I got some bad news the other night.

A former student (she just graduated 8th grade this past June) killed herself in dramatic fashion. (Tony asks: is there a non-dramatic way to kill yourself?) The news and details I was given were this: the student leaped to her death from her 12th floor balcony, and on the way down she made impact with several other balconies below her. It was an instant and intense death. And it was preceded by at least one other attempt at her life (with pills) and a traumatic childhood where she witnessed the shooting death of her younger sister.

I have a hard time with death. Always have. Sadness fills me from the inside but does not have a direct path to escape. Somewhere deep within there are still unexpressed echoes of the despair I felt when as a second-grader I learned that my bus driver had suffered a heart attack and died. I remember locking myself in my room and sitting for hours under a blanket. After this incident I have always just sort of shut down emotions upon hearing about the death of loved ones. I try to bring it to the surface, but often it just leaves my heart bloated and my actions awkward.

Now… anyone alive would feel horrible after hearing about my student’s death. And it would be obvious that any of her teachers are going to be shaken up considerably. But this news has particularly affected me for what I feel ashamed to say feels like a wrong reason: I think about suicide all the time. Both as an objective topic and also a personal impulse that has compelled me for years.

(Author’s note: This post will now become very self-centered, and I don’t want to minimize the sadness that exists purely about the student or my concern for her family and her young friends who I fear will have a horrible time coping with this huge loss. It is impossible to imagine that anyone so young can carry around such sadness, and I have spent two days reflecting on this very thing. And I realize that so many I know have so much sadness within, and as I have been processing my own conflicted feelings since I heard the news I realize that the there is a chance I do as well.)

In high school the idea of someone taking their own life appeared several times. I was introduced to Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Ernest Hemingway in English classes and the relationship between the arts and suffering began to blossom in my little brain–but all of it was so far removed in the past that I didn’t really think about the actual act as something people (especially anyone I knew) ever really did. And then I became romantically involved with a pair of people (No, Tony, not at the same time…) who were emotionally troubled and who lived so raw with nerves exposed that hours of my life were devoted to late night phone calls trying to coax them into, if not happiness, then life-preserving neutrality with my love and concern for them. This infused my already generally upbeat personality with a new-found optimism and will-to-live that my own potential suicide seemed ridiculous at the time. I loved life and experiences and it was my role to help others see that and value them as well.

(It should be noted that there was one suicide that affected me, and everyone I associated with, that happened in high school. Kurt Cobain shot himself in the midst of huge success and unwanted attention. Those of us who were affiliated with the “Alternative” movement hosted a tribute concert where local bands of teenagers played mediocre covers of Cobain’s songs. During this show my friends took up a collection to send to Courtney Love and then brazenly, and quite insensitively, used the money to buy pizzas and rent slasher movies the following weekend.)

Youthful naivete gave way to confusion and angst as I entered college and began to conceive of myself as a becoming-artist and I experienced things like sexual frustration and unrequited love. And it was at this point that the tortured soul appeared to me not something to fight against with love and appreciation of potential experience but rather something to value and stoke like logs on a fire as it alone may ignite the creativity required to make important art. And it was also this point that I met Karly and she placed the seed of an idea in my brain of a happy, and empowering, suicide party one might through oneself at a time in life when old-age was starting to attack and quality of life might begin to falter if it wasn’t nipped, as they say, in the bud.

Suicide as a useful tool? Relief from pain or the simply the act of controlling your destiny so that you and you alone decide when to end this life you didn’t seek out in the first place. Fast-forward to a recent book I read, A Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, in which a central character takes his own life in a neat and tidy fashion and expressed the following in his suicide note: “…that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is a moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision.”

I don’t know if it was this line of reasoning alone that made it seem like an option for me, or more internal strife and sadness began to manifest in my life, but the act that used to be so removed from my personal life suddenly made itself poignantly known. It would show up while driving down an interstate and I would fantasize about just swerving into the opposite lane and surrender myself to the oncoming traffic. If I were ever in a tall building or crossing a bridge I would imagine just jumping off and floating down to the end. Those seemed the most palatable to my musing mind, although I would often try and imagine other more gruesome means. This line of thinking was mostly academic, however, and I think my general response at the time can be summed up perfectly in Dorothy Parker’s poem on the matter called “Resumé”:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

And then a couple years after graduation a friend of mine from college, and a close close friend of a close close friend of mine (Tony says, “What?” and I explain that the woman and I weren’t particularly close but she was very close to someone who I am very close to) took her life by throwing herself from a moving car. This was both awful and troubling because, as I explained earlier, my tendency with death is just to avoid it because I don’t process it at all effectively and yet here was someone whom I knew and who was loved by many I knew who had done what I had been thinking about for years and it was horrible and it smothered me in guilt for even thinking about it because (a) I was sure my own pain wasn’t in the least authentic and (b) it really hurt those she left behind. (Not unlike the present day with the impossibly sad death of the student.)

And yet the romance with my own potential death lived on. Re-reading Anna Karenina and her artistically poignant encounter with a train placed the idea in my head every time I stood upon a public transportation platform. And never with despair, just the acknowledgement that it was possible and if I did then there would be a sort of peace in nonexistence. But always love of those I love and guilt over upsetting them rendered this a passing fancy. A “passing fancy” that seems to eternally return.

So many writers I have discovered recently that I come to respect seem to have taken their lives: Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, David Foster Wallace…. And then a relative of another close friend jumped off the bridge in my hometown and instead of properly mourning him I was completely inspired to write the libretto for a collaborative piece with George that was performed in Hong Kong, a country that has a huge suicide rate amongst its citizens. I convinced myself it was to begin a conversation about a topic in a place that refused to discuss the issue, but lately it seems just another excuse for me to release through catharsis these thoughts from my head.

I have discussed this with a therapist, and I write about it now, purely because I want to know why the thoughts of suicide are so present in my mind. Am I what people refer to as “suicidal?” I don’t think so, nor did my therapist. And this despite the fact that my most recent apartment has windows that open upon train tracks far below and seem the most reasonable way for me to kill myself should I ever be tempted to do it. And yet, I really am not tempted. Indulging too much makes me feel so guilty for the pain and upset it would cause, and there are many things that I still need to get done.

And it is that awareness that brings me full circle to the news I received the other day. This poor girl. Although she and I may have had some of this in common, she was missing the thing that anchored her to her life and the opportunities that could be found within.