Us, After: A Memoir of Love and Suicide
I loved this book. It is sad and disturbing, and there were times I found it difficult to read. But I don’t consider that a criticism. What happened to this family was sad and disturbing. It is reality.
Rachel Zimmerman is a journalist who worked for WBUR, Boston’s NPR station. Her husband was an MIT professor who seemed easygoing and enjoyed his life and family. They had two young daughters. He adored them and Rachel, but he became severely depressed and died by suicide.
Rachel writes about the time after his death, trying to make sense of what happened while caring for two grieving girls. She is grieving, too, of course. But being a mother doesn’t stop because your own world has fallen apart. Her protectiveness of her daughters and her efforts to understand their different ways of grieving were among the things that moved me most.
What I found especially difficult was how much of his depression and hopelessness had remained hidden. How do you reconcile the person you knew, who loved you and your children, with someone who could no longer bear to be alive? His love for them makes his death harder to understand. We want to believe that having people to love, and people who love us, will be enough to keep us here. Sometimes the severity of a person’s illness overwhelms that.
As a therapist, I found this humbling. We ask about suicidal thoughts. We listen, assess, and try to understand what a person is experiencing. Still, we don’t always know how suicidal someone is or what they might do. I wish we did. Rachel interviews a suicide expert, and even he doesn’t have the answers she is looking for.
I can understand her need to keep asking. There must be an explanation, something that would make it possible to understand how the husband and father she knew could have died this way. She brings her skills as a journalist to that search, but she is also his wife, trying to understand what she couldn’t see and whether she could have done something.
I don’t have anything negative to say about this memoir. I don’t feel obliged to find a flaw simply to make this a balanced review. I loved her willingness to write about her own grief and her children’s grief, and about how difficult it is to make sense of a suicide when the person who might explain it is gone.
I recommend it. Be prepared to be sad. There is a great deal here to think about.
Winner of a 2022 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award. Published by Santa Fe Writers Project in 2024.
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