Posted by In many ways, Meg Kissinger’s childhood was idyllic and Father Knows Best-ish. Growing up Irish Catholic in late 1950s/early 1960s Chicago with her mom, dad, and seven brothers and sisters, there were fun times aplenty. But behind closed doors simmered a largely unacknowledged darkness: mental illness.
Nobody knew much about mental health at the time, and they certainly didn’t talk about this problem which evoked feelings of shame. That stigma and lack of communication eventually played a role in the suicide of two of Meg’s siblings. As a result, Meg devoted much of her award-winning journalism career to covering the mental health system (or lack thereof) in the United States in order to reduce the stigma around this sensitive topic. She has now shared her story in the memoir “While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence,” so we discussed it recently on “Christopher Closeup” (podcast below).
Meg notes that her childhood “was really a blast” at times, but adds there were also periods of “great heartache and sorrow.” She now knows the Kissingers’ troubles stemmed from severe bipolar, a mental illness she dubs “the family curse.” “The point that I was really trying to underscore,” said Meg, “is that both of those things can be true at once. There can be heartache and sorrow and mental illness, but also great joy and warmth and love.”
For Meg’s parents, the practice of their Catholic faith was an important part of their lives. She reflected, “It was expressed in different ways, which matched their personalities. My mother was quieter, but I would say her faith was bedrock to everything about her. I have a scene in the book where I talk about her wrangling all of us to bed, these eight little kids…I can remember so clearly she was just exhausted, but every night – and I mean every night, no matter what shape she was in – she always knelt by the side of the bed and prayed. That left a big impression on me. My dad was a lot more outgoing, a lot more vocal. He wrestled with his faith a lot. He was a lector at church. They were both avid mass attendees. We went, of course, every Sunday, hell or high water, and often during the week. My mom would bribe us during Lent, she would bribe us with chocolate donuts. So, I’m glad for that gift of their expression of faith because it really stuck with me and has proved to be quite a life raft.”
As years passed, Meg’s sister Nancy began acting erratically: cutting class, drinking, and shoplifting. The worst, however, was when Nancy swallowed a bottle full of aspirin and said she wanted to die. Though she survived, her behavior kept getting worse. Despite that, her grandmother believed Nancy’s problems were “all in her head.”
Her parents supported her as best they could, but Nancy’s suicidal ideations ebbed and flowed. She eventually committed suicide at the age of 24. Meg said, “It was a great sorrow to us, but not at all a surprise. We were left reeling without the resources or the ways to talk about it. And one of the more profound scenes in the book, I think, is when my dad called us all into the living room on the night that she died and told us in no uncertain terms, ‘If anybody asks, this was an accident.’ Which was ridiculous because the ambulance had been at our house countless times because of Nancy’s many suicide attempts. But he was really afraid that our family would not be able to have a funeral mass for her. This is 1978, and the prevailing dictates were that if somebody dies by suicide, that’s a mortal sin, and you are not to be given a Catholic mass or a burial. My dad’s best friend had lost a son to suicide the year before and that’s indeed how his parish priest handled that. As it turns out, that was not the case in our family. In fact, her funeral mass was concelebrated. I think there were at least three or four priests up on the altar, which was a great comfort to my mom and dad.”
Stifling the truth and never talking about Nancy’s suicide – not even with each other – produced negative long and short-term consequences for the Kissingers. Meg said, “When I was putting this book together, I kept calling my brothers and sisters to say, ‘It can’t possibly be that we never talked about this, right?’ And each of them said, ‘We never talked about it.’…Just to give you an idea: Nancy died late on a Friday night, her funeral was on Monday. On Tuesday, boom, we were all back doing whatever it was that we were doing. When you think about that…our lack of actually sitting down together and processing it…led to nothing good.
“We internalized that,” Meg continued. “We felt ashamed, we felt responsible, many of us, scared. We began, in time, to show the effects of that, which was turning to the bottle too much ourselves or acting out. And as readers of the book will learn, there was another suicide among my siblings. My brother Danny ended up taking his own life in 1997. That just felt like a bomb went off in all of our souls after his death because we just felt like, why couldn’t we have seen this coming and why couldn’t we have done more to help him? I really believe now it’s because we didn’t properly mourn Nancy’s death, and so we didn’t have the skill set to be able to have those conversations.”
By the time of Danny’s death, the Catholic Church’s attitude toward those who committed suicide had thankfully evolved to a more compassionate approach. The family received “so much outreach and love and support and comfort from the parish,” Meg noted. In addition, her father and brother, Jake, took part in an Archdiocese of Chicago program called Loving Outreach to Survivors of Suicide (L.O.S.S.), which brought them both healing.
Meg had found healing and purpose as well after writing an essay about Nancy’s suicide for the Old Milwaukee Journal. Though she feared the public response might be one of judgment and negativity, she was instead greeted by applause and hugs in the newsroom, along with calls and letters of support from the public. “There was such an appetite out there,” Meg said. “People really wanted to talk about somebody in their family who had died by suicide or a friend or whatever, and this secret society that was ready to burst at the seams.”
Prior to his suicide, Danny sent Meg a letter acknowledging his bipolar disorder after years of being in denial, and apologized for his actions in the past. At the end, he wrote, “Only love and understanding can conquer this disease.”
Meg feared this was a suicide note, and unfortunately her hunch was correct. After Danny’s death, she wrote “Only love and understanding can conquer this disease” on an index card and taped it to the side of her newsroom computer. Those words became her guiding light.
Meg explained, “I had the good fortune of working at a newsroom where the editor, a man by the name of George Stanley, was very dedicated to telling stories about mental illness and going after the scandal of the way people in America, really throughout the world, but the scandal of how we mistreat them. In his words, he considered them to be, ‘modern day lepers.’ For the next 25 years, he let me explore or examine that question: why aren’t people with mental illness given the same kind of care that we give people suffering from other illnesses? And what can we do to make their lives better?”
Regarding her hopes for those who read “While You Were Out,” Meg concluded, “I want readers to understand that shame is toxic. Shame kills. When we internalize things and we’re not honest with ourselves [or] not honest with each other, it boils inside of you and you’re singed by that. We need to find ways to talk about how we’re feeling and to take away the sting of that, to take away the shame and speak about these things in very loving, understanding, non-judgmental ways. And that goes both ways. So if you’re suffering, you need to have the courage and the humility to say that. Then on the receiving end, if someone you love is going through something difficult, find the compassion and the care to be with them.”
(To listen to my full interview with Meg Kissinger, click on the podcast link):
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