David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

David McElroy

Briefly: Suicide reminds me that we don’t always know other people’s issues

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I found out this evening that someone I casually knew killed himself last Wednesday. I didn’t know him well — and I never found him personable — but he had started work a couple of months ago at a restaurant where I go. He was a 26-year-old who struck me as a confused and unhappy person, but I didn’t think much about it since he stayed to himself and resisted my efforts to chat with him. It turns out that he had a history of depression and had a lot of gender confusion. He seemed very androgynous to me and I learned today that he presented himself as female in some situations. He was rejected by a romantic interest last week, so he went to the woods and killed himself. His body wasn’t found for three days. It’s tragic how miserable people around us can be and how we so rarely know the truth about things they struggle with.

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‘Run away with me?’ I couldn’t accept her offer, but I wanted to

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Katie looked at me intently with big blue eyes and her face became very serious. She seemed to be trying to make up her mind about something.

“Run away with me?” she finally asked. “I know it’s crazy, but I need someone and so do you.”

I had met Katie only an hour before, so it really was a crazy offer. In some absurd way, it seemed to make sense, just for a moment. But it wasn’t a real possibility. It was more like a fantasy. Doesn’t everybody dream of running away — at some point — and leaving everything behind?

Katie had actually done it. She wasn’t a child, but rather a 32-year-old woman. And she was asking if I wanted to go with her.

Until a month ago, Katie was a school teacher in a small town near Springfield, Ill. She had gone away to college and then moved to Chicago with a boyfriend — who she planned to marry — after she graduated. When that relationship ended with angry words, she moved back home, where she started teaching middle school.

Her life had been stuck in neutral until six weeks ago — when her father died in an accident.

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I’m horrified that it’s become so difficult for me to finish a book

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I knew I was in trouble when I was called from class to come immediately to the school library.

I was in the eighth grade and I never got into trouble. But the librarian didn’t summon one of her aides from a class unless something big was wrong. I didn’t really care for Pernie Mae King, but she seemed to like me. I seemed to be her most trusted aide that year. But I was in trouble this time.

When I arrived, she confronted me with the checkout slips for about a dozen books — and I knew I had been caught. The library allowed students to check out no more than two books at a time, which was a painful limit for someone who read as many books as I did. I had been taking as many books as I wanted and hiding the checkout slips in a secret place behind the aide’s desk. But she had found my hiding place and figured out what was going on.

I quietly walked to my locker on the second floor and brought back all the books which my criminal actions had accumulated. But Pernie Mae King never said another word about it. I don’t think she really wanted to punish someone for the crime of reading too many books.

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