Finding Mom

Finding Mom is a story of tragedy, secrets, and forgiveness. As a six-year-old, Steve Messer found his mother's body after she committed suicide in 1961, and for the next fifty years, he and his family lived in silence about her death and her life. This book chronicles the physical and emotional journey the author and his wife took to find his mother again, but this time as a fully human woman instead of a haunting figure shrouded in silence, this time as the mom who deeply loved her son in the midst of her deepening depression. Responding to a gentle but unmistakable nudge from the Lord, leaning on supportive family members, and utilizing his training as a historian, Messer spent six months gathering documents and images, interviewing individuals who knew his mother, and traveling to sites associated with her life. The physical journey culminated with two family gatherings that welcomed Marian Pett Messer back after the decades of silence, but the emotional journey of new-found understandings of family, grace, forgiveness, and what it means to be human will continue for a lifetime.

""What a beautiful, moving book! Steve Messer has taken his training as a historian and applied it to his own life story in a way that is humane, generous, and finally transformative. Finding Mom begins when a six-year-old boy loses his mother to suicide, but it doesn't end until he finds her again, fifty years later, after the most important research project of a lifetime.""
--Thom Satterlee, author of The Stages

""I have no words to convey the gentle power, the stunning beauty, the deep humanity, and the rich understanding of the Christian gospel embedded in this book. For while the suicide of Messer's mother takes us to the heart of the human condition, Messer's remarkable journey takes us to the heart of the gospel message--that God's compassionate grace can renew and transform us, even in the face of unspeakable loss.""
--Richard T. Hughes, author of The Vocation of the Christian Scholar


Stephen C. Messer is a suicide survivor and Professor of History at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana. His primary academic interests are African American History and the cultural landscape of the civil rights movement.