When I was a high school junior, my best friend and I made a suicide pact. We were going to kill ourselves right after finals, in the spring.   Despite our planning, I knew that I’d never go through with it (I was terrified of blood for one, and of dying, for two), but I talked a good game.
“It’s cool that we don’t have to study for the Calc final,†I told my friend and she agreed. We really had everything figured out. This whole “life†business, as seen in high school, was totally for losers. We didn’t need any of it.
Neither one of us went through with it but the experience shaped my teenage years. What bothers me is that I cannot remember the why of it. Why did we make the pact? Why did we flirt with such a horrifying thought?
The thing that sticks out for me is that we were reading Moby Dick in English class and that even armed with Cliff Notes, I could not bear one more paragraph. I know that we were in the middle of the whole college application thing, that our futures were as uncertain. Although they would certainly include a liberal arts college in the Northeast.
But we were filled with teenage angst and flirting with lower adulthood, as seen on the ABC Afterschool Specials.
Surviving high school is no small feat.
I worry about the desperation of the teen age years, the isolation that creeps in, even as you’re surrounded by friends, the perforating away from your family.
My kids are growing up, my daughter is on the cusp of teenagehood. And I’m terrified.
I will never make her read Moby Dick.
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PSA: I’ve rewritten this sentence many times. “My husband has been touched by suicide.” But touched is not right. Touched is gentle and forgiving, and this was neither. It is not my story to tell, and it happened many years before I met him, but I see its imprint, its stomping on the man that I love decades after the tragedy.
If you are in a crisis, or are worried about someone who is, please visit this link. Help is available, free help.
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