edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed Editions, [2022] | Summary: “A fractured reckoning with the legacy and inheritance of suicide in one American family”--Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022001973 (print) | LCCN 2022001974 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571311764 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781571317476 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Suicide--United States.
Classification: LCC HV6548.U5 P38 2022 (print) | LCC HV6548. U5 (ebook) | DDC 362.280973--dc23/eng/20220421
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001973
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001974
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Sinkhole was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.
Author’s Note
This is partly a story of trying to understand suicide. This is also a story written through and about grief. In both cases, there are gaps to navigate—in memory, in access, and in the historical record—and so this book should be considered a work of creative nonfiction, although I have done my best to ground this work in geographical and historical research and the stories of others, as well as my own experience as I lived it. Specifically, the three imagined final days of my relatives—an attempt to understand the “transient tempest in the mind,” as psychologist Edwin S. Shneidman calls suicide—while based in this research, do not represent actual transcriptions of thoughts or events.
Finally, I would like to note that this material may be difficult for some readers to encounter. If you or someone you know is in suicidal crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255).
JULIET PATTERSON’S FAMILY TREE
I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
—Muriel Rukeyser, “The Speed of Darkness”
And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets
PART ONE
1.
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 had no choice but 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,