It is not about her looking away. About choosing when to look.
I am not sure if writing her own book is still on the table.
In my childhood people said the best-looking kids come from mixed ethnicity. Frances is Eurasian. And beautiful, yes. If you don’t mind I will leave it to you to visualise the skin, eyes, cheekbones, her hair. I didn’t want to tell you straight away because something happens when we’re told someone, a young woman especially, has a she’d-look-good-in-a-postage-bag league of beauty. We have been told little yet somehow we know now and are less alert, less hungry for something. Wrong to keep it from you much longer, though. Frances thought Katie was the most beautiful out of them all. How beautiful? Katie didn’t need make-up, ever.
‘Stunning, popular, unstoppable, involved in everything; she was extremely smart too,’ says Frances, ‘and funny. The entertainer. The leader.’
Bryn, says Monique, made friends with every wayward person. It was obvious after he died that he had been a shepherd for his school’s lost kids.
The day after Katie’s boyfriend killed himself—five weeks before she did—Katie spent the day at round 2 auditions for Australian Idol. She sang in its entirety the periodic table of the elements while doing backflips. She wasn’t the least bit serious about getting in and getting on TV. Says Frances, ‘She wanted to encourage science in the community.’ Laughter in Frances’s voice.
The boyfriend was technically an ex-boyfriend. They were together for about six months. He was older, no longer at school, didn’t have a job, her parents did not approve. They didn’t know about the drugs. The relationship was apparently intense. Friends remember fights followed by reiterations of love minutes later. Frances says Katie did not love him. ‘When you are sixteen, who cares if it’s real love, it’s the drama.’
One May evening Katie and her boyfriend went to her Year 11 formal and Katie broke off the relationship afterwards. Shortly after that he killed himself. It became public knowledge that Katie on the phone was last to talk to him. The young man’s family (though not his mother) blamed her. His older brother called her murderer. At the funeral Katie was not allowed to speak. No mention was made of their relationship, none of her, no space carved for her grief. His suicide smashed Katie. Straight after, she was put on suicide watch. Pre-breakup, it transpired, they had a pact and tried dying together. Katie told Frances she was not going to attempt it again. She said, ‘I promise you as a sister.’ Then she tried to hang herself in a school toilet. Someone disturbed her; she had to stop. ‘It would have been absolutely appalling if she had done it at school,’ says Ann. ‘The ramifications. You can sell your house, move on, but you can’t sell a school.’
At Australian Idol auditions the cameras were on Katie. Eight hours. Her entertaining crowds. A classmate remembers calling Katie: ‘And she said “hi” and I said “are you at the auditions?” and she said “yeah, got through the first bit, going into the judges in a couple of hours” and I said “oh, yeah”. And she’s, like, “you know he died” and I’m like “yeah, we got told this morning” and I say “is everything OK?” and she is like “oh. Yeah.” She must have been in absolute shock.’
Frances says, ‘My sisters were my life. Four sisters: together. Four against the world.’ Growing up, people mixing up her and Katie—she could never understand that. Now when she looks at childhood photos she sometimes struggles to pick the difference. Plus: the voice. ‘I don’t like hearing my voice played back because I sound like her, I feel it’s her talking.’ A glorious, true likeness bound all four. A friend from Katie’s class remembers sister #2 (Frances is #3, Katie #4) entering the room at the funeral: ‘We couldn’t handle it. Like seeing a ghost.’
Something strange—‘downright freaky’ Frances says—happened not long after. One of the regulars, a woman, at a cafe where Frances and Katie both worked had a job with Fremantle Media, the production company behind Australian Idol. That woman’s brother killed himself sometime before Katie. When she found out about Katie the woman flew to Sydney and cut out each frame of Katie from eight hours of footage and sent the tape to Frances and the family. Frances watched the tape once then wouldn’t touch it for five years. ‘In that footage it wasn’t HER. She’s acting a bit crazy. She was just trying to get through the day.’ Sister #1 (six years older than Frances) watched the tape every day that first year.
Bryn had no siblings but many friends and S had been his best mate since joining Bryn’s school at the end of Year 7.
‘Bryn’s mother called with the news. Or his father. One of the parents. Sunday morning. I was in the kitchen having a cup of tea. There was this call and they said Bryn was found dead. Short conversation.’
In a little park under a big tree S and I talk quietly and, listening back on my mobile, the birds and the kids are louder than us.
S’s parents were away. He called his grandmother. She came around. After that’s a blur, especially the early weeks. He did not have to go to school but went. School was a good place to be. Friends and a couple of caring teachers were there. The only moment that whole year he felt let down and pissed off was the final assembly when the principal made no reference to Bryn. The following year Bryn’s year were about to graduate and Monique got asked to speak at the valedictory dinner. ‘I knew,’ she says, ‘by that time the school would have wanted it all to go away. And I hate public speaking. I got up. Big room with a lot of people in it. I said, the thing I am really good at is being in the right place at the right time, and I think I was in the right place right time when we lost Bryn. And the room went silent. And people were nodding. I knew I’d done right, in saying something.’
