Review: "Shut Away" by Catherine McKercher

Shut Away by Catherine McKercher
Published 2019 via Goose Lane Editions
★★★★

After our parents took Billy to Smiths Falls, writes McKercher, my brother never came home again. Never. (90)

When McKercher's brother Billy was born in the 1950s, the plan for children with disabilities was simple: send them away. Billy had Down syndrome, and so Billy was sent away—against McKercher's mother's wishes and best judgement, but in line with what society believed about disabilities at the time.

Because Billy was, from the time he was sent away, in the periphery of McKercher's life—by chance and by institutional design—this is not really a book about Billy. He is the glue that holds the book together, but it is impossible for McKercher to know the exact shape of his life: instead she has hundreds upon hundreds of pages of maddening, incomplete documents and forms about him; she has what she knows and does not know about her parents' perspective; she has the history of the institution Billy was sent to and others like it. Returning again and again to Billy's experience—the parts of it she can know, and the parts she cannot—McKercher does a brilliantly researched job of illustrating the complicated, shut-away life of institutions.

Attitudes were changing even as Billy was sent away, and if he'd been born even ten years later chances are that there would have been more voices saying 'Raise him at home.' It's important to note that this is not a book about blame—in sending Billy to an institution, McKercher's parents were doing what just about everyone around them, to say nothing of the medical establishment more broadly, said was best for him and for the family. McKercher is very clear about that, just as she is clear that Billy almost certainly would have been better off had he been allowed to remain home. Institutions like Smiths Falls might have been founded with good intentions—and many of the workers may have been wonderful—but problems plagued them from the beginning: overcrowding, understaffing, lack of personalized treatment, infectious diseases that were so endemic in the institutions that in some cases they didn't bother to take basic precautions to prevent their spread. Neglect and abuse, though those certainly weren't named in Billy's file, were almost certainly de rigeur, though to what extent is unclear.

In writing Shut Away, McKercher asks readers to look at the reality of 'out of sight, out of mind'. Also worth looking at We Used to Dance and Hazard for stories of families making decisions in similar contexts, but with very different details.