Inside Suicide at a Small Liberal Arts College

What do you do with the pieces of a broken community?

The illustration is a stock photo of some other college.

For obvious reasons, the name “Adam” used here is a pseudonym.

Little liberal arts colleges are labyrinthine, full of so many secrets and stories that they defy an undergraduate to learn the breadth of the place before leaving. Most don’t. I certainly won’t.

Of course, some of the stories are on Google. Juniata College was founded in 1876 by the sorts of Christians that only grow beards and not mustaches: you can read that on the same device you’re using to read this article. But there are others that you can only really learn once you’ve settled into your cinder-block room and your parents are four hours down the road. Take for example what the upperclassman tasked with adjusting me and some other freshmen deemed important to know. They told us, “My advisor did x, y, and z terrible things, and the Juniata Challenge exists.” The Juniata Challenge is just fucking in every building up to and including the president’s office, but it always sounded so generic to me. I bet every college has the Challenge, and I bet no one gets very far along, especially not in a small school like this.

Juniata has secrets, but it begrudges keeping them. If you know who to ask, they start fluttering from the earth like newly-7 cicadas. What makes the place cryptic is the amount of insects, not the time it takes to step on one. Maybe that’s why administrators thought they could avoid telling freshmen that Adam died here last year. There are so many things that aren’t on the brochures, what’s one more? What’s the harm, really, if there are tours trawling campus the day after a kid kills himself in the center of it?

Or so the line went.

Everyone was angry when Adam died, and everyone had a different solution to campus’s pain. Many wanted a memorial. It didn’t happen, thanks to the efforts of a small but noisy band of killjoys. I was one such piece of shit, campaigning against an on-campus memorial until the day I graduated, for reasons that will take a whole essay to unwind. 

Stick with me, please. 

First semester, I had an intro level environmental science class every Wednesday. So did Adam. There’s more to say, but that lays bare the tragedy as it relates to me. Really, I have no reason to be upset except that, if you apply the lens of hindsight and forget what a gift it is, I have done something horrible. I have walked by a person I could have saved once a week for six weeks in a row, and I never said hello.

That sounds hyperbolic, I admit. Rarely is anyone saved by an acquaintance. After all, by the time you’re suicidal, the warmth of a random smile is not enough sunlight to bask in, and that’s a fact I know intimately. But the explanation the labyrinth gives for Adam’s death is his adjustment to college life, or lack thereof.

The thing that admin never told us, but that we found out anyways, is that Adam didn’t have any friends. He was struggling in all his classes. The labyrinth says that Adam felt like he wasn’t a part of it all, like Juniata society had passed him by and he had no chance of joining. That his life was over before he died. Admin adamantly refused to tell us anything so personal about him, but they did implicitly confirm the story. If you see someone alone, talk to them, admin would say. Don’t let anyone eat alone, admin would say. When you know the story, that sounds like Adam was alone, why did no one talk to him? Every day he ate alone, and no one said hello.

I have no idea if that story is true, but it weighs on me. It’s hard not to feel guilty when you are one of the ones who passed him by.

---

On the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, you eat slices of apple dunked in honey to make the day sweet. The sweeter the day is, the logic goes, the sweeter your new year will be. So you’ll never guess what day Adam died.

The Juniata Jews and I sat through morning services in a stunned daze, eyes too glazed to cry. Our tongues moved of their own accord, reciting prayers set to melodies we learned long ago. But we were too struck by what our sweet new year really was to fully rejoice what it should have been.

What brought me back was the call for names before the mourner’s kaddish. “Should we…?” I started to ask, even though I already knew the answer.

“We don’t know their name,” the Hillel president said. “We can’t.”

There was nothing more to say. Our heads turned toward the bimah again, bowed slightly as we chanted the kaddish, a familiar old friend who nonetheless couldn’t comfort us. And then we went home and dispersed, off to our separate lives with whispered promises to take care of one another, if only the others asked.

I think I laid in bed as the students’ search continued, combing through the internet forest hand-in-hand as to not miss any ground. Of course, unlike a real missing person’s search, no one held heroic notions about being the one to save the poor lost hiker. There was an initial tsunami of texts sent by everyone to everyone in their contacts, and then, after confirming it was no one you could have saved, the only point of continuing was curiosity. Curiosity, but stripped of the bright-eyed connotation: curiosity, but with something anchoring your chest to your guts, so you can’t take too deep a breath without it hurting.

