When someone you love takes their own life, guilt is unavoidable; when they hold you responsible, guilt is off the scale. The sister of Canadian novelist Martha Baillie, Christina, killed herself at 61. On the wall, in blue marker, she’d written three reasons for wanting to die: “Because of schizophrenia / Because of The Juniper Tree / Because of losing the house”. The schizophrenia went a long way back; she’d first attempted suicide in her 20s. By “The Juniper Tree” she meant a Brothers Grimm fairytale in which a child is killed by one parent and fed in a stew to the other, much as Christina felt she had been, believing herself to be a victim of domestic abuse. But it was the third reason that weighed on Martha, who’d been the one keen to sell the family house in Toronto, despite Christina telling her, in front of a psychiatrist: “If I’m forced to leave the house as soon as Mom dies, you’ll just find a body.”
The book is a trilogy of essays about an ordinarily dysfunctional middle-class family, “a dog chasing its own tail”. Death is its starting point and the source of its best aphorisms. “Were life a cartoon, being punched by the death of a person you love would make you see stars,” she writes; it’s “the sweeping tug of a train entering a station, attempting to draw everyone from the platform”. The first essay recounts the death of her mother, an artist, at the age of 99; the second looks back on the life of her father, a mathematics professor, who was “rescued from loneliness” when he married at 41. Martha remembers both parents fondly, recalling how her mother professed “I love you always” and presenting her father as a kindly man devoted to trees and animal welfare. But in the long third essay Christina’s suicide drives her back to childhood to reassess them.
