My mother is a 6th grade English teacher.  6th grade is a unique age because in the schools of Texas you are typically introduced to middle school with 6th grade.  It is a scary transition from elementary to middle school for many kids.  6th grade teachers help to make the transition.

This year my mom greeted a whole new group of incoming kids as always, their faces carrying the sweetness of elementary school childhood and the attempted toughness of being in middle school for the 1st time.  This confusing switch back and forth is common in the beginning of the year especially, a remarkable transition and one of the hardest transitions kids have to go through in the conditioning of the planet we all have to make known as life.  One of mom’s favorite goofball boys this year was a bright faced kid I’ll call “Bobby”.  Everybody loved Bobby because he was always laughing and always cutting jokes.  Bobby wasn’t bullied, he had lots of friends and came from a large religious family with several brothers and sisters.  He made good grades and attended class regularly.  His handwriting was a scrawl across the page, so messy you could hardly read it yet appearing to literally jump off the page it was so full of the goofy spirit Bobby held. 

Though Phaedrus lived in Rome long ago during the time of Jesus before the modern complexities of life made things more unclear he was a wise enough poet to observe that “Things are not always as they seem; the first appearance deceives many”.  The beginning of the school year my mom (whom I call here “Ms. E”) always does a survey that the kids have to fill out naming such stuff like their favorite things and what they’ve learned prior to 6th grade, and the last question always asks: “What do you want Ms. E to know about you?”.  Common answers from the kids are “I want Ms. E to know I am not a good speller” or “I want Ms. E to know that I don’t like reading”.  Bobby wrote down: “I want Ms. E to know that I will never get to grow up”.

A few weeks later after school one sunny afternoon this past month 12 year old Bobby went home, ate dinner, and then went to his room, shut the door, got into his closet, climbed up on a chair and hung himself.  His mom discovered his lifeless body hanging a couple of hours later.

Shock and grief barely begin to describe the feelings that the entire middle school and community felt in the wake of this news.  There were zero warning signs that anybody had seen, save for the very strange thing that Bobby wrote to my mother the first week of school.  My mother is a very tough woman, but the death of Bobby has completely transformed her after 20+ years of teaching as she blames herself for not seeing any warning signs and for not asking him about what he meant when he wrote down “I want Ms. E to know that I will never get to grow up”.  It had been an odd comment for sure, but not looking at it through the context of the later suicide my mother at the time did not know this was a possible warning sign of such extreme ends. Lots of kids have a tough time making the elementary to middle school shift.  It was a part of life.  In truth this lively kid with the sweet disposition and sunny façade had been thinking about this prior to the action happening it was later revealed–though the details of everything are murky and there is an on-going investigation to try and give answers to the community begging to understand the age old question of Why??  What could a 12 year old possibly be thinking that would make him believe that he needed to end his young life?

The repercussions of this are still being felt and will continue to be felt for years to come.  The teachers feel like they have failed.  The students feel like they have failed.  The uncertainty of why Bobby would do such a thing hangs over everybody, especially his peers who are going through such an uncertain time of growing up as it is.  And the loss of such a wonderful soul also leaves a gaping hole in the class, an empty locker in the hall and a vacant seat at the cafeteria table.  I want to know what drives our 12 year olds to kill themselves too—are we putting too much pressure on them?  Are we not letting them just be kids anymore?  Over 1,000 teachers, students and parents filled the local church where Bobby’s family had attended church services for years and where they held his funeral to say good-bye.  They all felt they had not united together for him when alive but in death they stood strong, letting his spirit know that they cared in the face of his unknown secret pain.  The truth is that people really do care.  And the Lie we tell ourselves that people don’t is the biggest regret of all of life because it keeps us walled and separated and from being able to really help each other when we need it.  A senseless death need not happen in the vacant space of darkness.  Perhaps the death of Bobby touches those enough to where they realize what a tragic waste such an act of suicide really is, a call for help given in the eleventh hour when there is no time to respond.