Smells Like Teen Suicide
Feb. 8th, 2012 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_camera
Could yesterday have been any shittier?
Well – sure.
If I’d totaled my car. Been diagnosed with cancer. If the sun had gone supernova. If something had happened to my kids.
But for a run-of-the mill day, yesterday was awfully shitty and left me mid-afternoon in this state of total despair. You know the mantra. Yada, yada yada. I’m a total failure plus I’m old – well, that part’s redundant, isn’t it?
So right about then I get this phone call from RTT – this kid he knew had committed suicide. Sixteen years old.
Shot himself with his father’s gun. It’s a very rural upstate New York story.
The kid’s (not his real) name was Pete McFarland and he was minor royalty in these parts, particularly in Freeville, the tiny hamlet where I live. Freeville was happening in the late 1880s when it was a nexus for the Ithaca & Cortland Railroad and the local trains to Dryden and Lansing 10 miles away. It had five grocery stores, a cinderblock factory, a glass factory, a factory that made furniture, hotels, restaurants, a telegraph office, a championship baseball team, five dairy farms and a population approaching 6,000. Today Freeville has a population of 500, an upscale marble and tiling outlet, a desperate-looking used car lot, a bad overpriced restaurant, a post office. Oh, and its own Miss Lonelyhearts, Alison Blake (not her real name either), who most improbably won a contest to replace a famous advice columnist 20 years ago and lives most of the time in Chicago where she appears regularly on the popular NPR show, Sit, Sit, I Know the Answer (not its… Well. You get the point.)
Alison Blake was Pete McFarland’s aunt.
I guess that kills HER career as an advice columnist, B texted me last night.
Why? I texted back. It’s not like she ADVISED him to kill himself.
RTT has another friend who tried to kill himself a few months back. John gobbled a bottle of antidepressants. I suspect this was more of a gesture than an actual suicide attempt since he immediately called someone. Or maybe he had the presence of mind to swallow the pills when his parents were in the next room watching Dexter – I forget the exact story.
A million years ago when I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley I did a research project on suicide notes for a psychology class. I looked at the notes left by people who actually died and I compared them to the notes left by people who didn’t die. Interestingly, there was a clear semantic difference. The people who didn’t die, the people who – you might say – were staging scenarios rather than mounting serious attempts at self-annihilation, wrote these elaborate notes with sidebars and premises and justifications. The people who actually died, if they wrote notes at all, left messages that were so cryptic they could have been written by Martians. About the Evil god (yes), About the Evil Seers killing people for their money (yes) I am a profit at my death.
I don’t know whether Pete McFarland left a note.
But John did.
And John was rescued, pumped and committed to a psych ward for a short period of time where RTT amazingly enough visited him.
I say “amazingly enough” because RTT has very little empathy for human suffering, a fact he knows himself well enough to recognize.
I suppose one might at this point legitimately ask whether any teenager has empathy for anyone.
We were driving in the car discussing breakup songs.
“You know that Eagles song, ‘The Best of Your Love?’” I asked him.
“I don’t know who the Eagles are,” he said.
“You. Don’t. Know. Who. The. Eagles. Are,” I said. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The Eagles were a band. Somewhat later than the Glenn Miller Orchestra but earlier than the Backstreet Boys. Anyway, they did this song and in my early 20s, when I was breaking up with the Great Love of My Life –“ I paused helpfully at this point to give him the opportunity to ask who the Great Love of My Life had been. He didn’t. “—I used to listen to this song obsessively. But I literally hadn’t heard it in years. And then the other day I was sitting in the State Street Diner, and their soundtrack is all 70s all of the time, and this song came on, and it was like a punch in my stomach, you know? Because I was that girl again, only with all this other stuff superimposed on top of me. It was a very weird feeling.”
“I have a breakup song too,” RTT said. “'You’re a Rich Girl.' Hall & Oates.”
