Heidi Stevens: The search for answers — and belonging — in the wake of family tragedy
Meg Kissinger's book “While You Were Out” is a clear-eyed look at mental illness. But it’s also a story of evolution and hope.
Journalist Meg Kissinger spent more than two decades reporting on America’s labyrinth, broken mental health system and its human casualties.
Her careful and dogged reporting led to public policy changes in Milwaukee, where she’s based, as well as numerous awards; she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, the winner of two George Polk Awards, a Robert F. Kennedy Award and more.
For her most recent story, she turned her investigative lens inward. The result is “While You Were Out,” a beautiful and searing memoir about her own family’s experiences with mental illness. She grew up in Wilmette, Illinois, with seven siblings in a boisterous, loving Irish-Catholic home beset by tragedy and bereft of the tools to fully cope. Two of her siblings died by suicide. Both parents struggled with alcoholism.
The book is illuminating, courageous and generous. In her Catholic elementary school, Kissinger was assigned to pick a saint to study and emulate. She chose Saint Therese of Lisieux, revered in part for her ability to suffer in silence and keep secrets.
Kissinger decided, ultimately, to do neither.
She first wrote about her sister Nancy’s death close to a decade after it happened — in an essay for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Sunday magazine. Kissinger had been visiting her parents and stumbled across her high school yearbook, which was filled with devil horns and blacked-out teeth and goofy comments, all courtesy of Nancy. She was overwhelmed with a tender longing.
“I had not let myself remember Nancy like that because I was too ashamed of the way she died,” Kissinger wrote. “Trauma does that to you. It steals your memory.”
That moment turned into an essay. Years later, when her brother Danny also died by suicide, Kissinger’s editor asked if she would write another essay. At first she recoiled. Eventually, she decided she must. The outpouring of phone calls, letters and emails after each essay proved why.
“The names and many of the details were different, but I quickly picked up on a universal theme,” she wrote. “People are frantic to get care for their family members suffering from mental illness. They didn’t know whom to call. They were either too embarrassed to talk to anyone about it or they couldn’t find anyone who would listen. So, they watched, day after day, while a little bit more of the person they loved disappeared before their eyes. They were confused, angry and frustrated. But, mostly, they were terrified.”
Mental health became her “beat,” so to speak.
“For the next 25 years, I traveled across the country and beyond, looking for answers to two simple questions: Why are people with serious mental illness so misunderstood, and how can we treat them better?” she wrote. “It was too late to help Danny and Nancy. If I was going to understand the illness that killed two of the people I loved most, I would need to look to strangers for answers.”
Kissinger spent a recent Wednesday in Lake Forest, Illinois, not far from her childhood home. She visited a couple of high school classes during the day, where she spoke with students about mental health and journalism and the intersection of the two. In the evening, she sat on a stage in an auditorium filled with more strangers (mostly) and spoke about her book and her family and her heart. Incredibly brave stuff.
I joined her onstage as the conversation’s moderator. The warmth in the cavernous room was palpable, and not just from the stage lights. For an hour she answered questions — mine and the audience’s — and for an hour I was reminded, once again, that we’re never alone. In whatever we’re enduring, in whatever we’re overcoming, in whatever we’re fearing, we’re not alone.
“While You Were Out” is many things. It’s a clear-eyed look at mental illness, of course. It’s an examination of the Catholic Church and its stance on everything from birth control to funeral rites. It’s a portrait of a large family in suburban America.
But it’s also a story of evolution — evolution in the way we’ve come to understand and treat mental illness. Evolution in the way the Catholic Church responds to suicide. Evolution in the way a family loves one other and understands one other and handles one another. Kissinger’s dad is appalled by her first personal essay, the one about Nancy’s death. By the second one, about Danny, he’s open and grateful.
So it’s also a story of hope. That we can find answers, that we can find healing, that we can survive darkness, that we can find a better way — as long as we never stop searching.
A man in the front row at Kissinger’s event raised his hand a couple of times during the audience Q&A, quick with kind words and helpful resources. He nudged others in the room to reach out to a local chapter of NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, for guidance.
His daughter, he told us, survived repeated suicide attempts. Now she’s married with children and doing well. He wanted to end the evening, he told us, on a high note. And he wanted to give us an assignment.
“Never give up on people,” he said.
That’s not the whole solution. Not even close. He wasn’t pretending it to be. But it’s a beautiful beginning and a worthy North Star to return to over and over, when we’re searching for something true to hold onto.
Never give up on people.
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