And, of course, he too is haunted by his father’s illness and death, a haunting intensified by the fact that he is at school in England, away from his family, when his father dies in the States: Michael is obsessed with the idea of transgenerational haunting. He studies how this phenomenon manifests in various forms, researching African American boys who have nightmares of travelling aboard slave ships and how such ‘hauntings’ are often triggered by music.
It’s telling that the second half of the prologue, which Michael narrates, describes him trying to reach his psychiatrist in a time of need and getting his voice mail. He’s only intermittently able to afford regular therapy, and his medical bills put his family in significant debt. Michael is prescribed Klonopin as a college student and over the next fifteen-odd years is prescribed numerous other medications, but the dosage is never quite right.
Imagine Me Gone also looks at the broader issue of how patients with mental illness are treated in the United States. Because the story takes place over several decades, following Michael from boyhood through to his mid-thirties, the reader also sees how the family dynamic changes over time, and how the family cope with John’s death and Michael’s illness. By spreading the narrative between the characters, Haslett reflects the way John and Michael’s mental illness is something that the family experience together. Haslett shares the narrative between the five family members: John, the father Margaret, the mother and their children, Michael, Celia and Alec. But while it’s a story of grief and loss, it’s equally about love and resilience and edged with hope. Alec’s ominous ‘something’s happened’ casts a shadow over the book no matter what else happens, the reader is going to end up back in the cabin. In the prologue, the reader learns ‘something’s happened’ to Michael while he and his younger brother are staying in a remote cabin, and it doesn’t take long to realise that he’s followed, or at least tried to follow, his father out of the world. It poses the question: what are we willing to sacrifice for those we love. Imagine Me Gone is the story of a family living with mental illness, first in John, the father, and following his suicide, in his eldest son, Michael. What do you do now? Alec said, Why can’t you start the boat? And Dad said, Imagine me gone, imagine it’s just the two of you. Alright then, he said, imagine something happened and I can’t drive the boat and you can’t start the engine. He closed his eyes and spoke to us like he did when he was taking a nap, with no expression on his face. Dad lay down in the bottom of the boat, using one of the life preservers as a pillow.
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