When I was in first grade a teenager who rode my bus threatened, one gray winter afternoon, to kill himself. He was very handsome. He looked a lot like Leonard Whiting, but with naturally yellow hair. He dressed in black pants, white shirts and little narrow black ties and black shoes. Kids dressed back then for school, in 1967. Hippies hadn’t come to high school in Kentucky.
Having said X, everyone his age on the bus said Y. In Kentucky, if you say X, everyone else screams Y. It’s what everyone does. It’s impossible to simply make an announcement.
We had dropped Vickie Turner, my classmate, off at her house on that dreary afternoon. The bus lurched forward and, when we were about one bus length away from the Turner driveway, the kid said suddenly, “I’m going to go home and kill myself.”
I didn’t hear anything else in the uproar that followed. They catcalling. They laughed. They roared insults. They said, “Oh, no, you WON’T” “SHUT UP. YOU ARE NOT SERIOUS,” and so forth. I was only six, but to me he looked pretty serious.
He was.
He went home and used one of his father’s guns to shoot himself in the stomach; I guess he couldn’t stomach his pain anymore. He didn’t die. He went to a hospital, and, as far as I know, if he hasn’t died of drugs, alcohol, cancer or unhappiness, he’s still alive. He was about sixteen, sweet sixteen and probably “never been kissed by a pretty girl yet.” Maybe if he had been kissed deeply, passionately and often, he would not have wanted to kill himself. He would have felt like he mattered to someone. Deep, passionate, frequent kisses have that effect on me, and I’m asexual.
It made an impression on me. My parents discussed it in whispers. They only did that when they discussed situations that they thought were horrifying. I was not horrified. It actually made a great deal of sense to me. He couldn’t take it anymore, and had no way out of his particular labyrinth. He couldn’t bear the Minotaur anymore; he had talked about how his father beat him with his belt. He didn’t talk about his mother; either she was dead, or uncaring, or too frightened of her husband to try to defend her son. It sounded to me that he hadn’t any other choice. Little kids cut to the point. He had no help or support, and he couldn’t run away. What was left?
We know that attempted suicide is a cry for help; it’s an attempt to get you to pay attention to them, to lift them from their great despair, to assuage their pain.
Every suicide, like every person, is unique. Everyone has his own ways of responding to crises. Some of us drink ourselves to death, or do street drugs, or endlessly go to the doctor to tell him/her that it hurts, and to fix it, and die of prescription drug use later because the bewildered doctor keeps prescribing drug after drug to fix the problems.
But someone who’s killed himself with cyanide isn’t crying out for help---he just wants a quick exit. Someone who kills himself with a double-barreled shotgun in the mouth isn’t crying out for help; it might be said that he is hushing himself in the most permanent way possible. Maybe these people think that the final pain of the blast will counteract the pain they feel inside. Some of us in this world carry impossible burdens of pain. Some of them choose to put down the burden. This kid tried to do that. I don’t think he missed; I think he was shaking. He was that upset.
I can’t say what kind of learning experience it was for him, but it was a learning experience for me. I learned that some hurts are unavoidable, but that some are, and that you have to shield yourself. I also learned that you can’t give up. If you give up, the assholes win. Even though he didn't die, the assholes won. They will always remember him, if they remember him at all, as the boy who tried to kill himself. You can't let them win.
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