“Heads is anger, tails is guilt.” A friend of James Whitfield Thomson used that phrase to explain how it felt to survive a loved one’s death by suicide: It’s as though you’re always carrying a coin with you, and no matter which side comes up, the survivor is left with difficult emotions.
Years later, Thomson experienced that grief firsthand after his sister Eileen’s death. During a fight with her husband, Eileen shot herself in the heart. Thomson was shocked. It was news to Thomson that his sister and her husband, Vic, had separated months earlier. His parents kept that revelation to themselves, knowing they couldn’t fix their daughter’s relationship. Thomson confronted his brother-in-law to learn what happened the day of Eileen’s death, accepted his explanation and moved forward as best he could. Vic went his separate way.
But decades later, when Thomson began writing a novel based on his sister’s death, he was confronted by a possibility: What if Eileen hadn’t chosen to die? What if she’d been murdered?
In A Better Ending: A Brother’s Twenty-Year Quest to Uncover the Truth About His Sister’s Death, Thomson recounts the questions and research that drove his investigation. Thomson turned to a private eye, and together they interviewed numerous people who were close to Eileen. But their recollections don’t always neatly align, and Thomson is often left asking how reliable memory—including his own—can be years later: “Selective memory. We all have it to some degree. Maybe it’s the only thing that lets us look in the mirror every morning.”
Thomson’s research and curiosity propel A Better Ending, creating a true crime narrative thread that begs for resolution. He weaves the mysteries surrounding his sister’s death with his own self-examination, taking a clear-eyed approach to his shortcomings, both after his sister’s death and in the present day. He writes not only of his sister’s marriage, but also of his and their brother’s marital problems, and Thomson examines the ways violence touched each sibling.
Reexamining the circumstances that led to her death won’t bring Eileen back, Thomson knows. But as he pursues a better ending, he revisits the sister he knew and reckons with his own guilt, anger and memory.
