BLOOD FLOW

A memoir about one man’s health issues and his father’s suicide.

In 1966, the author’s father, Nathan “Nussin” Bograd, committed suicide. The author was only 13 years old at the time. Over the years, Bograd has interviewed family members, studied family letters, and dug up medical records in an attempt to piece together who his father was and why he decided to kill himself. Dr. Bograd seemed a well-liked, knowledgeable physician in the Denver area who shared a practice with the author’s uncle. He was known for being funny and kind, but he also had a history of depression. Nathan had spent time in psychiatric hospitals, sometimes with bizarre assessments like “near-conscious ego alien homosexual impulses.” He sometimes gambled and took on heavy losses. In addition to his family history, Bograd recounts his own health trouble that occurred in the 2000s when he had triple-bypass heart surgery. From his anxiety around the operation to a painfully slow recovery to the fact that medical insurance companies will forever pin him with a “pre-existing condition,” he tells all. Bograd also includes mundane information, like when he went backpacking in Europe or took accordion lessons. Nevertheless, everything comes together in an honest, raw way. Quotes from family members are often from recorded interviews. One prickly relative said of Nathan “Sure, he had a hard life, but he wasn’t the only one with a hard life.” The look back at psychiatric techniques reveal all kinds of horrors, including insulin shock therapy in which patients were “injected with large doses of insulin to produce daily comas over several weeks.” Near the end of the book, there is the shock of how Nathan ended his own life. Even if the audience must process a barrage of emotionally wrenching material, the book provides an irrefutably intriguing, haunting journey.

A well-documented, intimate portrait of family woes.