In Her Wake

In Her Wake: A Child Psychiatrist Explores the Mystery of Her Mother’s Suicide is a 2009 memoir by American psychiatrist Nancy Rappaport. When Rappaport was four years old, her mother—also Nancy—committed suicide after losing custody of her children. Now a mother herself, and a psychiatrist who specializes in helping suicidal young people, Rappaport attempts to piece together the story of her mother’s death, unearthing some family skeletons—and treasures—along the way. In Her Wake received mixed reviews. Critics praised Rappaport’s bravery in researching and telling such a personal story, while noting that the book itself is excessively detailed, amounting to a “dry, clinical examination of a family’s profound loss” (Kirkus Reviews).

Rappaport introduces herself: an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, she also works with suicidal young people at the Cambridge Health Alliance. However, her interest in suicide is not merely professional. When she was four, her mother, a well-known socialite and philanthropist, committed suicide. Rappaport barely remembers her and has never heard the story of her death.

The impetus to learn more comes when Rappaport receives a phone call from her father’s wife, Phyllis. On her own initiative, Phyllis has decided to pass on to Rappaport and her siblings a trunk full of “photographs, drawings, letters, all kinds of materials that my mother had saved.” Rappaport learns that the trunk had been in the possession of one of her mother’s friends. She pores through the trunk, finding “evidence of a life I did not know—small calendars with hand-scrawled appointments, a high-school yearbook, report cards, school awards, newspaper clippings, and chatty letters from her friends…A photo of my mother cradling me as a baby in her arms.” Finally, Rappaport comes across a novel—closely based on her mother’s life—and several journals. With these materials, Rappaport resolves to tell her mother’s story.



Rappaport’s parents were well known in Boston. Her father, Jerry, was the founder of the New Boston Committee and a developer whose Charles River Park Project displaced thousands of working-class people from Boston’s West End. Nancy was a socialite, but she was also active in several worthy causes. One of these was a run for the Boston School Committee. Her campaign manager was a younger married man, Richard Sears, and Nancy began an affair with him. The affair ended, but Nancy decided to leave her husband and children. Interwoven with this story is Rappaport’s discussion of psychiatric approaches to affairs, in theory, and in therapeutic treatment.

Nancy tried to reconcile with Jerry, but he wouldn’t take her back. Both re-married (Jerry to Richard Sears’s ex-wife) and a bitter custody battle began. Rappaport’s narrative takes on a detective-novel quality as she tracks down the surviving figures from this story, including Richard Sears, to build a fuller picture of her mother’s life at this time.

On the day the court ruled against her, Nancy took a lethal dose of sleeping pills. She died five days later.



Rappaport combines personal reflection with professional insight in an attempt to understand her mother’s suicide. She wonders whether her mother suffered from depression when she finds a journal entry which reads: “All my life I’ve been like a peeled onion with all my nerve endings exposed.’’ She also wonders whether her mother should have been prescribed sleeping pills—should she not have had Valium or another mood-altering drug instead? However, at this distance, Rappaport cannot second-guess her mother’s doctor.

Rappaport sets out the prevailing clinical theories of suicide, including case histories of suicidal patients. One thing emerges clearly from this material, that a necessary condition for suicide is “an underlying predisposition, a propensity for impulsiveness, without which the probability for suicide is small, no matter how bad things get.’’

In the end, Rappaport cannot say why her mother died as she did. She is left instead to reflect on the legacy of her mother’s suicide in her own approach to her work “I wonder if surviving my mother's suicide brings with it a certain knowledge that there are limits to keeping people alive if they are determined to kill themselves.”



After Nancy’s death, Rappaport and her siblings continued to live with their father and stepmother, who “wrapped us in an uncomfortable silence and tried to carry on as if everything could be – would be – just fine.’’ This became an unwritten rule: no one in the family would mention their mother or her suicide. “As we all grew up, there were rifts that developed as a result of our silence concerning our mother. Grief and guilt developed in my father and my stepmother, which was compounded by the challenges of attending to so many children.”

Rappaport knows that none of this is unusual in such cases. She cites reports that show that the children of people who have committed suicide are five times more likely than other young people to commit suicide themselves.

As she researches and begins writing her book, Rappaport resolves to try to heal some of her family’s old wounds: “I was the youngest in the family,” she explains. “I’m the doctor. I wanted to help make it all better. Here, I would say, tell me where it hurts.”



After a difficult conversation with her father, she reaches out to her siblings: “Through connecting with my siblings about their memories of our mother and our loss of her, we are closer.

“In finding shared words to understand what she meant to us, I am fortified. This kind of journey can rekindle old familial conflicts or can be transformative. In our case it was a mixture, but a mixture that brought strength to our love and an appreciation of our shared time growing up together.”

Ultimately, complete healing is beyond them all: “Losing our mother when we were so young cannot be sugarcoated. We needed her.’’