The tragedy of suicide is often magnified by shame. While suicide attempt survivors and family members left behind should not feel obligated to share their experiences, their stories can open up difficult conversations and make us feel deeply seen. Rachel Zimmerman’s debut memoir, Us, After: A Memoir of Love and Suicide (Santa Fe Writer’s Project, 2024), offers us this invaluable gift.
The book begins when a state trooper arrives at Zimmerman’s home to inform her that her husband, Seth, has jumped to his death off a nearby bridge. Seth had never been diagnosed with a major mental illness and was a successful MIT robotics professor and loving father. Zimmerman cannot fathom how to explain this tragedy to their two young daughters. Desperate to understand her husband’s suicide, she uses her experience as a journalist to look for clues: she reads scientific studies, interviews doctors, and speaks to a suicide-attempt survivor—a man who jumped off the same bridge and lived. Zimmerman searches for “a story [she] could live with” and ultimately finds solace through her relationships with her daughters, friends, and growing family.
I spoke to Zimmerman over Zoom about the trauma of spousal suicide, the time-bending experience of grief, and the narrative power of suicide notes. The following interview discusses suicide and suicidal ideation.
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The Rumpus: After your husband’s suicide, you looked for comfort in scientific research. How did you decide which data to include in Us, After?
Rachel Zimmerman: I was desperate to understand Seth’s suicide, and as a journalist my initial instinct was to talk to a bunch of experts and pore over studies. It quickly became clear to me that I did not want to write a book that was like My Husband Died by Suicide and In Other News, Here’s The State of Suicide Research. I didn’t want to write the definitive, well-researched book on suicide. I wanted my book to be literary and have emotional valence. I wanted any research to be woven naturally into the narrative. For me, that meant only including scenes of talking to people whose expertise complicated or clarified my understanding of Seth’s suicide.
For example, when I talked to the psychiatrist, Dan Brenner, he spoke a lot about how suicide isn’t a choice. The most confounding thing about suicide is that it seems to be a volitional decision. Seth had this charmed life, why would he turn away from it? Talking to Dan offered a lot of relief for me. It affirmed the story I told my daughters: that Seth had an illness in his brain and that is what killed him, like cancer cells run amok. I talked to many more people than I included in the book, but I only included research when the data made me feel something. This made the book much harder to get published, frankly, but I hope it gave the memoir emotional authenticity.
Rumpus: You ultimately arranged your book in short chapters. Many memoirs of grief unspool in a nonlinear fashion, which speaks powerfully to the way loss disrupts our experience of time. How did you settle on the structure of Us, After?
Zimmerman: The book was originally a memoir in essays, but every writer I showed it to said, “This is too tidy. We want to feel it more.” I realized how comfortable I was, as a journalist, writing shorter stories with tidier endings. I had to open up those essays and pull together lots of narrative threads. I had to develop myself and my kids as characters—you know, to write a book, not just a series of journal entries.
As to the order of the book: grief does profoundly reorder your sense of time. Those tidy classic “five stages” don’t happen sequentially—or even at all. My experience of grief was that it was a lurching forward and back. It would recede and come to the forefront. It would stop me in time and it would propel me forward, then backwards again. The book’s arc is overall chronological in that it starts when Seth dies and ends about five years later, but within those chapters I tried to track more of an emotional chronology. There are three big sections: Seth’s death, the desperate murky middle of digging to understand and wondering, “What did I miss?” and the calmer, more grounded ending. Importantly, I didn’t want to end with getting remarried. It happened organically and it was beautiful, but re-partnering wasn’t the end of our story. Seth remains pervasive in ways that I couldn’t imagine. Even watching my youngest daughter on her ultimate frisbee team last week—she moves exactly like him. Seth comes up in unusual and unforeseen ways. If I told the story strictly chronologically, it wouldn’t have made emotional sense.
Rumpus: Can you talk more about another meaningful formal decision you made: your memoir’s title? I liked how the “Us” in Us, After shifts through the book, from you and Seth, to you and your daughters, to you and your new family unit.
Zimmerman: Yes, all of the above—especially that second definition. I think the “us” is my two daughters and I reflecting on the good in what remains. It’s the three of us holding the absence of Seth. He is still here with us, and we talk about him all the time.
Rumpus: My husband is a hospice chaplain, and he likes to quote a line by the playwright Robert Anderson, “Death ends a life, not a relationship. . . .” Does this speak to you?
Zimmerman: I love that! The complicating factor, the most difficult aspect of Seth’s death, was of course the incomprehensibility of his ending. There is a section of the book where I imagine that he died in a car accident—which is what I thought initially when I came home that day, because his car was gone. I wish it had been cancer, I wish it was something I could easily explain. Not that it would have made it feel better, but there is so much stigma around suicide. Combined with the fact that he was never diagnosed with any major mental illness. He was a brilliant, moody engineer. He had a lot of shame and never developed coping skills beyond thinking he would fix things himself. He made a very bad decision in a single moment. It was enormously painful and difficult to try to explain this to my children when they were little.
Rumpus: I really appreciate how you grapple with that stigma. There are very few memoirs by people whose spouses have completed suicide. The vast majority are about the death of a child, sibling, parent or friend. Do you think there is an additional layer of stigma in spousal suicide?
Zimmerman: Yes, absolutely. I remember when I came out of that acute phase of shock, I started worrying that people thought—not that I was to blame, but that I was a contributing factor. Maybe I nagged him too much, maybe I wasn’t watching closely enough. I got obsessed with this thought. When a tragedy occurs, people are naturally looking around for explanations. I did too! There’s a scene in the book after Seth’s death where I find a locked safe in the basement and I imagine inside is a note where Seth revealed he was having an affair that he couldn’t bear to tell me about or that he gambled away all of our money. And of course, it wasn’t any of that. The safe was empty.
