Beauty queen’s suicide leaves me pondering lesson of Richard Cory

Cheslie Kryst lived the kind of life that most people can only dream about.

She was a 30-year-old attorney — who held an MBA, too — and she lived in a fancy New York City apartment. Just a couple of years ago, she won the Miss USA pageant. She was followed by more than a quarter of a million people on Instagram. In addition to her law practice, she was also a correspondent for an entertainment news site. She lived a life of glamour that millions of young women envy.

Despite all that, Kryst killed herself Sunday morning. She jumped from the 29th-floor terrace of her Manhattan apartment building.

I have no idea why Kryst wanted to die and I have no judgment about her life or death. But the news of her suicide immediately brought my mind back to a lesson I learned through a 19th century poem when I was in the sixth grade.

Edwin Arlington Robinson eventually became my favorite poet, but I had never heard of him when my father discussed him for the first time. I knew very little about mature poetry — and I wasn’t inclined to pay a lot of attention to it. But my father asked me to pull a book off a nearby shelf and read a particular poem out loud.

“Richard Cory” isn’t a long poem, but its sparse language is painfully beautiful and its lesson pierced me even though I was only 12 years old. Although I wouldn’t encounter Robinson’s work again until high school, I decided to memorize that poem. And I’ve never forgotten it.

The poem is about a wealthy man named Richard Cory. The narrator recalls seeing this man on the street. He recounts how much everyone he knew envied Cory for his money and charm and education.

After the narrator makes it clear how much everyone admired and envied Richard Cory, he lets us know that he and the others around him were poor and lacked all the finer things of life that Cory had.

In the last line of the poem, though, we find out — with no explanation — that Richard Cory went home one day and “put a bullet through his head.”

(Click or tap below to listen to me recite the poem.)

I thought a lot about that poem as I was growing up. I’ve thought a lot about it as I’ve gone through life. I’ve spent a lot of time in the homes of wealthy and powerful people — mostly when I worked in politics — who had lives that others envied.

But I often found that those wealthy and powerful people were no happier than anybody else. In fact, I’d say that the wealthy people I spent time around tended to be more unhappy — and their families more dysfunctional — than the more average people I’ve known.

Celebrities such as Cheslie Kryst are held up to us — in news media and on social media — as people we should envy. They’re often beautiful and successful and well-educated. These “influencers” typically have many people following and envying their every move.

The lesson that most people draw — unconsciously, perhaps — is that trying to be like these people will make us happy, too. Because of that, many people strive to look like and act like these celebrities.

The truth is that achieving success and wealth will never be enough to make us happy. It will never bring us peace. Each of us has a different way to find peace and happiness and purpose in life, but chasing the life of status and wealth and success is only a distraction from whatever we ought to be doing.

We don’t need to feel envy for people who are held up to as as glamorous and successful. Their path isn’t necessarily the best path for us. And it’s often not the best path for them, either.

I’m sorry that Cheslie Kryst never found whatever it was that she needed to be happy and to have peace in her life. The only thing we can say for certain is that all the success and fame she achieved wasn’t enough to save her on a cold Sunday morning when she jumped to her death — leaving that fame and success behind.