I don’t know how much was found by the people who wanted to know, but even though I wasn’t looking, I knew that he was a freshman and a guy and how he died by the time admin released his name. But knowing who it was felt so deeply pointless by then. I couldn’t even chant the kaddish for him.

How do you say goodbye to someone you never met? Adam and I lived in the same dorm and shared a class, but that can’t really be called knowing a person. And yet it was enough for me to mourn him, whether I felt like I should be or not.

Grieving Adam felt selfish. During the shellshocked days following his death, I figured it was best to shove my upset deep down, knowing that I was not allowed to be upset, lest I steal space from people who knew Adam or were present for his death. It wasn’t until a friend made an offhand comment days later that I wept, and then I could not stop weeping, but I’m ahead of myself.

The counseling services on campus organized a sleepover in a big common room that first night so no one would be alone. Or, better put, so that everyone had the option to not be alone. My roommate went to sleep there several nights, but I never did. The thought of going never crossed my mind.

That first night without Adam, I dreamt of the same thing I expect everyone on campus dreamt of. I dreamt I was there as he prepared to die, and I dreamt of his soul-crushing loneliness. I knew that he felt so incredibly alone and in response I took him into my arms and said every reason I was still alive. I said, “In the Jewish tradition saving a single life is tantamount to saving an entire world, because we are just microcosms of it. Please stay here with me. Your world is worth saving.”

I said, “It is worth being alive because, beyond life, we can be certain of nothing else but a cold, uncaring universe. This is all we get, and it can get better. I can help you make it better. I know how. I’ve done it for myself. I’ve fixed my grades. It can be done.”

I said, “You don’t even know it yet and I don’t even know it yet, but invariably, you cannot leave this earth without causing immense pain. Our every action is at the very least a stone tossed into a puddle, but this would be a boulder, and the tsunami will kill other people.”

And Adam cried in my arms, and we collapsed on the roof together. But when I woke up, I was only holding myself.

---

Classes were canceled the next day, which was horrific for me. I can’t claim there should have been classes, but I can say that having somewhere to go would have helped me, at the very least. Instead I laid in bed paralyzed remembering my suicide attempts, my family’s, imagining the suicide contagion that would follow Adam. Who else would we lose? My neighbor, my best friend? How many people could I pull into my arms and make safe before I myself wasn’t?

Other than that, I don’t remember the day at all.

I don’t think there were classes the next day, either, or else I didn’t have classes till the afternoon, or else this next story actually happened on the day after Rosh Hashanah. I couldn’t disentangle it if I tried. My memory’s horrific. But I had turned in a paper a few weeks before and was itching for it back, if only because I needed something to work on. So I headed to the professor’s office hours, with the intention of asking.

I never got around to it. He said, “I’m glad to see you. I just emailed the class before yours to tell them that if they need anything, my door is open. No one responded, but here you are.”

At that moment, I realized something strange about this whole affair. No one was asking for help for themselves, but everyone was offering it to others. No one was able to take care of someone else, but everyone needed taking care of. So I cocked my head and told him exactly how I was processing Adam’s death, and said nothing about my paper.

In turn he told me about his relationship to the events. By the same token that I won’t write his name, I won’t relate what he said, but he did seem to be as close to the deceased as I was. Even in life, Adam was a filigree specter haunting the edges of our vision.

“I think Juniata is so small that everyone knew him, in some way or the other,” I said.

The professor agreed with me and thanked me for stopping by. At that point I’d been in there for an hour, so as soon as I stepped out I answered several worried texts from friends who had expected this to take ten. “didnt get the paper lol” was all I said over messenger.

I was extremely stoic about it for several days. After visiting my professor I had figured out a formula for taking care of people, as it were. If I started the conversation, they would feel safe enough to share, and in that way get the catharsis they were seeking by asking me if I was okay.

Counterintuitive, maybe. I’m sure there’s a therapeutic name for the concept. But in any event, that was what I was doing at my neighbor’s a few days afterward. I hung out with them a fair amount, and so it wasn’t particularly odd for me to be sitting on one’s bed as we all shot the shit.

