Leave-taking
This time of year, former students circle back from college or grad school or their first jobs, and I catch up with them. I hear about cool internships, or landing in the emergency room in Austin, Texas alone, with a broken toe, one day after moving there. Yesterday, over hot chocolate, a former student asked me if I’d heard that one of her peers, a girl I taught in seventh grade, died by suicide last year. I hadn’t. I asked her to repeat the name twice because it just didn’t make sense. Not this girl.
When I got home, found her obituary. “She lit up everyone and everything she came in contact with,” was the quote from her grad school advisor, and it’s true, she did. In the photo, in her mascaraed twenty-three-year-old eyes, was the gentle twelve-year-old I remembered. Tall, thin, white blond; her handwriting, so careful, that hyphen in her first name, the vowels rounded, the slight backwards tilt.
“Left us unexpectedly” is, of course, code; I wondered if she “left” impulsively or after deliberation. Knowing her, it was something she’d been thinking about over time, but when she actually did it, she was way beyond reason.
What she brought her to that moment I’ll never know, but what runs through my head is that maybe she had been treading dark water for so long that she got tired, sick to death, of always being the one to bring the damn light.
So true. She seemed so uncomplicated (seemed being the operative word here). She hid her troubles well. Breaks my heart that she was so alone in this.
I think she was my student, too, as a junior. With others I’ve known who have made this same, dark decision, it is striking how often those of us on the outside can’t conceive of the turmoil going on inside another, how deeply alone we can choose to be.