Includes bibliographical references.

"A fractured reckoning with the legacy and inheritance of suicide in one American family"--,Provided by publisher

2009. Patterson learned her father had died by suicide. His death was part of a disturbing pattern in her family, and over the months that followed she kept returning to one question: Why? Why had her family lost so many men, so many fathers, and what lay beneath the silence that had taken hold? Sifting through the few belongings her father left behind, looking to signs and symbols for meaning, Patterson also gathered evidence of the final days of both of her grandfathers, who also committed suicide. Her search provided not answers but essential, heartbreaking truth.-- adapted from jacket