Introduction

Abstract

One snowy January, an extended family stays up late, gathered in a warmly lit living room, the night before the funeral of their beloved patriarch. He was an accomplished man who lived well into his seventies, though he had suffered from a chronic debilitating illness for the last decade of his life. Recent and distant memories are threaded together—some vivid, some partial. Cozily mundane recollections mingle with slightly exaggerated stories of his accomplishments, in almost hushed admissions of how the illness had compromised his normally gentle nature. The conversation moves to a sibling who had died before him—Forrest, whose suicide and eccentricities meant he was barely discussed and yet hard to forget. He took his own life some thirty years earlier: walking out the front door of the institution where he was being cared for, he went to the river, folded his clothes neatly on a rock, and drowned himself. The institution sent the clothes, still folded and damp, in a brown paper envelope to his brother with a note of condolence. The family members who knew him say that Forrest was chronically depressed after having fought in the Second World War.