The Answer Is Yes

On a rainy and dreary Friday in November, shortly before Thanksgiving, a classmate of my son’s killed himself. He was 13.

I found out as I was returning home from Safeway and preparing to take the cat to the vet for shots. Hudson met me as I was rummaging in the garage. I knew from the bluish pale of his face that something was very wrong.

“Mom. Something’s happened.”

I stopped searching for the cat carrier and stood very still.

“You know Mason?”

I was expecting to hear from him that a friend was in trouble, maybe got suspended from school, or wrote an obscene text or post.

“He killed himself yesterday.”

There are moments when time both stands still and swirls around you quickly. I could say nothing. I sat down heavily in the broken posturpedic office chair we’d stashed in the garage. Hudson had found out from his father (we are divorced) who had heard it from another parent at school. He’d called and broken the news to Hudson, who looked at me now like a shaky swimmer looking for the shoreline.

I asked the questions everyone asks, for the details. How did he know? Who told him? Was he sure? What happened? And the biggest question that screamed inside all the others, Why?

I wasn’t close to Mason — in fact, I barely knew him and he wouldn’t have known me if I’d walked up to him on the street. I knew him from orchestra, because he was one of three cellists in the school’s orchestra. Mason, Hudson, and Hannah, the third cellist; were a tight knit group. I’d seen Mason at the concerts, at the mall on a field trip, a handful of times. He appeared normal by orchestra standards…creative, edgy. Left of center like kids in the arts often are, but upbeat and laughing with the group. The first thought that went through my mind was that he must have been bullied…he was black and he’d recently come out as gay which in my middle school would have meant a pile of ass kicking. But Hudson told me, no, he didn’t think he was bullied, he was well liked for the most part. There was a couple of jerks but Mason liked school and school seemed to like him. In fact, his parents had recently taken him out of school due to some behavioral problems, and that is what had made him so depressed. School, and orchestra specifically, my son says, is his life….then corrects himself, “was his life.”

Was his life.

Some questions after a tragedy get asked, are asked repeatedly as we search for answers that often aren’t there. But some questions hang in the air unasked because the asking alone breaks the heart. The asking holds an answer which is unspeakable. How can his parents survive this? I think. How can any parent survive this? How can they live with themselves? Knowing that they took him out of school, no doubt thinking they were doing the right thing if there were behavioral issues, only to find they had cut his lifeline? And that he killed himself over it? Ended his life?

His life. He was only 13.

They are still children at 13, caught between adulthood and childhood. Talking tough and sleeping with their teddy bears at night. How can a child have enough awareness about the world to even figure out what to do, not to mention feel something strong enough to make him want to end it. Another unspeakable, unasked question. How in the world did he know what to do and how to do it? The possibilities that present themselves to me make me realize the precarious situation we are in with the internet and this age group. And bullying, if that’s what contributed to this, hits home with a sucker punch.

Hudson says Mason’s was an “on/off” personality describing someone that was some days ebullient and outgoing, other times withdrawn and sullen. From the sound of it, it’s quite possible that Mason suffered from the early stages of a mental or emotional disorder, was perhaps bipolar. I struggle with this disorder too, and know the signs.

If only I could have told Mason there was medication and ways to manage the rollercoaster, people to talk to. That it would get better, he could feel normal, that this feeling would pass. There would be bad days ahead, yes, terrible ones. And middle school would claim its fair share of the worst ones. But these would pass, and there would be good days again, even great ones. Even, occasionally, magical ones.

My son looks at me. “Mom, he thought people didn’t love him.”

I realize this is what many, if not most, people who kill themselves must think. But the thought of a child believing this will break you clean in two. My son is still looking at me, pleadingly now. “Mom he asked me if I loved him.”

There is a beat of silence between us and in it I can feel the answer.

I hold my breath then release it. “What did you tell him honey?”

His words come out in a rush. “I didn’t know what he meant by it. He had just told everyone he was gay and I didn’t know if he meant he liked me like that. I was uncomfortable and I was just quiet. I didn’t say no… I just didn’t say anything.”

His voice breaks.

“Mom I wish I had told him yes.”

I look at him and try to muster everything I’ve learned about life and death, hoping I can impart something to help the pain I can see him feeling now. Mason was too young to die; and my son is too young for the depth of this guilt.

I tell him that there was no way he could have known Mason’s intentions (with the question or with his plans to harm himself.) I tell him it was not his fault, or that he did anything wrong. It is an awkward question at times, even for adults.

And then I tell him the next time in his life someone asks this question, the answer is yes, is always yes. I’m not a holy roller by any stretch but I am a believer. And so I tell him that Christ teaches us to love others as Christ loves us.

That there are different types of love, but this one is absolute.

“We’re all in this together, Hudson. And you can never know what another person is going through. You must try to love in that way.”

A child like Mason should not be dead, and a child like mine should not feel the depth of guilt that he is feeling now. The color that has drained from his face seems to have taken some of the innocence with it, too..

I tell Hudson that it’s not too late to tell him. That Mason is now at peace, and can hear him in his prayers.

Maybe he will hear mine too.

Mason, the answer is yes.