It is a topic child psychiatrist Nancy Rappaport has spent decades trying to make peace with—the mystery of her own mother's suicide. She was only 4 when it happened, the youngest of five children, and like so many families dealing with mental illness, hers decided that the less said the better. But the silence soon became a shadow over her life as Rappaport came to believe that her mother's death was somehow her fault. When her father casually mentioned that her mother's problems with depression began after Nancy's birth, she felt responsible. When everyone seemed wary of discussing the topic with her, it reinforced her sense of guilt. "I used to have this dream where I would come into the bedroom of my mother and see an open bottle of sleeping pills. I see it and no one else does, and then I leave the room," she says. "In truth, I wasn't even in the house when it happened."

So after earning her medical degree and starting a family of her own, Rappaport, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, found herself compelled to begin a personal search for answers. "There were times when I didn't feel that this was a choice, that the momentum behind this was bigger than me," she says. It was the only way "to understand, to free myself. It was like I carried these dreaded assumptions in my bone marrow."

Over the next 18 years, she tracked down members of her mother's extended network of family and friends, and searched through old newspaper clips and court records. Combining her findings with her professional knowledge, she tried to piece together answers to the mystery of who her mother was and what led to her death. Her efforts culminated in the publication of her new book, In Her Wake: A Child Psychiatrist Explores the Mystery of Her Mother’s Suicide.

Rappaport didn't find all the answers she was looking for, but she found enough to give her peace. Where there were once only fleeting memories of a mother's touch, there is now the complex portrait of a highly capable woman and mother plagued by childhood trauma and skirmishes with mental illness. And the experience of writing the book has created a new mission for her: helping other families learn to talk about suicide, particularly when it affects children.

"Suicide demands an explanation," says Rappaport. "Adults often have a hard time putting words to their grief, so they try to move on and don't want to talk about it." Or they're paralyzed by the fear that they'll say the wrong thing, so they say nothing. "But when children don't get an explanation, they often fill the void with their own interpretations, and those tend to gravitate toward blame," she says.

Suicide is more common than many realize, and each one affects a family somewhere. "There are 33,000 suicides a year, compared to 11,000 murders," Rappaport says. "Every 16 minutes a suicide occurs in the U.S., and another family is devastated. We don't track how many victims each suicide has. We don't know how many had young children. Did they have a mother and father, brothers and sisters?"

As children grow older, they can also develop a sense of shame about their family history. Rappaport recalls being interviewed for medical school and stumbling around for an appropriate answer when asked about her mother. "I said I didn't want to talk about it. When the subject came up, I instantly felt exposed, like people were judging me, trying to determine how stable I was. I felt for a long time like I had a scarlet S on my forehead," she says.

Her experience taught her that the lack of information and reassurance can leave kids with a lingering fear that suicide is contagious, that the same thing is likely to happen to them. "The truth is that children of parents who die of suicide are five times more likely to die of suicide themselves than a child not exposed to this kind of loss," Rappaport says. "But that's a dangerous statistic, because the truth is, that child is still more likely to die of a heart attack. This is not a prophetic death sentence. This does not usually happen like a bolt of lightning. The truth is, it takes a lot of damage to lose the will to live. The real lesson is to understand that you may be more vulnerable to mental-health issues. So parents should watch these kids like hawks and help them learn to take care of themselves so they have positive outcomes."