Lucille Abshire’s suicide attempt

Lucille Abshire’s suicide attempt is a childhood trauma Clare recalls years later, after finding her mother in the aftermath of the attempt. The episode followed the death of a baby when Clare was seven, and its effects persist in Clare’s memories of her mother and in the family’s history of grief and loss.

Background and Discovery

Clare tells Henry that her mother is manic-depressive and had been better when Clare was younger. After the baby died, Lucille tried to kill herself; Clare found her and called for help, with no one else at home. The event left Clare with an enduring memory of the scene and the fear and isolation of being a child confronted with her mother’s crisis.

Memory and Family History

Years later, Clare encounters her mother’s papers and recognizes that 1979 was the year Lucille lost the baby and attempted suicide. Unable to continue reading those papers, Clare sets them aside, then finds a poem addressed to her, “The Garden Under Snow.” The discovery brings the past into the present through both the painful record of Lucille’s suffering and the separate evidence of her mother’s affection.

Echoes Across the Narrative

The attempt belongs to a wider pattern of loss in the novel, but its particular force lies in Clare’s position as a child who witnessed a parent’s crisis. In another conversation, Henry describes his mother’s death as the central event around which his life circles, returning to it repeatedly through time travel. The parallel connects the characters’ family histories without making their losses identical: Clare’s memory is of finding her mother after an attempt, while Henry repeatedly revisits the fatal accident that killed his mother.

Consequences and Significance

The episode continues to shape how Clare remembers her mother and how she responds to the family’s history. Her choice to stop reading the old papers marks a limit to what she can bear in that moment; finding the poem afterward complicates the record with an intimate message from Lucille. The novel thus presents the attempt not as an isolated incident but as a remembered wound whose meaning emerges belatedly, through fragments of family documents and later acts of recollection.