Starting with the end

Joan Wickersham searches for meaning in 'The Suicide Index'

CAMBRIDGE - Early one morning in 1991, Joan Wickersham's father, a 61-year-old Connecticut businessman, went out to the driveway and picked up the newspaper. He placed it on the kitchen table. He made a pot of coffee, brought a cup to his sleeping wife, as he always had, and carefully set it on her bedside table. Then he went to his study, took a pistol out of a closet, sat in his armchair with his feet on a footstool, put the gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

It was the beginning of a long nightmare for his widow, two daughters, and extended family, one they had no experience with and could not wake from. "Suicide is such an enormous mystery," Wickersham said in an interview at her home. "No matter what we think we know about it, we never really have an answer."

After she got the call that morning, Wickersham and her husband drove to Connecticut, and were plunged into the horrifying details and the maelstrom of confused and sometimes conflicting feelings that the other survivors had: her mother's, uncle's, sister's, and those of family friends. They had theories and interpretations but no knowledge.

Such a death lingers, demands attention, begs for explanation, yet can't be fully resolved. It dogged Joan Wickersham for 14 years, until she found a way to write about it. The result is "The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order." Published in August, the book is a nonfiction finalist for the National Book Awards, which will be announced tomorrow night. Her intention was not therapeutic, but the labor of writing brought her as close as she'll ever be to the resolution she had craved for so long.

"The question everyone asks is, 'Why? Why did your father do it?' As if there is going to be some big answer that will explain everything, but there wasn't," said Wickersham, 51. He had told no one, hinted to no one, of his intention, and did not leave a note.

Wickersham's father (she does not disclose his name, out of consideration for living family members) was gentle and loving, the kind of parent who wanted to know of his family's everyday concerns and would go to extra lengths to try to help. There was evidence that he disdained suicide. The son of a neighbor had killed himself, and Wickersham said, "My parents were shocked and horrified, and my father said it was so sad, so tragic, and he clearly didn't think it was OK." She quotes him in the book: "You can't throw away your life, no matter how hard it gets, because it's all you have."

With time and discovery, some things became clearer. Her father had failed repeatedly in business and was about to be confronted over a ruinous, unpayable debt that he had hidden from his wife. Wickersham learned from her uncle that her father had been mercilessly beaten and belittled as a child by his father, a self-centered German actor, and emotionally neglected by his mother. He was private by nature and never disclosed his sufferings.

All were possible factors in his decision, but none answers the "how could he?" question.

"Some people blamed my father strongly for what he had done," Wickersham said. "I wrestled with the issue of blame - was there even a choice, or was it an illness? Having people blame him made it worse, because I loved him. He did this thing that made everyone mad at him, and it made me feel protective, which didn't give me a lot of room for my own anger at him."

Then there's the guilt. Her mother believed unshakably that if she had gotten up when her husband had brought the coffee, he would not have done it. "You don't know whether it would have taken a whole big intervention," Wickersham said, "or whether a momentary interruption might have made all the difference."

A tool for searching

Wickersham writes fiction and periodical nonfiction, including a column for an architecture magazine, and is the author of a collection of short stories, "The Paper Anniversary." She and her husband, a lawyer, met as Yale students and have raised two sons in Cambridge. In 1995 she began to write about her father's death. Her husband encouraged and supported her in the intensely private labor, but she had no writing adviser. "There was nobody who could tell me how to write the story," she said. "I had to find it myself."

She wrote a straightforward chronicle, then began a novel. "It was this muted third-person novel about a family where the father kills himself, and the impact on the family," she said. "It was flat, numbing, lyrical, and boring, not true to the experience. The more I tried to organize it and make it neat, the more disconnected it became from the experience."

In 2004 she went to the MacDowell Colony, the New Hampshire writer's retreat, and ended up abandoning the novel. "Something about being there, having that time and privacy, made me start over," she said, "and go about it in a more truthful, urgent, memoir-like way." She wrote a book, not with chapters, but with sections of varying length, organized as book-index headings, hence the title. The "index" is printed in the front, with page numbers, beginning with the heading "Suicide," followed by:

"act of

attempt to imagine, 1-4

bare-bones account, 5-6

immediate aftermath, 7-34"

Later entries include "numbness and," "glimpses of his character relevant to," "philosophical conundrums stemming from," and "possible ways to talk to a child about."

An index is a tool for searching, which is what Wickersham was doing. "She created a form to go with her content," said Ann Patty, Wickersham's editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. "It's spare, rigorous, unsentimental. One of the chief insights for me was that when you kill yourself, you change everyone's past, not only their future."

Wickersham explained: "My father, who was a familiar, loved figure, suddenly became a mystery. My mother died about a month ago, and I miss her so much, but I know who I am missing. With my father, the death took him away but also took away my sense of who he was. I wrestled with that for years, trying to restore him, to make him a complete person again, come up with a picture that is big enough to encompass all the contradictions."

If "The Suicide Index" wins the National Book Award, there will be acclaim and parties and celebration, which is bound to feel strange for the writer, given the sadness of her story. But Wickersham is not concerned; she knows she did not write for fame, money, or awards. "The push comes from being a writer," she said. "So much of what I know about the world, experiences I have not had myself, comes from having read about it. There is a feeling that when something important happens, a story is the way to go."

The agonizing conundrums surrounding her father's death have lost force, with time and the writing of the book. "If my father was kind and good and tolerant, how could he have done this?" she said. "If he had loved us, how could he have left us? I'm at the point now where I can accept that all of those things are true. Sometimes I have this fantasy that if I could get him back, I could ask him these questions. But I don't think he could answer."

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.