For me there was stigma in being his partner, but also in being a journalist. I’m a professional observer and I missed the signs. But of course, at the time they didn’t seem like signs. Even as he escalated on that last weekend, all of these small details—the stress of his robotics competition, turning fifty, poor sleep, worsening tinnitus—did not add up to me. In any other narrative, those factors do not inevitably point to suicide. But in this case, they did. In retrospect those issues become so loaded, so obvious. While in the moment they were very much just Seth being Seth. It wasn’t until a few days before, that things seemed to feel a little different. The day before he killed himself, he saw a psychiatrist he had never met previously. He told her that he had thoughts of suicide but would never, ever do anything: he had me, he had his kids. Do I wish she had involuntarily committed him? Yes, of course. But there is such a high bar for that, it just never would have happened. He was charming and articulate. He was very clear that he wanted to take medication. He had no history of suicide attempts. He just didn’t seem at imminent risk.
Rumpus: As a psychiatrist myself, I was interested in Seth’s psychiatrist and whether the two of you may have experienced similar judgments about your inability to intuit this tragedy. What is your relationship to this psychiatrist throughout the book and has she read your memoir?
Zimmerman: Initially, I advocated to meet with Seth’s doctors because I wanted to know who I could blame. I met with his primary care doctor, that psychiatrist, and a psychiatric nurse practitioner who had seen Seth a few times over the past twenty years. The psychiatrist was very upset during this meeting, for obvious reasons. After the meeting was over, she told me that my daughters were lucky to have me and that her father died by suicide when she was young. This completely blew me away. In the meeting I felt that she wasn’t being particularly responsive to my questions, yet here she was, being so compassionate. I felt really bad for her and wanted to know more about how it was for her. Selfishly, I also thought it would be a great story if we could come to some sort of understanding, but I think it was too much for her. She never agreed to meet individually. I did run the book by her. I wanted to ensure she was okay with it.
Ultimately, I came to understand that she was evaluating the information that she had at the time and that Seth was extremely good at concealing himself. A friend who knew Seth recently read my book and told me, “Seth had a PhD in hiding.” That completely resonated with me. People perceived him as very chill. He would teach his MIT classes [wearing] shorts, he played ultimate frisbee. And yet, internally, there was such intense self-criticism and doubt. We couldn’t see the burden of the impossibly high expectations he held for himself.
Rumpus: Seth references those high expectations in his suicide note, which becomes such a potent object in your book. You do not read it for many months, and do not share it with your daughters for several years. Why did you also keep it hidden from us, your readers, until near the end of the memoir?
Zimmerman: I did not know how to deal with the note—in my life or in the book. It was the thing that continued to eat away at me. I was trying to find a story I could live with. If the story is, “He had an illness in his brain, and he had some kind of psychological break”—because wouldn’t you have to, to do something like this?—the note, on one level, seems fairly rational. There are sentences. There is punctuation. It’s coherent. He names us. Whereas, in my mind, the stereotypical suicide note might be full of delusions, flourishes, all capital letters. In Seth’s note you really can’t see that psychic break on the page. That bothered me, because I felt that it undermined my explanation to my daughters about why this had happened. It was so painful.
Frankly, I had major concerns about including the note in my book at all. I gave my daughters full veto power before I was deep into the publication process, and they really didn’t ask to change anything. My older daughter did ask if I wanted to include the suicide note, because it is so personal. I went back and forth. But the note was a huge part of my experience of Seth’s death and ultimately, I felt I needed to show it. Once I chose to include it, the note kind of took on a life of its own, it became like its own character. I knew I was going to withhold it for most of the book so that you could feel that repulsion, that putting it off and putting off. You’re not going to see it until I can see it.
Rumpus: I am so glad you included it. I spent a lot of the book with a growing, unrealistic hope that Seth’s suicide note would provide an explanation for the tragedy of his death, and it ultimately told me very little. How did you come to understand his note?
Zimmerman: Seth’s note tells us he believed he could no longer be his full self: a father, a teacher, a husband, a researcher. If he couldn’t do that, he couldn’t imagine existing at all. The note made it clear to me that, in that moment, he felt convinced that the world would genuinely be better off without him. His note shows an enormous loss of perspective. And that’s why it’s so sad. You wonder if he had been able to get through that moment, maybe his perspective could have broadened. In our popular culture, suicide notes are so often used as narrative devices to “unlock” a reason why someone killed themself, but these people are in such psychic pain—suicide is all they can think about. I realized that the suicide note really becomes an object that we project all our expectations onto.
Rumpus: Us, After is joining a canon of widow memoirs, including Elizabeth Alexander’s The Light of the World—a text you read from during an annual party honoring Seth’s life. What do you hope your book adds to this collection?
Zimmerman: Interestingly, after Seth died, people gave me all kinds of self-help books about coping with suicide. These made me cringe. They were profoundly unhelpful, largely because they were full of generalizations. The situation I found myself in was very specific, and those self-help books helped not at all. The books that really helped me were ones that illustrated how we can metabolize loss and transform it into something meaningful. Alexander’s book is really a love letter to her husband, and it moved me tremendously.
So many people said to me after Seth’s death: “I can’t imagine what you’re going through.” And I thought, “You know, I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, but I am going to try to help you imagine.” I really hope my book encourages people to feel everything that comes up for them when something traumatic happens. You may end up losing control. You may yell at your child or your mother. I want to give permission to the smorgasbord of feelings around loss. Grief ultimately transforms you, and you don’t know how that will look. You don’t think you can evolve, and yet you do.
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Author photograph courtesy of Rachel Zimmerman