“Hall & Oates!” I said. “Yes. Well. Music snobs always looked down on Hall & Oates back in the day. But I always had a sneaky affection for them. 'You’re a Rich Girl!' Is that about Sarah?” Sarah being the scion of a land rich family hereabouts with roads named after them who used to drop by several time a week throughout December to hang with RTT in his bedroom with the door closed, though as far as I could tell he never actually took her out on a date.
"Yeah."
What mother can resist the urge to pry? “Are you still friends with Sarah?” I asked carefully.
He shrugged. “Sort of. I see her at parties. She gets drunk and cries.”
“I see.”
“It kind of bugs me when she does that.”
“Yah. I can see where it would.”
“I mean – I don’t feel anything when people cry. I just wish they would stop. It’s annoying. I mean, I feel sorry for people I don’t actually know. But people I know? I just get really cold on the inside.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know that about you. Empathy has never been your strong point. Maybe you’ll develop it in later life.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“It’s a good thing to have,” I said. “Empathy.”
“Why?” he asked.
“It’s what makes people human,” I explained carefully. “It may be something you can learn. I know why you have a hard time feeling it, by the way.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, when you were a baby, you were very sick. You were born with something they call meconium aspiration and you spent the first 10 days of your life in the hospital being stuck with needles. They wouldn’t let me feed you when you were hungry. They wouldn’t let me hold you when you cried. And I think that probably did something to you. For example: when I finally got you home, you didn’t want to snuggle. You would stiffen up. I had to teach you how to cuddle. It took a couple of weeks.”
He laughed. “Can you teach me how to have empathy?”
“Nope. You’re on your own with that one. It will come when you finally realize everyone on the planet has an inner life just as interesting as your own.”
“When will that happen?”
“Dunno. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never.”
Then he got bored and started talking about the Superbowl.
“It’s weird,” said RTT over the phone yesterday. He was bursting with excitement. He was part of a collective reaction so much bigger than he was! “Everyone liked Pete. I mean, he was just this really cool kid. He was a great musician. He had tons of friends, this really great personality.”
“So why did he do it?” I asked. I was reeling, although not over the suicide of a kid I didn’t know but over the meaninglessness and futility of my own existence. No, I wouldn’t kill myself. But if somebody would just tell me where the Off button is…
“Nobody knows! But everybody’s talking about it. It’s so weird. I mean, I just hung out with him Friday. He’s like Bill Smithson’s” (not his real…) “ best friend!” Bill Smithson being the scion of two eccentric Ithaca College professors who live in Trumansburg where Ben and the chipmunk-cheeked, button-sewing Jayne LeGro currently reside (meow, meow), an overweight, awkward kid, whom RTT deigns to hang out with on weekends because the Ithaca College profs installed a sauna in the house.
I think adults with their perpetual need to provide psychologists and grief counselors with employment get this whole teenage suicide thing wrong. I scanned the dead kid’s Facebook wall – kids, unlike adults, realize this whole notion of privacy is a complete fantasy and therefore don’t put up any kind of privacy restrictions whatsoever on Facebook. Fuck ‘em! Let’s let the whole world know what we’re doing! With their cyberspies and their Patriot Act, they do anyway!
The FB tributes all had this undercurrent of feverish – for lack of a better word – joy. Like Pete McFarland was their very own Kurt Cobain or something and they were part of the Rolling Stone story too:
I completely 100% regret the way I met you, because ever since all I wanted to do was talk to you. People rarely leave an impression on me, but then it hit me "Wow, I met someone really incredible didn't I?" I tried (and failed) to start a conversation as nervous as I was, but i'm happy I crossed paths with you even if it was incredibly briefly. I've listened to your music and been amazed. I felt ...weird that you seemed to be this fantastically interesting person when I barely knew you at all
I think kids who kill themselves become part of the Myth. In later years, you affectionately recall the night of your senior prom, the night you and yr cronies went target shooting empty in Seersucker Woods, drunk out of your gourds, and the kid – what was his name again? – who killed himself.
But I don’t think teen suicide makes other teenagers sad. I think it makes them feel important.
Probably a different thing entirely for the advice columnist whose nephew the kid was.
