But as early as age 5, Kissinger remembers her beloved mother disappearing for days at a time. By her 40s Kissinger has lost two siblings to suicide, and her alcoholic mother has survived several attempts. Silence was the vessel in which all of her family’s desperate ululations were contained. Every suicide begets a vacuum, family and friends left to fill it with stories, efforts to rationalize the unfathomable. Some, like Kissinger, try to move forward by ignoring the vacuum altogether, as though the very act of speaking it aloud could set off another bomb, one whose wick is drenched in secrecy and whose fuel burns with shame.

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Persons: Meg Kissinger’s, Kissinger Locations: North Shore, Chicago