The story came with a trigger warning, and while I have mixed feelings about trigger warnings in general, I cried off and on for the next few hours of the day. I don't have any close friends who have committed suicide. I don't have any children. For most of the article, I was a sympathetic bystander - not emotionally invested in the story, but sorry for the girl and her loved ones.
However, the article eventually came to the part of the story when the parents were first told their child was hurt. That moment is present in all of these stories, and I'm somehow blinded by it every time. In this instance, the police called the girl's parents after they found her on the pavement, cold and unmoving, and told them something had happened.
"Is she okay?" They asked.
The answer was no. Because the answer is always no in that situation.
The question itself is filled with an optimism that, rationally, isn't earned. If the police are calling you about your child, your child is not okay. But your mind can't be rational at that point. What you're about to be told is something you don't want to hear, something you aren't able to process, and you're begging to be told something that doesn't make sense, because otherwise you're about to find out something you might never recover from.
I was about to turn 21 when I called my grandparents one morning in Boston to thank them for the birthday card they sent me. Grandpa asked me if I had heard about the Johnson* boy, and that it was too bad what had happened.
"What are you talking about?" I asked.
"It's in the paper."
"What paper?"
"Oh, the Star I think."
"What happened?"
"He went hiking by himself and he fell."
"Is he okay?"
Grandpa had started the story with "shame about the Johnson boy." If I had bothered to think about it, or wanted to think about it, I would have known the answer without asking.
"Well, no, he... He died."
Everything inside me seized up. The Johnson family was close to ours. My dad had been the best man at their wedding. The daughter was seven months younger than me, and the son (now deceased) was within a year younger than my brother. They had had some issues during their high school years, some really tough times in their family, but the daughter was doing well in college now, and the son had just graduated high school, and it felt like they were finally out of the woods and that things were going to be okay.
Grandpa tried to keep talking to me, asking me about school and my social life, but I wasn't much good at responding. I needed confirmation that he was right, that this boy was dead, before I would allow myself to believe it. Maybe there was a mistake, somebody got the story wrong, maybe the Johnson boy was actually just fine.
I ran to my room and went on Facebook. His Facebook name was Bill Cosby. This was before it was common knowledge that Bill Cosby was a serial rapist, and most people still thought of Bill Cosby as the square who told kid-friendly jokes and wore awesome sweaters. It was a dumb thing, a very eighteen-year-old boy thing, to change your Facebook name to Bill Cosby. It was funny too, in that very stupid, teenage boy kind of way. It was funny for the same reason farts are funny, or the word "boobs" is funny, or wearing a DARE shirt while smoking weed is funny. Making the square, kid-friendly, pudding-loving comedian from the 80s your profile name is, in teenage boy terms, hilarious.
Comment after comment from his friends lamenting his passing and how they couldn't believe it and how this couldn't be real confirmed Grandpa had the facts right. I immediately started bawling. Bill Cosby was a good kid, and funny and fun to hang out with, and pretty fucking smart, and it just sucked so much that we weren't going to be able to see what happened next with him.
I called my parents but they weren't answering. Mom was at yoga or brunch or something like that. My brother was still asleep. Dad was playing basketball with his Saturday morning crew and wasn't answering his phone. I left Dad a message telling him to call me as soon as possible.
Finally, an hour later, I heard from him.
"Hey Caitles!" That is a nickname I tried to give myself in 10th grade that only caught on after I got to college, well after the period of time I wanted it to stick. I suppose that is the penance for giving yourself a nickname - it sticks when it feels like sticking.
"Hi. How are you?"
"Oh, just ducky. Played basketball. It's a beautiful day. Gonna run some errands and then relax in the backyard."
It sunk in that my dad had no idea his best friend's son had just died the day before. I felt even worse.
"Have you talked to Mr. Johnson?" I asked.
"Not recently. So how are you?"
"Have you talked to Mr. Johnson?"
"No. Why are you asking that?"
"Something happened..." My voice caught.
"I got a missed call from an 818 number I didn't recognize. Maybe that was him."
Mr. Johnson doesn't have a cell phone, even now, so that sounded like it was well within the realm of possibility, for my dad to not have his best friend's phone number saved.
"Something happened to Bill. He went hiking and he fell-"
"Is he okay?" My dad asked. He sounded angry but I knew he wasn't. When Dad gets panicked his voice gets harsher, as if yelling scares away whatever thing he's currently afraid of.
At this point I was sobbing again.
"No. Dad, he's dead."
"I gotta go," my dad said, and promptly hung up on me.
The story about the girl's suicide got me thinking about Bill Cosby Johnson for the rest of the day, and I had trouble getting the energy up to go see the shows I needed to see that night (for friends, for class, etc). I kept going back to that moment - "is he okay?"- when you hold on to that one last optimist shred of hope that whatever happened to your kid is fixable, reversible, not all that bad. I kept imagining being in the room with those parents when they got that phone call, as their entire lives came crashing about them. I kept remembering my dad telling me how great his day was until I told him it wasn't. I kept imagining Mr. Johnson calling the search party for his son when Bill didn't come home, and his face when they found him. I kept remembering my dad telling me how depressed Mr. Johnson was, and how he'd go to bed some nights hoping he wouldn't wake up.
I remembered there was only one memory my brain felt capable of going back to in the weeks that followed Bill's death. It was when we were kids, and Bill and his sister and I all went hiking by the creek near my house. The parents were in my yard, barbecuing and having a great time. Bill fell into the creek. He was only down to his belly button, but it felt like mortal danger. And I kept shouting at him "get out! Get out!" But I was frozen and couldn't move to help him. And finally he got out, and I had done nothing about it, and maybe I couldn't help anybody ever, and now that same boy was dead.
I was having a long day when I read that article about the UPenn student's suicide. I had work from 9-6. I had two shows, one for a friend and one for class, that I had to see. And I cried for a while in memory of young Bill's death, because it had been a while since I thought about it, and because it still doesn't seem fair.
"Is he okay?"
No. And he's not going to be.
