Maybe we should talk about it her perspective

When I was in middle school, I attended PATS (the Program for Academically Talented Students). It was awesome because you got to get out of school and take weird classes with all the other gifted kids in town.

One semester we had some “Mensa” class where we played dice games. This awkward boy was in my group and he was brilliant (there is a difference between smart and brilliant). We won every game. Then, the next semester he was assigned to be my lab partner in a genetics class where we anesthetized fruit flies with ether to study their traits under a microscope. We accidentally overdosed a lot of fruit flies with that ether. And I learned a profound lesson – there is a fine line between comfortably numb and dead.

Years later when I was in my early 20s, I was shocked to read the obituary of my brilliant PATS classmate. I had not seen or heard of him since eighth grade. He died of a drug overdose.

I remember being so sad – what a waste of a brilliant mind. I couldn’t help but be perplexed, though. Hadn’t he learned about that fine line when we killed all those fruit flies? I wanted to know more about him and what happened. But nobody wanted to talk about it.

Sadly, this story is not over. It begins again my senior year of B. T. Washington High School. In my AP History class, I sat next to Fred, our valedictorian and the most brilliant boy ever (alas, very shy and awkward). Our assignment was to write an essay on “Jacksonian Democracy: A Façade?” Why do I remember this 40 years later? I’ll tell you why.

Usually, we just turned in our assignments to the teacher. But on this day, we had to swap papers with the student beside us and grade our peer’s paper. Ugh, it was just my luck to sit next to Fred. I thought my essay was good – I was ranked number seven in the senior class and knew how to use a semicolon. But his paper was off the charts. Mine seemed so middle school compared to his, I was embarrassed he had to read it. I gave him an A plus and couldn’t find anything whatsoever to critique. He made several corrections and comments, was very polite, told me at least I proved my thesis and gave me a B. I probably deserved a C; he was just being kind. At graduation they announced he had a full ride to Harvard. He wanted to be a nuclear physicist, I think. But the week after graduation, he drank a whole bottle of vodka and died of alcohol poisoning/asphyxiation.

I think it was a dare. He wanted so desperately to fit in with the cool kids. But I don’t know. Because shhhhh, nobody wanted to talk about it. Could I have been nicer to him? Sat next to him on the bus freshman year or at least smiled at him when I passed him by to sit with my friends? Would kindness have made a difference? Would he still be alive to make the world a better place with his beautiful mind? I’ll never know. It feels like something we should talk about.

High school bullying and binge drinking are alive and well. I tried to talk to my teenage daughter about it, but it made her terribly uncomfortable and she changed the subject.

Many of my dear friends have lost their loved ones to suicide or overdoses. It is hard to know what to say. Words seem inadequate. So, we avoid the subject. A very good friend told me that talking about the brother she lost helped her deal with the grief. When people spoke of him, it helped keep the memories alive and made her smile.

Yes, this is a sad story. But life is sad sometimes. Maybe we should talk about it.