Dear children, understand this, a lot of the time death is senseless.
Dear children, some of you will find within yourself great reserves of rage and sadness.
Dear children, the adults around you, your bastions of safety, are barely keeping it together.
Dear children, don’t worry too much about strangers or terrorists hurting or killing you, statistically and by every other measure your biggest problem is your family.
I have spoken to parents disturbed or worse by their kids being dragged into well-meaning, externally mandated, classwide, school-wide prevention-of-something programs in which students were told about the deaths or suffering of kids they had no connection with, then made to participate in rituals and activities that seemed senseless at best, the experience stirring in them not a heightened empathy or empowerment but niggling feelings of unease and foreboding. A melancholia. Or simply boredom.
One time a girl approached Amanda. ‘Why talk to me?’ Amanda was not fishing. She wanted to understand. ‘Because,’ the girl said, ‘I thought you wouldn’t be shocked.’ What does it take to not be shocked? The girl was abused by a family member. Amanda thinks teachers should have the facts and stats laid down at teacher training. ‘When I taught I knew the statistics,’ Amanda says, ‘of sexual abuse and every class I went into I’d say to myself: “Five in here, who are they?” Sometimes you can see them straightaway those five. I used to say to new teachers, do you know the statistics? How come no one teaches you any of it?’
S says none of it was part of his training.
Actually I must take it further—schools, despite their sincerely pursued, these days, aim of keeping students out of harm’s way are structurally unable to do so 100%. Nature of the beast. The nature of human nature. Nature of adolescence and of sticking teenagers en masse into an institution. Too many sardines in one tight-sealed tin with a hook-up lock. It is the thing about being young (‘all character and no experience’ as Inga Clendinnen memorably wrote) and not always recognising how violated feels, that thing of having no map of the territory or a half-decent torch. Something else: space between a student and teacher cannot be made totally non-dangerous. Power over another is like that, it’s alchemically malleable, and there is always a grey zone, a 0.5%, a 0.05%. Sex. Doesn’t have to be about that. Coercion is often a wolf in sheep’s cuddly clothing when you are young.
Amanda, I say, did everything after school feel like a walk in the park?
I was working on this book and a year passed, then two, and two more (I struggled in vain not to be tossed off course) and that whole time I remembered nothing about being the person who emphatically does not like schools. Then my kids reminded me. Mum, you hate schools. Oh, I thought, schools drive me crazy, how is it I forgot? Perhaps tragedy did something to a school, peeled back something I had never understood about it before.
In Ukraine I went to Number 36 school for eight years; when we came to Australia I tried out two Melbourne high schools. Not much to tell you other than I couldn’t stand all three schools roughly the same. I won’t pretend I love schools now. I don’t. There’s the compulsory attendance for years without horizon. Whiffs of the army: lining up, obsession with uniforms. Having to raise your hand for the toilet. Crossing quadrangles past groups discussing parties to which you are non-invited. Undercooked curriculums, or misguidedly overcooked. First realisation of the unbridled rewards that conformity and good looks bring. And for every Monique, Ann or Amanda, ten so-so teachers or ten you won’t connect with. This is if things are good and safe, no gangs or psychopaths on training wheels running the show, no predatory teachers, no eager purveyors of racism or homophobia, no dealers offering ice and smack at corner discounts, no trolls who won’t rest till their victims are rearranged in foetal positions in bedrooms or cutting strips off themselves.
Also in this mix is your ‘internal age’, as David Rakoff phrased it—me, I may have been fifteen calendar-wise coming to Australia but felt more like thirty-nine on the inside, still decades away from that state of bliss defined by Rakoff as ‘when your outside and inside are in sync, and soma and psyche mesh as perfectly as they’re ever going to’. (Cancer got Rakoff at forty-seven. His own internal age? Between forty-seven and fifty-three, he reckoned.) Some people, possibly many people, are really good at being children. Me: nup. Nothing particularly awful happened. Just: powerlessness, choicelessness, dependency, always having to do things on someone else’s terms. I couldn’t wait for it to be over. It’s over. I am goosewalking into my middle age (I almost typed Middle Ages) and it’s my son’s turn now (my daughter is done) and then, gods willing, it’ll be their children. Watching them is its own torture.
