Tracie Blackmon begins her story in 1982 in first grade at the age of six, on her first day of school. Tracie was called to the office. While she was out of the room, her teacher told the class Tracie’s mother was dead. The death had occurred a few days before, and Ms. Austin asked the students to be kind.
At lunch only one classmate asked how Tracie’s mother had died and Tracie told her; she had killed herself. This was the first time anyone had spoken to her about it and it would be a rare occurrence and is essentially, the theme of this memoir.
Blackmon tells us of a silence that lasted decades. She insists that almost no one in Wilsonville, Alabama inquired about her mother or offered much in the way of condolences or spoke of her at all.
And it was a small town, one stop light and seven churches, and everybody knew, but nobody spoke of it. She came to understand, over time, that people were not being cruel. Suicide frightens people. They did not know what to say. Even her father, a good, hardworking man, would never speak about it, except to say “Baby, I don’t know why your mama done what she done.…”
This memoir is not a book about suicide prevention, looking for the warning signs, where to seek help, and so on, although there is some of that in it. This book is about the way in which the trauma of loss is made worse by the silence that presents like pity, and the way in which the grief, when rarely spoken of, is the source of so much emotional difficulty.
Blackmon speaks of her own response. She rejected what she interpreted as pity, and the silence caused in her a defensiveness. She put up a shield which kept others away, emotionally, and in that way refused to allow in friendship, affection and, she suggests, even caused her to reject what might have been the love of her life. How could she let herself commit emotionally when she knew the person she loved might disappear in a moment?
Blackmon became an exemplary student and always the hardest worker at the job, a perfectionist, but sometimes angry and volatile. Blackmon also briefly speaks of her brother’s difficulties. He experimented with drugs, in a rather ordinary teenage way, but became addicted. Many stints in rehab failed because, Blackmon says, the doctors were treating the addiction, not the underlying, unresolved grief.
Over time, Blackmon realized what she needed. She gathered any information she could about Judy, collected pictures, spoke with people who knew her mother. She put together a mother she did not know. Blackmon found healing in groups of suicide survivors and commemorative “Out of the Darkness” walks, and she wrote this memoir, with Judy’s face on the cover.
