Inside Was The Present Where Young Boys Die by Kathryn Smith

Fifty of us walked, fingertip to gloved fingertip, through the sodden snow, looking for anything out of place: a mound of shapes, a candy wrapper, the body of a thirteen-year-old boy. Our footprints left wavering lines behind us. We didn’t speak. And if we glanced at each other, it was quick and desperate. This was the fourth day of searching. It was March 8th, my daughter’s twelfth birthday, and the missing boy was a student at her middle school.

Four days prior, the boy had gotten a bad report from a teacher, something about missing assignments, and like a kid he bolted on impulse, taking a minute to put on his black snow pants and gray puffer coat, but leaving his phone and his wallet at home. A runaway.

Each day as I left home, I told my daughter, “We’ll find him.” She knew him. His mother and I were friends. We worked together every year on the school’s auction and spent time in each other’s homes, designing giant decorations. The school was small, intimate even, with fifty kids per grade in the middle school. Everyone knew everyone. Everyone knew the boy.

He was found that day, but not by us. They said he’d fallen into a creek at the base of a stone bridge not far from his home, maybe hit his head. He was covered by a thick blanket of snow. They said he died the evening he ran away.

When I arrived home from the search and peeled off the layers of heavy wet clothes, my daughter came up to me. I dreaded telling her. She was my sensitive child, the one who intuited my emotions before I was aware of them myself. What was I going to say? I had no idea how to parent her through this tragedy.

“He died, didn’t he?” she said. We hugged for a long time, me kneeling on my sodden snow pants, she still in her pajamas because birthdays are automatic jammy days. “We should cancel my birthday party tonight,” she said.

“It might be good just to come over,” my friend said when I called to ask her opinion. She was right. We’d all been locked into the polarities of hope and despair, and now the worst had happened. Though no one wanted to celebrate, we needed to be together. I set the table for a big dinner of spaghetti for moms and kids, but the kids wanted to be outside, never mind the freezing temperatures. We mothers sat inside, arms crossed while our children hurled snowballs, built forts, lit a campfire. They refused to come in, even to eat, as if inside was the present where young boys die, and outside was the past where children still play. For five hours, they exhausted themselves, exorcising their grief, screaming and laughing, forgetting just a little bit.

As I waved goodbye to the last mom and kid that night, I thought to myself, their hearts are beat up, their innocence diminished, but they will be okay. My daughter’s going to be okay.

Then we learned a gun had been found near her classmate’s body, hidden under the snow. He had not accidentally fallen off the bridge. He had not hit his head on a rock.

The boy had found his father’s hidden antique gun, fitted with a loose trigger lock because trigger locks aren’t made to fit old guns, and taken his own life with a single gunshot to the head.

The town splintered, some blaming the family for having the gun, some supporting the family because they had lost a child and isn’t that what matters? Her school became a grim place with reminders everywhere, in the growing shrine of his locker, the multicolored Post-it notes on the walls, the somber tones of the all-school meetings discussing guns, safety, mental health.

And just as we were beginning to recover from the tragedy of his loss, just as my daughter was fully entering puberty, another boy from her small school drove into the nearby city and leaped off a bridge.

We were told to watch our children closely because now, apparently, our little school was experiencing something they called “The Werther Effect,” named after Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which a sensitive young man takes his life. They said adolescents are especially vulnerable because their brains are still developing things like impulse control and long-term reasoning without which despair can feel permanent, and suicide can seem like an answer rather than an irreversible decision. They said the risk is highest among young people who have been exposed to a recent suicide in a close setting, like a community, like a school.

Like our school. So small. So intimate. We had all been so involved in the search for the first boy. We had all known both boys so well.

So what did this mean for my child, her friends, the other students, our community? What does suicide contagion look like, and how does it stop? No one seemed to know. We were focused on supporting the families in the immediate, but as the weeks and months drew on, I wondered if and how the local tragedies were impacting my child.

