Loss

I saw on the news and then read on-line that a young gay man killed himself in Buffalo last weekend.  This young man had been mentioned as part of the “It Gets Better” initiative and had produced a series of YouTube videos talking about his struggles with teasing and bullying.  However, for this young man there was clearly not enough time for it to “get better”.

Each time I read these stories of teen suicide I feel a sense of anguish over the lost potential, the loss of these lives from their friends, family – and the world.  Each time a young person decides that dying is the best option for escaping their personal situation, it is deeply tragic.

I feel a connection to the struggles of these young people, not only because I was bullied in high school, but for a different and somewhat convoluted reason.  As many of you may know, I was working at Pace University on September 11, 2001.  Given the proximity of the university to the World Trade Center I watched the towers fall, breathed the dust of their destruction and spent the latter part of that day walking the length of Manhattan to my home in the Bronx.  While no one I know personally was killed in the attack, seeing the towers fall, and knowing that I had witnessed a thousand people die, was a horrible experience.

Some time later – possibly several months – I was watching a documentary about the attacks that had been produced by a team of French filmmakers, who were at the site on that date.  Part of the film included interviews with first responders in a staging area prior to them being mobilized and heading up into the towers.  At one point the interviewer was speaking to a firefighter while there were occasional “thumps” in the background.  The fireman was asked what those noises were.  He responded: “jumpers”.  The interviewer then asked the somewhat stupid question: “how does hearing that make you feel?”  The Firefighter had a haunted look on his face and answered: “how do you think it makes me feel?  My job is to go up into that place.  A place where those people consider jumping out to be the better option.”

His statement continues to stick in my mind:  A place where jumping out is the better option.  The environment in those towers was so awful, so hopeless, that the reasonable choice was to kill yourself.  Through those attacks, an environment was created where people, through no fault of their own, were faced with a horrible choice, and the better decision was to die by their own hand.

When I think of this young man in Buffalo who died, I have such a feeling of sadness that he was living in an environment where dying was the better option.  His experience at school caused him so much pain, that just like the “jumpers” on 9/11, he felt that killing himself was his best choice.

I find it profoundly disturbing that we, as a society, are creating an environment for some young gay men, where they consider suicide as the reasonable option.  Each time someone flippantly says: “That’s so gay” or “don’t be such a homo”, we are figuratively flying an airplane into the twin towers of their life – their self identity and self respect – creating an intolerable place for them to exist, where they feel their better option is to jump.