They were a special year, S says, unusually close. For the first few years afterwards a group would gather on Bryn’s birthday. Sometimes out bush at a place his ashes were scattered they’d hold a picnic, talk about Bryn, be together. ‘I said to the kids: we are different, we have had our hearts broken, we will never do it to anyone,’ Monique tells me, ‘remember this feeling.’
S teaches high-school English and humanities. ‘I haven’t thought much about the connection between Bryn’s death and my decision to become a teacher.’ I look at him disbelievingly. ‘I am just trying to make myself,’ he says, ‘approachable. Make it easy for students to come and talk. Make myself available.’ I don’t press the point. It is enough that he is there and that he knows.
If kids ask Monique about a boy who killed himself years ago, she tells them. Say someone steps into the classroom and flippantly announces ‘I just wanna kill myself’. Others’ll whisper ‘shhh, don’t say it in front of her’. Students around her know.
Everywhere you look, you see holes—vacant chairs, empty desks, holes on class lists. Lockers: S’s eyes used to bump against Bryn’s locker all the time. Try to forget, how can you forget? Yet no space for a suicide in a school’s institutional memory existed. If the student were school captain, maybe they’d lay a plaque or something equally inconspicuous. With no allusion to cause of death. One school I know grew a rose garden at the parents’ insistence. A rose garden floating in schoolgrounds, no explanation of its reason for being, a silent, fragrant signifier.
‘Lisa,’ I say—it was Lisa I talked to first about schools losing their kids, about wanting to write about it, by now we’re friends—‘is suicide the worst that can happen to a school?’
‘School is an institution but it is like a family,’ she says. ‘In loco parentis—in the place of a parent. When a suicide happens a school is damaged irrevocably, like a family would be. A school is haunted by a suicide, like a family. Like a family you find yourself asking what didn’t we do, didn’t we see, should we have said, how?’
‘Lisa, but how can a school keep safe young souls,’ I say, ‘that do not know themselves, do not know death is final, are in turmoil, often don’t know to ask for help? Can any institution respond to such a demand?’
Lisa still teaches English and literature but not full time and no longer at Bryn�
�s school. She paints, writes, plays in a band, looks fifteen years younger than she is supposed to. (No make-up like Katie.) She answers, ‘In Raimond Gaita’s book of essays is an excerpt from a letter by Anne Manne who tells her dear friend, Rai, that to really face up to the tragedy of his mother’s suicide and a lifetime of its consequences he should find pity for himself as a young boy.’
Pity. I am struck by the word.
‘A school should be able to find that pity,’ says Lisa, ‘for itself. That forgiveness.’
At home I pull down After Romulus, Gaita’s book, and re-read him quoting from the letter then catching himself remembering something he once wrote: ‘For the Greeks pity did not carry the connotations of condescension that it often does for us. It referred to a sorrowing compassion that is marked through and through by awe at our vulnerability to misfortune.’ ‘At this last school I heard about,’ Monique says, ‘the school captain killed himself the day before graduation. How’d they miss him? How did we miss Bryn?’
Pity and forgiveness, they are nothing like the booming, blaring, everywhere phrases: unbroken spirit, coming together, overcoming adversity, rebuilding, shared values, vision for the future. ‘Community’ feels wooden as something out of a grant application.
At Bryn’s school, Stephen, a Year 10 boy, killed himself years before Bryn’s suicide. Stood in front of a train at a nearby station. Not many people from Stephen’s time remain at the school but Amanda, who taught Italian and got retrenched in pre-Bryn times, was there when the principal, dead now, gathered the Year 10s and said ‘it’s self-centred and indulgent of you to grieve. Think about Stephen’s parents.’
Amanda’s insides flipped when she heard that. Out of these kids being told they were selfish to feel anything, some were Stephen’s friends and others had bullied him, called him a mad dog on the train platform on the way home the night before he killed himself.
‘I had to go to a station. Stand on the platform. And think, what must you feel like to do that? Had to watch a train coming,’ Amanda says. ‘Try to exorcise this awful image that was in my head.’
Back in the classroom she spoke. ‘This is not my place but I must tell you—of course you feel. You have every right to feel.’ She went up to the principal, said it was wrong what he said. How that old principal hated her guts. Later he’d get rid of her but this once he couldn’t deny her. He regathered the Year 10s. Said ‘I made a mistake.’ Feelings were allowed.
When Bryn ended his life a new principal was in place and unafraid of feelings: his own, others’. Teachers in tute rooms read aloud a factual non-euphemistic statement about what happened. Lisa, who was there, thinks it helped. No one afterwards was roaming the schoolyard wondering why pockets of distressed kids were crying. Lisa credits the old principal—a dinosaur who came to see and to disown parts of his dinosaur upbringing—for the turnaround. And outside the school’s gates the culture was shifting too. Not like a bit of taboo erosion each year. Things were going in bursts and bounds. An Australian schools guide edited by psychologist Mardie Whitla sawed suicide away from the generic tragedies-slash-crises pile. Suicide was its own crisis, got its own chapter. Whitla’s book was forward-thinking for its time. Its time—2003—in this story each year counts. For schools something bigger than institutional self-preservation was at stake. Still-developing teenage brains, no impulse control, peer pressure, suicide pacts, danger of clusters and contagion, romantic notions of death—what other institution had to contend with such a fusion? Each of these was real. What you got when you mixed them was real. ‘Can’t pretend nothing happened,’ Mardie Whitla tells me. ‘Principal needs to take charge. Parents need to know what school is planning to do.’ Parents of the living, she means.
