It was the spring of 1998 and my eldest son, Ben (not his real name), was 15 years old. Fifteen is an odd age. It’s in between young teen and older teen — too young to drive, but old enough to want to go somewhere and not be driven by your parents. Too old to be told how to spend your time, but too young to always make good choices about how to fill your free time without getting into a heap of trouble. Being at that liminal age can make finding summer activities, in particular, a challenge. One more year and you’re 16 and able to work legally. But 15, that’s right on the cusp of being legit.
So, what to do at 15 with the ten long weeks that spread out before you between the end of school in mid-June and the beginning of the new school year in late August? You can go to camp, but most 15-year-olds are too old to be a camper and would find doing so even if it was possible, humiliating. For many camps, being 15 is too young to be a counselor. There’s lifeguarding, of course, which takes up the summer for many teens not yet eligible for other work. Ben had been a lifeguard the previous summer. He’d been bored to tears and burnt to a crisp, so he wasn’t interested in doing that again. So here he was, too young to work at most jobs, but definitely old enough to take on some real responsibilities.
One day in early May, with the prospect of summer bearing down on him, Ben told me that he’d noticed that a pre-school had opened in our neighborhood. He said that the grass was long and that the staff seemed to be all women. He asked whether I thought there might be a place for him doing “guy things” like hauling sandboxes around, keeping up the grounds, and generally being a male presence. I told him I didn’t know, but it was worth asking. He wasn’t sure he wanted to walk right in and inquire, so I suggested that he write an email laying out what he was proposing and then wait to see if he received a response. I told him not to be disappointed if he heard nothing as there wasn’t really a job posted. But he drafted up a cover letter anyway, attached a very short resume (after all, he was only 15), and sent it off. Not too long after, the director of the school emailed back. “Come in and we’ll discuss this idea. It’s an interesting one,” she said.
A few days later, Ben put on a button-down shirt and khaki pants and walked over to the pre-school office. He met the director, Sarah (also not her real name), whom he later commented was “a very nice lady.” He told me that she had started the school herself with help from her husband, and had two of her own children enrolled, ages 2 and 4. Ben and Sarah discussed his proposal and she said that she liked his idea. She said there was a real need for lawn mowing, general maintenance of the grounds, and some light custodial work in the school itself. Plus, with teachers going out periodically for summer vacation, having an extra set of hands around (especially some male hands to deal with some of the more rambunctious little boys), Ben could be a real asset. They settled on a minimum wage salary and Ben left the meeting thrilled by this successful outcome. I was thrilled too as I no longer had to worry about him for an entire summer. He’d be very busy.
The end of the school year was a few weeks off and so Sarah told him they’d start when his vacation had begun. Several weeks later, Ben sent her a note that he was free, and she told him to come in the following day for training and to sign employment paperwork. The next day he learned where all the items relevant to his job were located – where the lawn mower was, where extra sand for the sandbox was, where to take out the trash, and what the priorities were for all his regular daily activities. At the end of the day, he shook Sarah’s hand and said goodbye. She said she’d see him the following morning bright and early when the school opened at 8:00 AM.
That evening after the school’s closing time, Sarah went to a beautiful park near our home and, sitting in the driver’s seat of her car, shot herself in the head.
***
Over the past two decades I’ve thought, perhaps a thousand times, about the moment, the following morning, when Ben received a call telling him not to report for work. “Something has happened” the voice on the line said. The family down the street had a 2-year-old boy who went to the pre-school. They too, were called and had been told not to come in that day. No explanations given.
It took several hours, but slowly, the story of Sarah’s death seeped out into the community. When the news reached our home, Ben turned at me and said, “What am I going to do?!?!?” It struck me that I wasn’t quite clear whether he meant that literally or figuratively. In either case, we were all at a loss for what to say or do next. So, we took a breath and for a moment, we did nothing.
In the immediate aftermath of Sarah’s death, Ben and I saw the problem differently. I was now much less concerned about the logistical problem of having an unemployed 15-year-old boy around the house all summer than I had been just a few weeks before. But Ben was terrified by that prospect. Now, I was far more concerned that I was somehow going to be responsible for explaining this inexplicable circumstance to him. We were both suddenly terrified and at sea — awash in the wake of someone whom my son who had literally just touched, taking her own life. I worried about his state of mind. I assumed he was going to be distraught. I was wrong. Or at least so it seemed.