Frances hated leaving school. It was her undergraduate years that were horrible. Back at school she’d felt supported, safe, surrounded by people who knew her and cared, then at uni kids were getting drunk and partying with abandon. She felt she had done all that before—before Katie. Three years at university, Frances did not make a friend. Later she did a Masters, that was better, she found people she could relate to. I say, I felt so alone too during my undergrad degree. I don’t tell her about the loneliness of my school years.
If a teacher says, ‘Today we shall talk about Antigone’ (it happened to Frances)—could you take any of it seriously when your sister hung herself the other month?
Or maybe it is in the face of death that school might make the greatest sense.
Mildura Secondary College—population 800—lost six kids and threw open its doors to everyone other than camera-wielding scum (scum is the image imprinted in people’s memories of the media hangers-around). A stationwagon rounding a bend had ploughed into a straggle of teenagers. Barb, a teacher I know, visited one of the survivors in hospital and embedded in this girl’s backside were ninety-six pieces of gravel that she later kept in a jar. The students were walking along the side of the road to a party.
The tragedy happened on a Saturday. All the area’s schools made a big deal about Monday being a school day. Former students, friends from other schools, parents of the students who died were encouraged to come that Monday. The school’s cafeteria was converted into a grieving room. The school helped arrange funerals for the kids whose families had no strong church links. The school’s chaplain led the ceremonies. In the weeks and months following the death of Shane, Abby, Stevie-Lee, Cassandra, Cory and Josephine, the school became the crumbling world’s centre—the centre that could hold. It was 2006. Years afterwards, it is as if something is caught in Barb’s words, a fleck, timelessness.
I think of the off-duty nurses who rang each other, got their kids minded, then went into the hospital that night to help wash the bodies before the families saw them. I think of how, as teachers, we faced the rest of the kids that first Monday morning and read the rolls, the names of the children we had lost still there. I think of the media and how ruthless they were and my boss striding across the oval telling cameramen to get off our grounds. I think of how happy I was we had such a large playground and the kids could grieve in private behind the big buildings.
‘A week later, or a bit more, I came to school, got out of my car,’ Barb says, ‘and the school was noisy again. The most beautiful sound. Like birds coming back from the northern winter.’
Practice exams, actual exams, parent-teacher interviews, classes, things absurd in their random and stiff irrelevance, may re-emerge as shockproof, and important.
Start time of Japan’s 2011 earthquake-tsunami-nuclear meltdown: 2.46 p.m. Most of the country’s school-aged children were at … [obvious]. What’s little realised is how much schools, in this natural and human-made disaster, sheltered the affected population. School gyms became relief distribution points. School walls were message boards. Many students seized control of apportioning food and medicine, and this granted them purpose, and structure. Eventually schools resumed being schools and students were transformed yet again. An Ishinomaki city principal said he never grasped what education could d
o until he saw children turn away from the debris and re-immerse in their school lives—and when Julie Pozzoli, eight weeks into the job as principal of Innisfail State High in north Queensland, saw her school reduced to ruins by category-five cyclone Larry she sensed her priority was to fling the gates back open. Because ‘we had children needing to come to school. We needed to make things as normal as possible for them.’ What a ubiquitous phrase it is—back to normal—but perhaps not as glib, nor so obscurantist, as it sounds. A local school can hold things together the way the medieval town square used to. As long as it was there, intact, the rest of a community could be reimagined around it.
