A couple weeks ago, we got a special digest email at work. It talked about an “incident” that morning in the parking deck, that police and medical examiners were on scene, but no foul play was suspected.
And then it linked to student support services for help.
That was it. No detail, no explanation.
On our social media, there was a post about how “we’re family, if you need help, click here”
From that, I guessed it was something that had happened to a student. And that it was bad.
I headed next to the local newspaper online where they reported a possible suicide at that location – and then those same links to student services.
So, there was my answer. One of our students had taken their own life.
I’ve been at UA for over 20 years and when something like this happens, even if I don’t know the student, my heart breaks. A couple years ago, a student accidentally killed another student – and one of my assistants at the time knew the people involved. She was devastated and broke down in tears in my office when she tried to talk about it.
College life is about a lot of things, including potential. Students with big, world-changing ideas and plans. There’s a lot of hope there.
But for one of our own that day, there was only despair.
I sat there in my office for a few minutes, just thinking. I set aside my emails and projects and… dwelled.
I work with the people that wrote UA’s response and I give them credit for the way they handled things with a mix of kindness and professional detachment. We are a large organization with a lot of audiences and crafting the right message couldn’t have been easy.
And yet…
There was no mention of the word. It was the “incident”. And there are a lot of reasons to avoid “the word”, but not saying it does, I think, a disservice to what this person went through.
Maybe we could have said the word. Maybe acknowledging that a student had committed suicide could have opened up a dialog. Could have brought people forward to get the help they need in a way that innocuous obfuscation and links couldn’t have. And maybe helped us come together and mourn that loss of potential – and the life of our student and what they meant to the people around them.
So I sit here, an “armchair quarterback” with a cooling cup of tea on a fall day, glad I didn’t have to write those notes and also unfairly second-guessing the content.
I don’t know the student nor their friends, nor teachers, nor co-workers, nor family. But my heart goes out to them and I share, in a small way, their loss.