Ben found a quick replacement for his job at the pre-school. Plans frequently change for families in the summer and last-minute opportunities open up. Soon Ben found himself at the local Jewish Community Center as the summer counselor for their day camp. He was in charge of the 5-year-olds, in a group the JCC called “The Bagels.” He wasn’t so much a counselor as a glorified babysitter for six little ones who needed help tying their shoes, putting on and taking off their swimming suits, and who needed to be regularly corralled as they frequently tried to wander off.
Ben learned a lot that summer. Within a few weeks he reported that, despite all our best efforts towards gender neutrality, there really was a big difference between boys and girls. He said, “the boys are easier. They get mad, they bop each other — frequently on the head — and then they immediately move on.” “The girls” he said, “are much more complicated. They get mad and then punish one other with threats ‘not to be your friend,’ or worse, ‘telling so-and-so not to be your friend.” He said, “it’s like they are torturing each other.” He was flummoxed and didn’t know how to deal with it. I wasn’t exactly sure what to advise him except to keep at it. “Things,” I said, “have a way of working themselves out.”
Ben and I hadn’t really spoken about Sarah’s death much in the first weeks as he settled into his job with The Bagels. And then one day in July, he came home, and out of the blue said, “I’m really mad at her.” I immediately knew who “her” was. Trying to explain the horrifying illogic of Sarah killing herself seemed impossible for me. So, I immediately thought to get him some therapy. Ha! He’s a 15-year-old boy. He was never going to agree to that. But he was definitely angry. This struck me as a dangerous festering anger to harbor. I decided that, even absent any degree in psychology, my homegrown qualifications as “Dr. Mom” were going to have suffice, at least for the time being. Throughout the rest of the summer, when he felt ready for it and usually unexpectedly at the oddest hours of the day or night, Ben and I talked about the far-reaching ripple effects of Sarah’s singular act and how he had been unwittingly caught up in it.
“Yes, she must have been desperately unhappy.” “Yes, neither of us had probably ever experienced such sadness that would make us want to take our lives, especially in such a violent way.” “How do I know you will never feel such sorrow that would impel you to such an end?” he asked me. “I don’t know. But I won’t. So don’t worry” (that sounded incredibly hollow). “Will I feel that kind of sadness when I’m older?” “I don’t know.” “How can I prevent it?” “I don’t know.” “Why did she hire me if she knew she was going to kill herself?” “I don’t know.” “Why did she say she’d see me the next day if she knew what was planning to do?” “I don’t know.” So many “I don’t knows.”
And worse, “Yes, her children and husband would probably never recover from the image in their mind’s eye of their mother and wife in that final moment of her life — and more gruesome, what the aftermath in that car must have looked like.” There will be no end to that deep, personal, torment. And finally, “Yes, Ben, she made you a victim as well. You will always remember the touch of her hand in that moment just hours before she put a gun to her head.”
“I am sorry, Ben.” “For what?” he asked. For having so perilously few answers. For not being able to explain the inexplicable to you. And for still expecting you to simply live with the anger foisted upon you at this inflection point in your life — between boyhood and manhood — that can never and will never be erased. No bopping on the head and moving on. Just a torment that you must stow away in the far recesses of your brain. Sometimes life doesn’t have a way of working itself out.
Ben turned 16 over that summer and eventually the conversations subsided. He went back to school and then the following summer was able to get a job as a busboy in a restaurant — a real job. With tips. Since then, he has never again spoken about Sarah’s death. I’ve let him take the lead on that silence. Slowly, an inch at a time, we had been drawn away from those inconclusive conversations. It was a relief.
But over the past 20 years I’ve thought a lot about Sarah, her husband, and her daughters who are now young women. I’ve thought about the teachers in Sarah’s school, a facility that is still open to this day. Most of the students in the school at the time were probably too young to remember what had happened. But their parents were also caught up in Sarah’s wake and they have inevitably protected their children from knowing too much about that terrible day. But the memory of her act is always there — even after all this time — just part of an on-going silent torture, not of little girls, but of a woman’s suicide.
Image by Steve Johnson on pexels.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
Seavey was the Founding Director of The Documentary Center at the George Washington University, which she led for 30 years. She was also the Founding Director of SILVERDOCS, the documentary festival hosted by the American Film Institute (AFI). Under her decade-long leadership, the festival became the largest showcase for documentaries in the US. She currently holds the academic rank of Research Professor Emerita of History and of Media and Public Affairs at GWU.
To find out more about Nina and her work, go to seaveymedia.com.
- The Silent Ones - November 19, 2024