‘We were asked to maintain,’ Barb tells me, ‘a certain equilibrium, a certain peacefulness. Not peacefulness. A calm. We really tried. We just kept running classes. We were conscious not to sob in front of kids because there was enough sobbing.’ Hardest was the grieving room’s dismantling after the last funeral. Messages and poems from that room were wrapped in little packages for the parents to come and collect. The six lockers were not used for the rest of the year. Flowers, notes, decorations were stripped off them and the lockers left empty, untouched. Same with Katie’s locker. Difficult to take the grieving room closure, says Barb, the school was flicking the switch back on and students and teachers went looking for ways of remembering the six. ‘We kept the kids with us, on our arms’—armbands, made of rubber, yellow and blue of the school’s colours. Some students wore them for two years without ever taking them off. Barb says sometimes with all that was going on, pain and loss, yes, also court hearings, an inquest, media reports, the incessant picking at the scabs—‘It was almost a relief to go and be a teacher.’
Just as the culture is shifting but it’s unclear where it’s going Frances and I attend a forum on responses to suicide. We sit in the front row, notepads and pens on our knees, waiting, Frances whispering.
—Do you believe in PTSD?
—Not that much.
Onstage is a mix of historians, artists, academics, mental health workers, journalists, people who know what it is to be driven to suicide, others familiar with how getting left behind feels. They are the proof change is happening, language emerging. A good night, we agree, waiting for a tram afterwards. Frances says:
—I was infuriated, though. So angry. One of the media guys, that journalist, didn’t you find him annoying? Didn’t you see how special he felt breaking his youth suicide story, such a hero, and how very traumatised? Did you notice how fascinated he was with these young people’s suicide? How drawn to it?
—I found him a bit narcissistic. He seemed to admire the depth of his own emotional response.
—Narcissistic that’s right.
Reporting youth suicide was once considered akin to starting a fire and walking away from the scene of the arson, and journalists didn’t do it. When Four Corners aired, in 2006, a sober and painstakingly researched look at the aftermath of seventeen-year-old Campbell Bolton’s jump off a hotel roof, the show’s EP Bruce Belsham spoke of grappling with the toughest set of editorial judgments of his career—more fraught than crystal meth, sex slavery, domestic terrorist recruitment and Australians on death row in Bali, all the stuff of Four Corners episodes that year alone. Later depression awareness group beyondblue successfully stopped a 60 Minutes segment on four suicides in one Geelong school. In 2009. The argument? Same argument waged so long and backed by such thick sheafs of research I need only key in buzzwords—irresponsible/dangerous/copycat/clusters.
Then one Monday night it was 2012. Four Corners covered a suicide cluster—twelve schoolkids; they were putting themselves in front of trains, mostly—in outer Melbourne suburbia. In Albury-Wodonga the Border Mail ran four months of frontpage youth suicide stories. By accident I had the TV on when the editor and staff were called up to receive a Walkley award for their campaign END SUICIDE SILENCE. The camera caught them swaying back and forth in the rhythmic, pain-releasing way people sometimes sway at funerals.
One of society’s last silences goes crack like a ripe walnut? Or, more boringly, the offline world playing catch-up to people’s online existences?
Another night: on my TV screen’s a talk show, tonight’s topic grief and time limits, and people with broad Australian accents and no special expertise in trauma are saying what great works of art have been saying for close to ever. They are saying stuff we’ve wilfully forgotten these last hundred or so years. ‘This is not an illness. I’m not going to get over it. I’m going to live with it’—(mother of a deceased girl).
What I want to say, it’d be disingenuous of me not to shout it, is don’t forget that this resurgent openness, fear’s absence, is so new you can smell the factory paint on it.
Attempted, fantasised about. Considered, completed (creepy technical term), mourned, memorialised. On social media platforms suicide has been discussed since year dot, death (along with desire) being one of two great forces, as Sigmund Freud knew, of human life and so they flow like two megarivers, death and sex, the Nile and the Amazon of the online world.
Bryn and Katie belong to this era’s dawn. Not a trace of Bryn’s life or death exists on the web; of Katie there is only her MySpace account, lingering on, which was where Frances found her suicide note a week after her death and where those who consider themselves Katie’s friends used to post fluffy messages on her birthday and assorted other occasions despite her being dead, e.g.