I told them my sob story, and they told me theirs, and we could move on to nitpicking the admin’s response. (For the record, this was in no way a post-Adam behavior. I would say the most popular sport at Juniata is probably bitching and moaning about admin.) We discussed the candle vigil at the clock tower and we discussed the sleepovers and we discussed the possibility of a permanent monument. The neighbor across the room said, “Every mental health professional says monuments are a bad idea. They encourage contagion.”

The one whose bed I sat on said, “We should really be listening to the parents on this. They asked for us to make contributions to the Huntingdon shelter because he loved animals, and admin just fucking ignored them.”

And then, without warning, I wept. I still can’t explain it, but even today it makes me cry a little knowing that. Adam loved animals.

I said I can’t explain it, but as I typed it I realized the reason. (That’s the point in writing all this out, anyway, is realizing things.) Adam was a person just as real as you and me, not just a kid who died. Not just a kid who was in pain. He had joys and loves and passions, and they died with him. It’s the Adam who loved animals that I’m still mourning for, and the Adam that could have spent a lifetime with them that reminds me not to give up on mine. 

---

Every day that week was an entire year of its own. After classes, dinner, and play practice, I’d sink into my bed, and every muscle would cry in relief at being cradled by the stone tablet mattress. And pretty invariably I’d be stuck there until the next morning.

My mom, who was horrifically worried, came to collect me that weekend. I had expected being home to be an instant cure-all, but it wasn’t. Every day was just as long, and I was just as exhausted falling into bed.

Home wasn’t a cure, but time was. Slowly, days got to be the normal length again, and no one talked about Adam anymore, though I think everyone still thought about him. For me it was every morning, like a ritual. It was scheduled for then out of convenience, initially – I’d have the same rooftop dream, and then it made sense to keep thinking about him. But then Adam became associated with mornings, to a point that I couldn’t see the sunrise without the associated pang. He isn’t here to see this, the little voice in my head said. The guilt did the rest.

So it was almost laughable to me when the student government started putting on airs around the labyrinth about making sure Adam didn’t slip from memory. Adam’s memorial is the door near where he died, which no one uses anymore because it feels like a violation. It is the fact that my friends in that dorm froze for months after he was mentioned, because they could hear the sound of him dying playing again. It is me writing this article. 

Putting something on campus to be another reminder was always, at best, a lackluster idea. As my friend said, permanent memorials are associated with an uptick in suicides. 

At some point at the end of the first semester or the beginning of the second (I told you my memory is bad), the student government held a forum for their constituents to comment on their proposed memorial. I’m sure this was a formality that they didn’t expect anyone to attend, so I almost have sympathy for how they felt when me and my friends arrived with printed-out studies, a powerpoint, and a dozen people to argue against planting a tree.

I cared, of course, but not as much as my friends. Not as much as the people who heard him. They argued with a bitterness in their voice, directed now at the student government but before used against admin and faculty and anyone else who we felt was responsible. Never the dead, if only because we were never so specific. We blamed the SPoT, not its director: we blamed admin, whatever that word means, not the dean of students. It’d be horrible to say any one person did this, but organizations were more than blameworthy. Such is psychology, I suppose.

At some point, my best friend ran out of the room in tears, and I followed her. I lived in the building where the forum took place, so I gave her my keys and told her to text me when she wanted company. She wanted it right then, but needed her things, so I went back to retrieve them and told the others what was happening.

When I came back and saw her sitting on my rug dabbing her tears with my tissues, it struck me all at once as a scene rather like the one I’d dreamed about. I don’t think I tried to hold her – we weren’t especially touchy-feely then – but I tried my best to listen. To say everything I had tried to say to Adam all too late, but repackage it in the way she needed.

To some extent we all have a responsibility to one another. In some ways religion and philosophy and creeds are about working out what exactly that responsibility is. It’s one thing to know intellectually that you ought to try and make the world a better place: I knew that my job as a Jew was acts of service long before that day. But I didn’t feel it before that moment. I didn’t know how it felt to be carrying my share of humanity until I was actually doing it.

This is at once life’s cruelest irony and greatest joy, the fact that you can’t write the meaning of it all down. You have to experience it. I wish these hadn’t been the circumstances in which I learned how to take care of another person instinctively, and not just follow a formula I’d worked out. I wish I could have realized how central that is to my personhood in literally any other situation. But this is how the cards fell. 

