Six months had passed since my brother gassed himself, and still I could not write a word. And then, one day, that click - as Brick says in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, “the click in my head that makes me feel peaceful” - and words poured from my core.The result is The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide, my most intense and unifying work. It touches me in the way no other writing of mine does, if only because it is my truth: the truth of my brother’s life, and that of his death; what it was to be his sister and what it is to have lost him; and how in losing him, I found myself.

I still receive communications from the bereaved and from the suicidal, telling me that they have come to a new understanding of both grief and the desire for oblivion, and that this has led to the profound experience of forgiveness - both of themselves and those they lost.

If I sound too much like the Dalai Lama here, know this: my wrath can be borderless, serpentine, as far from forgiveness as hate is to art. But even so, I know what it is to love enough to forgive, and the experience is something like having a headstone lifted from your breast.

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