Suicide contagion isn’t obvious. It’s like carbon monoxide poisoning. You can’t see, touch, or smell it. It seeps into your house and finds its way into your thoughts. The way you look at yourself and your child shifts. Ordinary things become threats. Silence becomes sinister and you find yourself lingering outside your child’s room, holding your breath, listening for sounds of life. A bath becomes dangerous. The train that comes through town? A weapon.

I’d raised two older teens already and felt confident, parenting-wise, about the rapids of adolescence, but I had no experience with this sort of trauma. After all, what is the difference between a teenager going through puberty, a depressed and anxious teenager, or a teenager contemplating suicide? Hard to say. All of them are behind the door to their room.

When my daughter closed her door to me after the second boy’s death, I called my friend whose daughter had been at my daughter’s birthday party to see if it was only me.

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

“I can’t stand the silence,” she said. Under normal circumstances, this could be a frustrated conversation between two parents about their sullen, private teens. But we were not under normal circumstances.

“Do you ever think that she could…you know?” I asked.

“Every second of every day.”

Another friend told me her daughter had started washing her hands until they bled, and refused to climb stairs without starting on her right foot. I admitted mine wouldn’t come out of her room. “And she has a growing pile of stuff outside her door,” I said. I had asked my daughter about it.

“I just need to know where everything I own is,” she said.

“Everything you own is somewhere in this house,” I said.

“You don’t know that. I want it in my room and I’m sorting.” I picked up an old stuffed rabbit.

“Don’t touch my stuff!” she screamed and started to cry. Real tears poured down her cheeks. Her eyes, tormented, her mouth, the shape of agony. What did I do? What did I say? What is happening to you, I wanted to ask, but what I said was, “What’s wrong with you!” because how is a pile in the hall related to anything? But it is. Just like washing hands, staying silent, or acting out can all be disguises for overwhelming upset and despair.

I took her to a psychiatrist. He suggested Zoloft, Xanax, and said many local kids were struggling with suicidal thoughts. It would take time, love, patience, he said. I took her to a psychologist who asked her to draw her feelings. She created a cemetery full of jaunty gravestones with a lonely noose swinging from a nearby tree.

Two months after the second boy died, I dropped her off on the first day of high school, desperate for some routine normalcy. She was dressed in new jeans with a slight flare, and a floral top. She’s a gorgeous girl with chestnut curls, smoky eyes, Irish cheeks.

“Let me take your picture!” I said, putting my car in park and opening the door.

“No!” she said, glancing back just enough to see me raise my camera.

In the photo she’s turning away from me, her face a sliver of disapproval, her hair lifting with the spin of her head, her hand raising to block me, her body mid-stride, moving away. My

baby, disappearing.

When you are concerned that your child may be suicidal, your parenting tools feel irrelevant. Your children hold all the cards and the stakes cannot be higher. You allow things you would never in a million years have allowed with your older kids, and when they come up to you and say, “What the hell, Mom?” You say, “It’s different.”

There’s a fine line between enabling and supporting. I know. I walked both sides of that line because, what does it mean to prepare your child for the real world if they can’t bear the thought of tomorrow? The future becomes abstract. Unimportant. If they want an orange Popsicle, you give them an orange Popsicle. If they want to talk to you until the sun rises the next day, you force your eyes open, you sit at attention, and you listen. And if they want to try to control an uncontrollable world by sorting through their things in a heap by your stairs, you walk around.

Did I do the right thing all the time? That’s a ridiculous question.

Suicide doesn’t end with the child who dies. It lingers, marking every parent who is left behind, every child who learns too soon that life is a choice you make every day.

It’s been ten years since the initial tragedy of those beautiful boys. My child and her friends are graduating from college. There’s a levity, a brightness to them as they step into the next stage of their lives. When I gather with their mothers, we celebrate this milestone, but in the quiet moments when our kids aren’t watching, we share the look, the one that acknowledges the lived nightmare, the memories of standing in our driveways, freezing in our bathrobes, not knowing. The one that says we’ve been through something, and we’re lucky as hell to be on the other side.