From time to time on Thursdays for the next little while, I will publish a chapter from my work-in-progress, a memoir tentatively called Before and After, about my experience when my son, Noah, spent three months in a psychiatric hospital in 2018, and how everything I did, both good and bad, was informed by the secrecy and shame surrounding my dad’s suicide 44 years earlier. Frame of Reference is, for now, the first chapter.
Frame of Reference
On March 11, 2018, exactly two weeks after my mother died, my then-20-year-old son was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. I’d known he was depressed. I had no idea how serious it was. I told myself he’d be in there for a few days. At most, a week.
In fact, he was in there for three months. Those were the worst three months of my life. That’s saying something, because 44 years earlier at pretty much exactly the same time of the year, my father went missing. I was 13 then and in my mid-twenties when I started trying to reconstruct the events of that time. That turned out to be more of a challenge than I’d bargained for, because (not surprisingly) I’d blocked out pretty much the entire period between when Dad disappeared and when his body was found nearly seven weeks later.
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