Wisconsin's "Suicide High"

My cousin was the eighth suicide in two years at his high school. Two years ago last month, he hanged himself from an electrical tower near his house. He used his belt. His older brother found him at three in the morning. He and his dad cut him down.

How do you even begin to grieve a suicide? My aunt's house was almost empty the next day, as people stayed away out of...I don't know what. Embarrassment that they didn't know what to say? A sense that his suicide somehow shamed the family? They acted like it was some big secret that they hadn't heard, even though it was splashed all over the news. Those who were there with my aunt were completely silent. There really was nothing to say. It hurt too much to remember him the way people usually do when someone passes.

Eight of these. Eight. They all did it the same way. In fact, when my mom called me at 5 a.m. to tell me our family had lost another seventeen-year-old, that's one of the first things she said. "He did it. Ben did it! Just like the others," she wailed. "He hung himself, Lizzie. They're all doing it the same way!" Present tense. As if there was no reason to believe it would end any time soon. It was like a line from a horror movie, and it has haunted me all these last two years.

I didn't know my cousin well. He was only four when I left home for college. I know he used to hide from the school bus and play hookey in first grade. I know he was a boy scout. He dyed his hair blue in ninth grade. I know he played football, sang in a concert choir, and left his two best friends utterly bereft. I know he had tried to hang himself before.

High school kids have not fully developed the part of their brain responsible for critical thinking and impulse control. They just haven't. It's not an indictment, it's a biological fact. A depressed teenager has an even less realistic sense of reality. Their pain is so all-consuming they can't grasp the permanence of suicide or the effect it will have on their families and friends. Ben broke his mother. She will never be the same person he knew. Had he known this, he might have stuck it out long enough to grow up.

They're all doing it the same way! Eight kids gone. The school is now nicknamed "Suicide High." The school did nothing after the first seven suicides. They claimed they thought it best to keep the incidents low-profile. It didn't occur to them that if the students are all committing suicide the exact same way, there was a copy-cat nature to the epidemic that needed proactive intervention. The school did nothing to investigate the deaths, so they didn't find out until after my cousin's death that the kids who suicided were lauded as heroes all over MySpace. The kids were all talking about it. Only the adults weren't.

And now my family is fresh out of boys. He was the last. His friends have all graduated and gone on to college and life. His sister is now driving. His dog misses him. And I never got to know him. Just because suicide is such a damn secret.

Talk about it. And if you hear someone hinting or threatening or pondering suicide, report it. It is a matter of life or death, and in some cases, it's a matter of many lives and deaths.

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