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.
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no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 04:39 pm (UTC)My son's best friend K. is away at college, but not far away- less than an hour. He was dating a girl @ college who is from around here. (another suburb, so not a school mate) They broke up about a month ago; I guess she went back to dating a former boyfriend.
Anyhow. She committed suicide a few weeks ago. She drove to a gorge in Warsaw, which is a good hour away, and I don't know what exactly she did, but they found her body at the bottom. Apparently she left a note for her mom and the other boyfriend and that's how they knew to alert the Warsaw police to look for her.
My son's friend K. took it very hard, and my son, who has been chocked full of almost too much empathy since he was a little bitty thing, was the person his friend turned to. At one point I texted him to ask how K. was doing, and he texted back, "He's taking it really hard, Mom, and it just breaks my heart." Wah!
The only thing I could think to hammer home to my own surly youth was that, no matter how difficult her life was or how difficult she perceived it to be, there were places she could've turned to for help; instead, she made the one and only decision she could never take back, never undo. And what her decision did to the people left behind. It's a hard but necessary life lesson when they realize that sometimes things just suck.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 04:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 04:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 05:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 05:09 pm (UTC)As is your conclusion about Teen Suicide.
When I was in high school this girl I was crazy about got run over my a milk truck. She was friendly with the popular crowd, but definitely was in one of the outer orbits with that group. We were supposed to go to the spring semi-formal together, and she renegged on me because some rich sports-playing kid from the inner circle asked her after I had. Anyway, the point is that after she died, all the really popular kids that had just kind-of known her were wearing sack-cloth and ashes and rending their garments. They even had this whole organized, school sanctioned "group" created to...Well, I don't know what it was for. They used to plaster the school with posters and shit on her birthday and whenever. It was like they all collectively misremembered themselves as her best friend. It was weird. I mean, even at our 10 year reunion, the popular kids (who put the reunion together, obv.) had some sort of memorial part of the whole thing for her, even though several other of our classmates had died in those 10 years...They just didn't have the honor to die in High School.
I wrote her a letter telling her how much she meant to me and stuff and then threw it into the ocean and got it out of my system that way.
And By the way, when I say "Popular" I mean your typical Preppie, athletic group that comes to mind when you use that descriptor. I don't mean to brag, but I was WILDLY popular, more than you could imagine, more than I realized until later in life. But I was a "different" kind of Popular...I'll have to try and remember to write about that someday. I just remember so little of High school. I only remember snapshots. It's scary.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 05:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 06:36 pm (UTC)But, of course, your son is six or seven years older than the kids I'm writing about, no? There's a big difference between the two age groups. Kids your son's age have more adult sensibilities; kids my son's age are really... aliens. I mean, there's a reason why Pol Pot's army was recruited from 14 year olds.
RTT knew this kid socially. It's the big news in Ithaca right now. I was taking the bus yesterday and actually heard people talking about dead kid. RTT's faculty advisor spent 10 minutes talking about the dead kid at our parent teacher conference this morning.
RTT's version: The kid had been planning it for weeks, making up with all his "enemies" (RTT's word), texting all his best friends five minutes before he pulled the trigger: "I love you, man. I'll always remember our good times together!" Very, very bizarre.
I think that teenagers feel things more... I was going to write "intensely" but that's not really the right word. But they don't have the certainty that "this too shall pass."
RTT and I talk a lot about "irretrievable decisions," and I've been hammering home since he hit 10 that there are a few things that there is absolutely no going back from and that therefore he should not do. Neither of my kids inherited my tendency towards melancholia, so these days our discussions about irretrievable decisions mostly center around Things Not To Do When You're Drunk. Chief among those Things is "Get in a car whose driver is also drunk." RTT, I'm happy to say, absolutely refuses to drive anywhere with someone who's had even one beer. No, I'm not basing this assertion on anything he tells me. I'm basing it on phone conversations I've eavesdropped on. ("No, man, I'm not going anywhere with you... I don't care if it was only one beer. I don't get in cars where the driver's been doing alcohol. Period."
no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 06:43 pm (UTC)I think it would be too hard to do as a nonfiction piece. I'd have to interview the family, the friends. Was thinking as I kept scribbling and scribbling and scribbling this morning that it wanted to be a short story.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 06:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 06:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 06:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 07:27 pm (UTC)If it is, RTT and he have very different personalities!! Your son is attuned to other human beings. I love RTT dearly, but he's almost ruthlessly self-involved.
RTT just turned 17. He's a really odd mixture of rebellious and dependent -- well, not so odd I guess. It's just that his older brother has always been so utterly self-reliant.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 07:50 pm (UTC)Mind boggling, how different siblings can be.
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Date: 2012-02-08 08:03 pm (UTC)It is, isn't is?
Also, before I "met" RTT -- odd word to use with yr own kid, I realize :-) -- I used to think extroverts were people whose parents never paid enough attention to them. RTT is the single most extroverted person I have ever met, and I know for a fact his parents paid and continue to pay lots of attention to him. :-)
no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 09:11 pm (UTC)"But I don’t think teen suicide makes other teenagers sad. I think it makes them feel important." Nail, meet head.
Can anyone have too much empathy? I think my kid has that - drives me nuts how she worries about people who could give a rat's ass about her. Not in a fawning/needy sort of way, but in a way that indicates she's truly interested in them. Its odd. Makes the usual drama just that much deeper. Takes her a while to forget the shit. I've a feeling she's gonna be good at vengeance - she gets into other people's heads pretty easily.
I was popular too, but in a dope selling, funny at parties, drive to the concert, Hunter Thompson wanna-be sort of way.
Love the pic of "McFarland" - not many photos of Radiohead where they all look happy. I wonder if McFarland listened to a lot of Radiohead? Too much of THAT can make you pretty depressed - probably not enough for suicide, but its definitely a gateway drug.
Leonard Gibson - funniest friend I had, drove his car into a phone pole at a hundred miles an hour after leaving a college Homecoming party. An only child - broke his parent's hearts. Heard he left them a note. Mailed it to them. They divorced a year after. Still think about that one pretty often.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 09:45 pm (UTC)I think I do, actually.
I was extremely unpopular in high school. I skipped three grades so I was a lot younger than my classmates. A real dwork. In fact, I ended up dropping out and getting my GED in rehab. :-)
Didn't interfere with my college career. Think it would now though.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 10:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-09 12:38 am (UTC)I never got how one became popular...too socially stupid.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-09 12:41 am (UTC)I remember hearing from my mother about some kid who had died, but I had no idea who she was talking about. It was odd...
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