SYNOPSIS

hen my mother killed herself, a reality that had once been safely remote thundered through every corner of my life. What I was left with felt strange and bare, a lunar landscape. On that October day, suicide took up a permanent place in my consciousness."
- Victoria Alexander from Words I Never Thought to Speak: Stories of Life in the Wake of Suicide

was 18 years old when my mother put a bullet in her head and changed my life forever. Her death, and my struggle to conquer the effects of her suicide, inform the fabric of my life - how I see, how I behave, and most importantly, how I feel. I fight the depression that is her legacy to me, commune with others who have suffered the suicide of an important person in their lives, and look for a resolution that I may never find.

aughter of Suicide is a personal documentary about my mother's suicide and the path my family has taken in an attempt to heal. The film follows my journey to get to know my mother and to understand her death; I am driven by the desire to find closure and to learn to see my mother's death as a source of power in my life. I was not always so strong.

uicide entered my vocabulary when I was eleven years old and my mother made her first attempt on her life. She had been "a bit down" during the previous weeks. When my father found her note on the dining room table and the empty bottle of sleeping pills in her bathroom, he realized that his worst nightmare had become a reality. My mother returned home after a brief stay in a psychiatric hospital and my family pressed on. We never discussed her suicide attempt, but it became a subtext in our lives.

fter that first attempt, my mother still struggled with her purpose in life, her self-worth and her importance. During my senior year of high school, my parents separated and my mother moved out of our family home. After six years of giving life another try, she began to reject everyone close to her and quickly spiralled down to the level where she was when I was eleven. Two months into my freshman year at Syracuse University, there was a knock on my dorm-room door. A representative from the University's multi-faith chapel had come to be with me when I was to hear the news that my mother was dead. With that news, suicide became the book-ends of my adolescence.

hot on a combination of digital video, 16mm and Super 8 film, Daughter of Suicide tells my mother's story - and my own - through interviews with my family, friends and myself. Imagery is used in conjunction with the interviews to evoke an emotional response and to explore my memories of my childhood and my mother's depression.

y narration responds to the stories of my mother's life and begins to examine the influence her suicide has had on my life. For example, trying to recapture the days before we knew of my mother's suicide, I see the mail piling up in the mailbox attached to the front of her small house and the fall leaves collecting on the hood of her red Chrysler LeBaron; her garden is overgrown and her cat is scratching at the bedroom door, hoping my mother will come out and feed him.

also explore my mother's relationship with her family and my suspicion that my mother inherited many of her struggles with depression from them. The film documents a trip I took to Hopkinsville, Kentucky, my maternal grandmother's hometown, where I hoped to find evidence of depression or suicide in my mother's family. I wanted to link her suicide to the genes in our family, in order to be able to let her "off the hook" so that I could stop hating her for her death.

ince my mother's suicide, I have become very aware of how easy it is to die. As children, we say that we will never be like our parents. Nevertheless, we often grow up to be just like them. Many children of suicide, including myself, find the prospect of ending up like our parents and "inheriting" suicide terrifying. By committing suicide, my mother made that act an option in my life. I live with the knowledge that I could, or could not, deal with life in the same way my mother did. Sometimes it feels as if I don't have control over my own life and an unknown force will push me over the edge. Daughter of Suicide explores those fears and the question that so many survivors keep locked away inside: will I, or someone I know, repeat the suicide?

aughter of Suicide is the story of my journey, but it reflects the journey of many other survivors of suicide in the United States. I provide pieces to one woman's complex puzzle of memories, ideas, emotions and facts and in doing so explore issues that are repeated time and time again in the lives of people who take their own lives. I, like many survivors of suicide, have realized that my connection to my mother is through friends and family and through my memories of my young childhood before my mother became ill. In getting to know her through the making of the film, I have also realized just how great the loss of life to suicide is. I will never know the woman I discovered making this film, but I hope that her story will help others to recognize the dangers of depression in themselves and in the people they love.