GONE BEFORE GONE

Clark, a resource and advocacy manager at the nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center, presents a guide for the caregivers, family, and friends of people living with mental illness.

When the author lost her 23-year-old son to suicide in 2019, she had already been dealing with “ambiguous loss”—that is, the grief experienced when a loved one with severe mental illness is “‘gone,’ as they once were but still around as a new version of themselves.” This book, first and foremost, is aimed at parents of people with serious mental illness (SMI) and is also a form of advocacy for the SMI community at large. In short chapters that each end with a self-reflective activity, Clark provides readers with “self-directed coping guidelines” for their grief, inspiration for telling their own stories, a critique of the “medical/legal system that criminalizes mental illness,” and tips on how to bolster community. A good portion of the book addresses the dark personal experiences the author went through with her son, including watching him make “creepy altars with knives, sticks…and sometimes his own blood.” While these stories are directly related to her son’s diagnosis of bipolar disorder, Clark is clear from the start that ambiguous loss can come in many forms, such as experiencing a miscarriage. Clark seamlessly blends in the work of family therapist and professor Pauline Boss, who coined the term “ambiguous loss,” and psychologist Richard C. Miller, whose concept of working with “opposite emotions” informed Clark’s guidance for naming and normalizing ambivalence. Clark also explains terms like “anosognosia,” a symptom of at least half of those with SMI that makes them unaware that they’re sick. Her periodic poems, such as “Ambiguity,” are jarring at first, but they mirror the inconsistent way in which bipolar disorder affects one’s life: “Life’s only clarity was sheer uncertainty.” She also offers refreshingly simple responses to platitudes about mental illness, such as a measured rebuttal to “everything happens for a reason”: “My son’s struggle with mental illness had no reason to it. I’m trying to find meaning in what’s left of my life, but that doesn’t mean his pain was something the world needed.”

A cathartic and helpful book for those dealing with ambiguous loss.