VIOLET
June 20
It’s a white-hot summer day. The sky is a pure, bright blue. I park the car and walk up the embankment and stand for a long time on the grassy shore of the Blue Hole. I half expect to see him.
I kick off my shoes and cut through the water, diving deep. I’m looking for him through my goggles, even though I know I won’t find him. I swim with my eyes open. I come back up to the surface under the great wide sky, take a breath, and down I go again, deeper this time. I like to think he’s wandering in another world, seeing things no one can ever imagine.
In 1950, poet Cesare Pavese was at the peak of his literary career, applauded by his peers and his country as the greatest living Italian author. In August of that year, he took a lethal dose of sleeping pills, and even though he kept a daily journal, no one could ever truly explain why he did it. The writer Natalia Ginzburg remembered him after his death: “It seemed to us that his sadness was that of a boy, the voluptuous heedless melancholy of a boy who has still not come down to earth, and moves in the arid, solitary world of dreams.”
It was an epitaph that could have been written for Finch, except that I’ve written one for him myself:
Theodore Finch—I was alive. I burned brightly. And then I died, but not really. Because someone like me cannot, will not, die like everyone else. I linger like the legends of the Blue Hole. I will always be here, in the offerings and people I left behind.
I tread water on the surface under the wide, open sky and the sun and all that blue, which reminds me of Theodore Finch, just like everything else reminds me of him, and I think of my own epitaph, still to be written, and all the places I’ll wander. No longer rooted, but gold, flowing. I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Every forty seconds, someone in the world dies by suicide. Every forty seconds, someone is left behind to cope with the loss.
Long before I was born, my great-grandfather died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His oldest child, my grandfather, was just thirteen. No one knew if it was intentional or accidental—and being from a small town in the South, my grandfather and his mother and sisters never discussed it. But that death has affected our family for generations.
Several years ago, a boy I knew and loved killed himself. I was the one who discovered him. The experience was not something I wanted to talk about, even with the people closest to me. To this day, many of my family and friends still don’t know much, if anything, about it. For a long time, it was too painful to even think about, much less talk about, but it is important to talk about what happened.
In All the Bright Places, Finch worries a lot about labels. There is, unfortunately, a good deal of stigma surrounding suicide and mental illness. When my great-grandfather died, people gossiped. Although his widow and his three children never spoke about what happened that day, they felt silently judged and, to some extent, ostracized. I lost my friend to suicide a year before I lost my father to cancer. They were both ill at the same time, and they died within fourteen months of each other, but the reaction to their illnesses and deaths could not have been more different. People rarely bring flowers to a suicide.
It was only when writing this book that I learned my own label—Survivor After Suicide, or Survivor of Suicide. Fortunately, there are numerous resources to help me make sense of this tragic thing that happened and how it affects me, just as there are numerous resources to help anyone, teen or adult, who is struggling with emotional upheaval, depression, anxiety, mental instability, or suicidal thoughts.
Often, mental and emotional illnesses go undiagnosed because the person suffering symptoms is too ashamed to speak up, or because their loved ones either fail to or choose not to recognize the signs. According to Mental Health America, an estimated 2.5 million Americans are known to have bipolar disorder, but the actual number is a good two to three times higher than that. As many as 80 percent of people with this illness go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed.
If you think something is wrong, speak up.
You are not alone.
It is not your fault.
Help is out there.
SUICIDE PREVENTION
American Association of Suicidology (AAS)—suicidology.org
American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP)—afsp.org
IMAlive—imalive.org
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline—
suicidepreventionlifeline.org (1-800-273-TALK)
DIAGNOSING MENTAL ILLNESS IN TEENS
Helpguide—helpguide.org
Mental Health America (MHA)—mentalhealthamerica.?net
National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)—nami.org
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)—nimh.?nih.?gov
Teen Mental Health—teenmentalhealth.?org
SURVIVORS
Mayo Clinic—mayoclinic.?com/?health/?suicide/?MH00048
SOS: A Handbook for Survivors of Suicide by Jeffrey Jackson (published by AAS)— available online, along with other helpful resources, at www.suicidology.?org/?suicide-survivors/?suicide-?loss-?survivors
BULLYING
Stomp Out Bullying—stompoutbullying.?org
StopBullying—stopbullying.?gov
ABUSE
Childhelp—childhelpusa.?org
National Child Abuse Hotline—1-800-4-A-CHILD (1-800-422-4453)