Dear Sage,
One of your murderers must now say goodbye to you having
only heard of your murder two years after it happened. Roughly six months after I broke off contact
with you, you jumped in front of a train just like Anna Karenina. I hope it was
as quick as you clearly meant for it to
be, but however quick it was, and whatever better place you may be in right
now, I can’t help it if I feel responsible. I failed you, just as so many
others did.
By your own telling, your parents were as ill-equipped
to understand the nature of your illness as any parents could be. You were left alone, utterly unattended,
kicked out of community college and living by yourself on a
miniscule stipend with barely a friend for comfort. It was then that you reached out to me. I cannot lie, I
dreaded your phone calls – knowing that my nights would be over the moment you
called because I first had to talk you up from your horrendous depression, and
then listen to your rambling conspiracy theories about the resurrection of
international communism or some class of illuminati you planned to join by
enlisting in the CIA (never mind how contradictory your theories were). To hear
this once-great mind which could write a Dante parody that would impress the
original and expound on the greatness of Moby Dick or mathematics with an
eloquence that could astound the world was too tragic to bear. Every time I
hung up the phone, I could only think to myself ‘there but by the grace of the
flying spaghetti monster go I.’
Your calls became more frequent, your obsessions still
odder, and then you left a message on my facebook wall and my voicemail so creepily
bizarre, and spoken in such an inhuman monotone…. I seized the opportunity and
did the ultimate immature signoff – the facebook de-friend – and never returned
your next hysterically emotional voicemail, the tone of which will now haunt me
forever. After that, I half expected you
to show up on my doorstep unannounced for a year afterward. When that never
happened, I figured that you did what we all had to do at Hyde – you found a
way to keep going. Against odds that seemed overwhelming, I and so many others
we knew found ways to keep clawing at life even after the thousand times when
we thought it might as well be over. Perhaps I’ve become too accustomed to the
thought that life, as difficult as it is, can be endured.
Yours is the tenth death of a student I’ve heard of from my
time at Hyde (that I can remember): Ian Worth, Maggie Miller, Al Vico, Jeff
Boiselle, Scott Thomas, Drew Llewellyn, Jon Ogan, Meg Lavin, and Rob Ebling (the
last one I now realize I forget where I heard it, …though I eventually told
you, another terrible mistake I made since he was a good friend of yours…). One
mutual friend of ours tells me he’s heard of at least five more deaths. Of the
people I just named, the only people I was particularly friendly with were Al
Vico and Scott Thomas – and neither were particularly close. The rest of them I
felt somewhere between a vague liking and vague contempt. Nevertheless, every
one of those deaths made me sad. At a New England prep school whose enrollment
was rarely ever over two-hundred, ten by age 30 is a terrifying figure. Perhaps
it’s acceptable when you think of the high-risk behavior involved in arriving at
Hyde in the first place, but it’s still far too many. I used to think I’d hear
of another death every year. But I heard about you and Meg Lavin on the same
day. As we reach our thirties, will the death tolls now increase to two from
year to year? And which of my old friends is next? Is it me?
Even had you not reached out to me, and even had I not
spurned you, I believe your death might have hit me harder than any other
person’s death from those years could have. From the moment you arrived on
campus, people commented on our similarities – in appearance, in demeanor, in
the way we talked, in our interests. We were far more alike than I am to my own
brothers, and to then see someone so close to a mirror image of myself reduced to
such a state as yours… how could I bare to hear from it?
How the hell did kids like us fall through the cracks so far
as to end up at Hyde? We didn’t need 2-4, we needed valets. I grieve for all
those kids we’ve lost, but I grieve for you more – because you were smarter,
because you could have contributed more, because the world will never know how many
dark places such a brilliant mind could illuminate. Of all those cruelties Hyde
perpetrated, was there anything so cruel as to tell smart kids whose problems
originated in part from encountering bullies that our problems were no
different from theirs’? The bullies at Hyde always flourished, because they
found new ways to bully everybody else. But the smart, introverted kids who
just needed a little patience, we were more bullied than ever – with even the
moral high ground stolen from us and given to them.
