A kid shot himself in the head at our Junior High the other day. Dead bang, took himself out ten minutes before the morning bell in a hallway in line of sight of the area where the cliques like to congregate. Gave a lot of now very shocked kids their first real exposure to blood and violent death. Movies just aren't the same. My niece was around the corner from him at her locker, heard the gunshot but thought someone had popped a plastic bag in the cafeteria. Maybe fifteen seconds later she turned the corner headed for class and got to good a look at the body, the spray and splatter on the wall. Not something anyone needs, much less a fourteen year old kid.
Needless to say, she came home in a state of shock. Her best buddy and I nursed her through the day as she rode across the waves of tears and horror as the shock wore off in stages. The shock isn't fully gone, but it's fading, into the once every couple of days stage instead of once every couple of hours. Tough kid, she's handling it very well. She'll never forget what she saw, but I don't think it's going to be a lasting trauma, just a lasting sadness.
That's the bad part. A very bad thing, but still sooner or later almost everyone has to deal up close and personal with death. It happens… a car crash, a shooting, a fight, sooner or later something shocking like that will happen and the living have to deal on the subject and then go back to living. Like the saying goes, "they're history now." The kids at that Jr. High are learning that lesson a lot sooner than they should have to.
I'm going to keep a very close eye (and ear, and heart) on her for a while yet, but I'm not to worried. Not for her. But I am very worried for the kids who were not quite so close as to know the full and gory truth of the matter. I'm worried for them because of what the damned grown-ups are doing. That's the worse running into despicable part, the hip deep euphemistic hypocrisy flowing like a mud slide across the entire affair. I watched the local evening news for a few minutes tonight, that was about all I could tolerate. Watched the news media (damn them to perpetually inflamed hemorrhoids!) spinning plastic fantastic propaganda around the word-thought "school" to misdirect and overwrite genuine public concern, watched the sides getting picked out for the finger pointing political blame game, watched the kids who most desperately need the truth being shunted off to become victimized pawns as the surrogate psyches of the adults trying to white wash the facts into one form of political mileage or another (yea, three local stations, three networks, take your best guess as to which was playing which angle).
Before all is said and done they'll probably do deep if not lethal damage to another fifty kids, and those kids will have to suffer a whole lot more than the kid whose unknown despair led him to end his own life. At least he died quickly. The others won't be so lucky, unless they take the same option he did. And if they do? There'll be no way to connect their deaths back to the initiating event, because after all, everyone did everything they could. Yea, right. They sure as hell did. But it wasn't for the kids, that's for damn sure.
You touched on a very personal subject for me. After my father died, my mother didn't tell me for a long time (I was nearly five); she "thought it was best" for my supposed vulnerable psyche. What really happened was that I couldn't deal with the death until I became an adult, and I never saw the need until my marriage was blowing up in my face and a good psychologist helped me to see that this was part of why.
ReplyDeleteFrom your report, it sounds like the "responsible parties" are all running around like (pardon the common simile) chickens with their heads cut off trying to "save face." Far better to admit: "Yes, he shot himself. Yes, it's a terrible thing. And no, we don't know why--yet." But that's about as likely as finding a politician who always tells the truth. *lol*