Happy Birthday Katie. It’s been too long without seeing you Katie. I hope ur in the french exam room with me today!! U were always better at French, especially those poems . Hope you’re happy wherever you’re. I was on placement and this girl from uni reminds me sooo much of u.
Is the banality touching? How much of this talking to Katie is self-gratifying, a performance: of cutesy, naive disregard for the finality of her death? A not-swallowing of its irreversibleness. Katie this, Katie that. I hear a coroner—she examines young bodies—say young people do not get finality. Once dead, you stay dead, how to teach that—that some things can’t be deleted, undone, when pretty much everything at that age is trial and error? Perhaps pray for error. A mother of a teenager who died under a train remembered her daughter’s friends kept calling and texting her dead daughter’s smartphone, as if the phone were a portal, connecting them to the underworld, or as if the phone could be a replacement for her vanished body (like wafer to the body of Christ), unless what they were sensing was the phone was with her. In that place where the battery would not go flat.
Katie after her boyfriend killed himself posted messages to his MySpace account. She direct-addressed him too. You didn’t wait for me. I will see you very soon—this is what a friend remembers Katie’s posts saying.
‘There might be more bullying on Facebook but Facebook is all white and upfront, MySpace was dark,’ Monique says.
I like this thought from Stacey Pitsillides. When the future’s archaeologists search for 21st-century traces ‘what they will find on the internet will resemble what they find under the ground: mainly garbage and graves’.
In online condolence books it’s the dead who are spoken to, not, as tradition once dictated, the bereaved family. We in the West have long been doing our speaking to the dead in private; were we to do so with some regularity publicly, in the glittering sunlight of day, we’d risk being diagnosed with complicated grief disorder or worse. Online, talking to the dead, sharing with them goings-on, letting them know how much they’re missed, reminiscing, petitioning them for help, makes sense. The asynchronous, one-way, publicly visible style of the communication looks and feels natural. It’s how people generally talk online. Facebook pages of the dead where these conversations play out are anything but the online world’s kooky underbelly. In the words of Régine Debatty (curator, critic, blogger) they lie somewhere between ‘the gravestone and that teenage bedroom that never gets touched’. Our rituals are changing and Debatty thinks in matters of grief, and not only, we are taking our cues from teenagers.
No p
lace until recently in our Western anglophone culture for overflowing, unpushawayable grief. Big grief. Long grief. No place for the grief of Demeter, who Ovid describes in Metamorphoses, the Greek goddess of earth, harvests and agriculture who grieved without rest for her daughter, Persephone, and ‘reproached the whole wide world—ungrateful, not deserving her gift of grain’. She grieved and the world suffered. She grieved and earth went barren.
Oh, Katie, you sent the suicide note to your own MySpace account. This was before Facebook did to MySpace what Coke did to Pepsi and Frances says the message said—
Hi Frances, you’re probably reading it and I’m probably dead blah blah. Miss you guys.
Were you giving yourself a chance to change your mind in the last moment?
I sit across from your sister in a nearly empty cafe that can comfortably gobble up half a dozen office Christmas parties, and watch tears jump off her cheekbones and fall on her neck. The tears feel endless even though they are not gushing out of her eyes but rolling quietly like beads. ‘The number of times I cried is ridiculous,’ Frances says. Cried, past tense, this coffee we’re having is a fair few Christmas seasons ago. She looks ageless when crying, sister #3.
Exact iteration of last two sentences in the suicide note—
if ANYONE feels that this is their fault, tell them i say it ISN’T. Even me, writing this letter, don’t know if it’s going to be read in the future or be deleted by me.
Katie, were you conjuring the world without you in it—or with you in it, only dead? Trying to speak from a place of no longer being here, while still alive?
From Frances’s third-year undergrad creative writing assignment—
so many spelling and grammar mistakes, too, as if she went to little effort to write this note, as if she didn’t think that anyone would read it or that she needed it.
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