The letter from our high school principal, though well intentioned, made me nervous. Not the part about encouraging our children -- our children who are supposed to know they can talk to us about anything -- to seek out the school counselors. I have been at a loss for words this past week when my sixteen year old daughter looks at me. She stays in the same room but she says very little. I try to talk about it without really talking about it. I'm accustomed to one word answers (or no answers at all) to my stupid questions, but usually she cannot wait to escape my presence entirely. This week, she stays in the room, furiously messaging friends on her phone, occasionally grunting in my general direction. I, finally, am the one who leaves.
The part of the letter that made me nervous was the line that carefully -- or carelessly, I think -- reassured us, as parents, that suicide is often caused by mental illness. Mental illness, a thing that happens to other folks, not to us. Mental illness, like depression, the letter explains. I can count on one hand the people in my life who are not being treated with medication for depression. Depression, more accurately, in my mind at least, a disorder rather than an illness, a slight chemical imbalance treated with tiny little pills that take the edge off with barely a side effect. I know it's just semantics, but I'd like to think the kind of depression most of us endure hardly rises to the level of acute "illness," hardly even causes most of us to miss a day or two of school or work here and there.
I suppose the real question, then, is how do we know the difference? Were these teens who took their own lives markedly more moody, more sullen, more irritable than their peers? Were there signs somebody could have noticed while they were locked in their bedrooms like all the other teens in the neighborhood. Were they not on Facebook chatting with friends, real and virtual? Are our kids not really on Facebook chatting with friends, real and virtual, as we assume they are? Is the perpetual look of disdain on their faces something deeper and more sinister, directed less at their parents than at the whole damn concept of life itself? How on earth do we know?
The tragic drowning death of a three year old child who attended day care at our high school (and was known to many of our kids who have taken a child development class) topped off the gruesome week. An unspeakable accident juxtaposed onto a frightening tableau of unspeakable intentional acts. A community of parents grieves for the parents of the three year old, many of us knowing how lucky we are to have avoided what we think of as a young parent's worst nightmare. A community of parents grieves for the parents of the teenagers, knowing that there but for the grace of God go we. But we also grieve for the children, not just the ones who were so desperate they felt they had no other options but for the ones who are left behind, the survivors who seem to understand on some frightening level how the ones who took their own lives felt. We can promise ourselves that we will always be vigilant when a toddler is near a pool (even though the most vigilant of parents is still at risk), but we have far less control over our teenagers. How vigilant can you be when, most of the time, there is a closed door between you. Even when you are in the same room.
Children aren't the only ones with monsters under their beds. For us parents, the monster is always there. When our children are babies and we watch over them almost every second, and when they get older and we have to grab a second here and there when we can and we just need to take a leap of faith every day and hope that they will be safe.
I grieve for those parents this week, and for the children, and I try to keep my own monsters at bay, under the bed where they belong.
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