The true believers at Hyde were not evil, they were just
idiots – dangerous idiots, but idiots nevertheless. They weren’t interested in
money, they were interested in converts, and they believed every word they told
us. They were weak people who needed a system to fall back on as badly as you did
at the end. Had their lives taken different paths, they would have fallen back
on Opus Dei Catholicism, or radical Islam, or fascism, or scientology, or any
other system which tells them that they could destroy a person’s sense of self and
build a new, greater one in its place. And if the process of making that
greater self entails monstrous cruelty in the service of a greater good, they
administer it happily. If ideals are turned into crimes, the crimes are always justified. Those Neanderthals truly believed that they would make their
students’ lives better, and another cruel irony is that in the cases of some particularly dumb students, they
probably did. But for others, they made lives so much worse. The true believers
lied to us by saying that they were doing good, and the smarter people at Hyde
lied to the true believers by telling them we believed their idiocies. I was
too depressed, crazy, delusional even, at that point in my life to keep up the
wall of doubt to everything I was told – sometimes I even believed their lies.
But you, far more self-confident at that point in your life, were never taken
in by those morons, and oh how I envy you now.
Yes, Sage, I envy you. I don’t envy your end, but I envy
your mind. The average Hyde kid was not exactly a genius, and any conversation
with someone of above-average intelligence in those years was worth its weight
in gold to a kid so starved for real education as I was. But to this day, I
maintain that your mind at its best could have held its own with the highest of
Harvard and MIT. I was a mere LD kid who could (and can) only operate the
right-side-of-my-brain, but your mind was a pristine engine. You could have
succeeded in anything – as a scientist, mathematician, writer, businessman,
lawyer, whatever you decided to do. But like so many brilliant lights in this
world, it came in fragile casing – and by the time you returned to my life, the
bulb was broken.
Would you have gone off the deep end without Hyde? Almost
certainly. Hyde already has enough to answer for without being called to answer
for the things it didn’t do. But I can’t help it if the thought occurs to me
that you might not have gone that far… Hyde is the last organization that
should be consulted in how to deal with mental illness. And I’m absolutely
convinced that anyone already nursing such an illness is that much more likely to
contract a worse one by being there. All those years, you were clearly nursing the
potential for an illness far greater than we even knew. Some people with great
minds have all the luck; their brilliance is born to the right circumstances,
nurtured correctly by family, noticed by the right friends, and they end up
getting honorary degrees at Yale. Others end up ramming themselves into a
train, forgotten by the world even before they had a chance to be remembered.
Would anyone who knew us then have thought that you’d be
dead and I’d be the one … at least
remotely approaching a success? Like you, I live alone. Unlike you, I have a
family that is reasonably understanding of our condition. I don’t know how much
help I am, but I’m a partner in the family business, I have more friends than I
ever know what to do with, I have creative outlets, I have a second job as a
choral conductor and also free-lance as a violinist. I write every day, and I have never known a better remedy for keeping the dogs at bay. For the moment, I can
honestly say that life has blessed me rather well, and now more than ever I can
only wish that it did the same for you.
Six-and-a-half years ago, I watched a friend and neighbor
sink further and further into depression – every day withdrawing a little more
into his private world until he finally no longer responded to people’s queries.
I recognized the symptoms, but I did nothing – thinking that as it does for me,
the black dog would somehow let up before it became too serious to return from.
One day, I was stunned to find him
coming into my room, he was even talking, telling us ‘I’m going away for a
while, you won’t see me for a long time…’, I was too stunned to say anything
back, and yet I still did not put two and two together. An hour-and-a-half
later, Alex had jumped to his death from his fifth-floor apartment in Southern
Israel. How could I be so blind, yet again, to the symptoms? I cannot fool
myself any longer, it is all too possible that one day the person with these symptoms will be me, and other people will be just as blind.
I have no way of knowing if or when, and it certainly won’t be any time soon. But
even in my most joyful moments (and I’ve known enough), I can no longer forget
that that agony may lurk round the corner. Nevertheless,
to this moment, I can still say to the Black Dog and all its bites, ‘Not Yet!’
Depression is the cruelest of all possible illnesses; I truly
believe that and probably always will. It is the only illness in the world that
renders it impossible to recognize any way in which we are still blessed. It cuts
through all rationality and all reality, causing us to see the world only
through its prism – and like barbed wire, the harder we try to free ourselves
of its tangle, the more it entangles us. There is no thinking oneself out of depression;
there are only small preventative steps which we can take that can hopefully
appease it. Because for all our developments in science, we still know barely
more about the human brain than we did in the Middle Ages.
I have to be realistic, one day, this illness may claim me
just as it did you and Alex. If this illness were ever to return with a virulence
I’ve still never known, I can only hope that we meet in a better world – a
world we can both embrace with nothing but joy. Wherever it will be, if it’s
not a world without depression then I don’t want to go. There, flying spaghetti
monster be praised, our minds can no longer torment us. Goodbye Sage and I hope
you’re happier now. We all do.
Love,
Evan
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