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By Tracie Blackmon
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The first time somebody asked me how my mother died, I was 6 years old and standing in a first grade classroom in Columbiana, Alabama. I told the truth. I did not know yet that the truth was the one thing I was not supposed to say.
My mother, Judy, died by suicide the week before I started school. In a town with one caution light and seven churches, that was a fact everybody knew and nobody spoke. Her pictures went into a drawer. My daddy, who was a good man and a tired one, would say only one thing to me about her, and he never finished his sentence: “I don’t know why she did what she did, baby…” The grown-ups did what grown-ups did in 1982, which was to protect me by never mentioning her again. And a town full of people who loved my family, who brought casseroles and sat with us and meant every bit of it, went quiet.
The silence lasted 30 years.
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I learned, without a single person ever saying the words, that my mother was something to be ashamed of, that asking about her made people sad, and that the safest thing I could do was need nothing and say nothing. I got very good at both. I built a career on it. I could walk into any room, read it in a second, and give it exactly what it wanted. That is a useful skill. It is also what a 6-year-old does when she figures out that the people around her cannot bear her questions.
I knew my mother in fragments. A photo somebody slipped me. A story an aunt let fall at a reunion and then looked sorry about. The smell of a certain kind of soap. For most of my life that is all I had of her, and I made my peace with it the way you make peace with a limp.
Then one day, in my 40s, I said her name out loud to a room full of strangers, and I did not fall apart. That is the whole miracle. That is the thing I want to tell you, if you are carrying a drawer of your own. I said "my mother died by suicide" to people who did not flinch, and something that had been clenched in me since first grade let go.
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After that I could not stop. I said it to teachers, as part of my advocacy work in suicide prevention. I said it to teenagers who needed to hear that somebody made it to the other side of a thing like this. I said it in Montgomery to legislators and in Washington to anybody who would listen, as the Alabama Public Policy Chair for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and I got to play one small part in a very big push that turned into 988, the number you can call or text any hour of any day. The day that number went live was the proudest day of my life. Because it meant that somewhere a 6-year-old is going to grow up in a house where the grown-ups have somebody to call.
This August I published a book about the grief from losing my mom. I called it Her Name Was Judy, because that is the sentence I waited 30 years to say. People ask if it was hard to write. It was not. The hard part was the 30 years. The writing was just telling the truth at kitchen table range, with more laughing in it than you would think, because that is how my family does everything, including grief.
And then, five weeks after my memoir came out, I did something that surprised everybody, including me. I published a thriller. A dark one, set in a small Southern town that keeps its secrets, about a woman who learned early that what you do not say can hold a whole life together, right up until it does not. The first reviews called it terrifying. I think that is fair. I think that is what 30 years of swallowed truth sounds like when you finally let it out of the house.
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So here is what I know, for whatever it is worth to you. Every family has a drawer. Yours might hold a mother or a brother or a friend from high school or a man at church that nobody talks about anymore. The silence feels like kindness. It is not. It is a weight, and the people who carry it longest are the ones who were too small to be asked if they wanted to.
Say the name. At the table. Out loud. Say it to your kids. Say it to a stranger if you have to, the way I did. Maybe you will fall apart, but after a while, you won't. I promise you that, from experience.
Her name was Judy. Tell me theirs.
Tracie J. Blackmon is the author of Her Name Was Judy*, a memoir, and* The First*, a psychological thriller. She lives on Lake Martin in Alabama.*
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, text "988" to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or go to 988lifeline.org.
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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