My dreams stopped after that day. In no way was sitting on my floor like standing on that roof, but it relieved some pressure in my head all the same. I can’t change the past, but I can let it change me. I can’t go stand on that roof, I can’t go back and befriend Adam. But I can sit with people who are sitting alone. I can open my door to people who need a private place to cry. I can open my heart to the people around me, knowing that in so doing I provide them relief as well.

The world is infinite in its cruelty, but if I do not let it turn me cruel, if I smile in the face of everything, I can affect much more change than I could by becoming mean and miserable myself.

Or something like that.

As time passed, the pain lessened, until I could almost say that it didn’t affect me at all anymore. Then came the one-year anniversary.

To be quite frank, there was a long time when I didn’t think I’d see that day. So for it to arrive felt almost unreal. There was a vigil at 5, which my friends were a bit upset about because of suicide contagion. I didn’t plan on going. I didn’t plan on thinking about it at all.

Then, as I was sitting drinking my ritual afternoon tea, I remembered that Adam loved animals.

And I cried again, as silently as I could. I didn’t want to be a bother. And I thought I was getting away with it, too, until two girls came up from behind me and asked what was wrong.

I apologized profusely and asked if they were freshmen. They said no, and I said, “Then you know what today is.” I couldn’t bear to say his name, nor that I was crying over his death.

One nodded. “It’s a hard day for everyone. You’re really brave, to show your emotions.”

The other chipped in, “And it’s good you’re not hiding them. I’m glad you’re expressing yourself.”

I felt intensely guilty all the same, but I admit, there was a part of me that was happy they came up to me. Not for myself, really. It was mortifying that these strangers had seen me cry over another stranger. But I was happy to know that if some freshman had gotten to that table five minutes before me and started crying over how hard the adjustment to Juniata had been, these girls would have comforted them. That wasn’t true a year ago, at least not for him.

It’s still a horrible tragedy, make no mistake. But we have learned that we are not powerless, and that it doesn’t need to happen again. We have learned not to let people sit alone.

---

None of that solves the issue of memorialization. My worst fears vis-à-vis suicide contagion didn’t come to pass, but that doesn’t mean it’s safe to put up a plaque. Once my class has graduated and the student body has lost its emotional understanding of his passing, the main message of the plaque will be, “If you end your life, you’ll get a plaque.”

Nonetheless, we all know that letting his death become apocryphal is a mistake. Not only does it smack of disrespect, it doesn’t solve the issue. Letting his death become a part of the labyrinth that lost him in the first place means we will also lose the next Adam who enrolls. But that’s a bigger issue than a memorial could possibly tackle. 

How do you save a suicidal person? There’s no institutional solution. The reason I haven’t killed myself is, at base, an idle curiosity about life. Since I believe that life is a cosmic accident, and that death will only bring non-existence of the sort that stars and meteors experience, I can coax myself to keep going. Suicide would solve my pain just as surely as it would solve my joy, my ability to write, and the happiness of everyone around me. 

But that can’t work for everyone. Indeed, it only works for me on the condition that I’m fed, housed, clothed, and otherwise comfortable. When lonely or particularly hungry, I think about it again. How hard life is. How unfair it is.

It is unfair. It was unfair to Adam, and it’s unfair to me, and it’s unfair to you. The first mistake we make in talking about suicide is denying that there’s any reason to be suicidal at all. This universe is a hard-knock, entropy-driven place, constantly disrupting what little order keeps us sane. Suicide may be selfish, but hey – I never claimed to be a philanthropist. 

Suicide is the ultimate triumph of the will over the community. As social beings, you and I are often told not to commit on account of how sad it’ll make those around us. But every suicidal person knows that. By the time someone commits suicide, they are a community of one, and need a way out.

The only way we can stop suicide is by creating communities we want to live in. All of us. Not just the outgoing, the easy-to-talk-to, and the intelligent. Until there is a place in the world for each and every one of us, some of us will want to die. 

Juniata became such a nice place to live, in the weeks and years after Adam’s death. I just wish it had happened soon enough for him to see it.

(A less-good version of this essay was posted on Medium about four years ago. Please don’t read that version. It’s less good.)