A tilt away from secrecy. From every school feeling on its own, besieged, so anxious about being destabilised by its students’ feelings running amok—this being particularly the case in expensive private schools—that a principal of conservative bent might reckon himself justified in lambasting kids for not sitting tighter on their self-centred emotions. Then when Katie died, it was during a feelings-are-OK strange period of transition, when a suicide was no longer a stain on a school to be covered with both hands, more like a scar, a hurting rather than a tarnishing, and Bryn’s death too, though it happened some years earlier, came in that time of reluctant tending-to not (frenetic) scrubbing-off. Grief was legitimate. It required, though, ‘managing’.
This ‘managing’ thread ran all through federal health department guidelines issued three years after Whitla’s book, and, looking back at the early 21st-century language—all the schools should facilitate appropriate participation in expressions of condolence BUT and other constipated tangles—it is plain how saturated it was with unease about the chance of suicide contagion. And scared: of protracted grief.
(And re how grief was to be managed, let’s see: channelled into a renewed understanding of the preciousness of human life. Countered by school routines. Given validation but no room to expand or to assert its non-transience. Counselling—yes. Flags at half mast, shrines, special concerts, photos of the dead student stuck on walls—no.) The aftermath of a suicide was like a flash of some other world of humans without skin, and needed to be gone in a flash too.
Possible to start your education in a school of whispers and rumours, graduate from a school of full disclosure, and enter a world where the news headline suicide survival stories must be told says Australian mental health chief does not feel one bit eye-popping.
Most important in the new-world guidelines is this, ‘Suicide should not be made into a prohibited topic, students must be allowed to talk.’ Some things in the guidelines, ‘Do not provide details of the method of suicide or attempted suicide,’ are as they always were.
After a suicide a school may desperately want to do right, whatever right looks like, for the students most affected but its duty of care is to all students and by extension their families. Lisa estimates 10 to 15% of the student population after Bryn’s death were devastated; the rest were shocked but not shocked to their core and ‘kind of able to put it to one side’. Tension between duty of care to the 15% and the 85% will probably always be there. Such tension may just be defining of school as an institution. Always the 15% need different things than the 85% and neither are the needs of those 85% by any means uniform and all the while teachers are already giving their 100% and…
A number of kids in Amanda’s Italian class were struggling with family illnesses. Stephen’s suicide pushed everyone to the brink. Amanda walked in on a fight. This was when teachers speaking to students about what happened, teachers making themselves night-and-day available to kids they saw gasping for air because they considered it immoral to outsource this talking to the especially trained special specialists, were risking their jobs. She walked in and a boy whose mum was dying was dangling a chair above his head. Amanda took the boy out of the classroom. ‘He fell on me and started crying.’ She said nothing, only hugged him, went back inside. ‘Look, we have to deal with it,’ she said to the class. ‘Don’t tell anyone but if by the end of the year you can order a pizza, a limonata and a gelato, I’ll pass you.’
Another boy in that class had lost his sister.
‘What do you want?’ Amanda asked him.
‘I want them to talk to me.’ Since his sister died people had been avoiding him with their eyes.
‘Would you be prepared to answer their questions?’
Amanda put him in front of the class. For the rest of that year all they did was talk.
Amanda, many suitably qualified people would take you to task, they’d say: ‘Did counsellors advise you on your radical course of action?’ No. ‘Did you do follow-up ensuring each individual student got long-term psychological aid? Did you involve family and other teachers? Did you consider the implications of students missing out on regular educational experiences and outcomes?’
No. No. NO; you were alone without help and these kids were turning insane wit
h the pain they felt inside themselves and in each other’s stomachs (where does pain live?) and you couldn’t pretend. Who would be the first to throw a stone at you, Amanda?
A friend teaching in outer Melbourne lost a student recently, a fourteen-year-old named Lachlan:
I was itching to get aggro, to tell the kids you only have one life, not three like the heroes in the video games you play—I wanted them to sign a contract. But teachers were blocked off from being there for the kids. Yet the kids were itching to speak. School was bringing in counsellors. What were they going to do? They didn’t know the kids. Didn’t know Lachlan. They were saying it was mental health. I think there’s more to it. On his Facebook page he wrote how he didn’t suffer the problem you’re meant to have starting high school—of leaving your friends behind—as he had no friends in primary school. And there were 150 comments underneath because so many kids could relate to friendlessness.
When a school goes into shutdown mode—it happens still, every unhappy school will always be unhappy in its own way (OR: only happy schools are alike)—it both closes in on itself and becomes overreliant on outsiders. On counsellors, experts. Gets scared to let students and teachers talk to each other. But stopping them? It doesn’t work. Doesn’t work, doesn’t, although it would be a mistake to grow too confident that we know what does. Where to start with prevention, for instance?
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