what this project is:

In late July of 2012 I began to list characteristics, quirks, and necessary elements of my father's life. My father was a suicide in January of 2010, after which, I began to read and research what I could about suicide: how to deal, what it is, etc. I found Joan Wickersham's book The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order published in 2008, 15 years after her own father's suicide. The quote above is from her book which I read after starting the project, but found to be a profound push to continue listing. The quote in it's entirity is this:
"I am going to try to reconstruct who he was, because I'm not sure anymore.
Suicide destroys memory.
It undercuts one of our most romantic, and most comforting notions: that we don't really die when we die, because we live on in the memories of those who love us.
When killing yourself, you're killing every memory everyone has of you. You're taking yourself away permanently and removing all traces that you were ever here in the first place, wiping away every fingerpring you ever left on anything.
You're saying, 'I'm gone, and you can't even be sure who it is that's gone, because you never knew me.'

So what did I know about my father really?"
- Joan Wickersham p. 158 The Suicide Index

The purpose of this blog is to list one or several from the list of rules about my father each day and provide explanation of each. This blog is for those who see the work on my website - www.caitlinpeck.com -  and are curious to learn more. Or for those who want to grasp an understanding of creating a portrait of a person through the power of words.