If you happened to notice, I didn’t write and share a post last Friday. I apologize for that, but I was too despondent to write, and I needed a few days to compose myself.
Perhaps you know that I taught for 30 years. In that time, I got to know a lot of teenagers who have since grown up to be fine adults. Some of those adults have remained in the community where I live while others have scattered to the winds.
Two of my former students grew up, married each other, and stayed in the community to raise their three children. In the wee early hours of Halloween, their family of five became a family of four when their eldest, a thirteen-year-old girl, chose to end her life.
The father was one of my all-time favorite students — not because he was good in class because he absolutely wasn’t, but because he has a personality that doesn’t quit. He’s upbeat, vibrant, goofy, positive, a jokester, ornery as hell, and one of the best guys you could ever know. The mother was one of the quietest students I ever had — seemingly the polar opposite of her silly husband — yet also so very sweet and now a preschool teacher at her alma mater.
They are what you’d call “good people.” Great people, in fact.
Twenty-four years and one week prior to their daughter’s suicide, the father’s older brother also took his life. The deaths are eerily similar with only the ages and genders being different. They both chose guns in their own homes where a parent was first on the scene. The brother was twenty, the daughter only thirteen.
Thirteen.
Thirteen years old, and this lovely little girl who shared so many of her father’s personality quirks decided she was done living.
Thirteen.
I still can’t believe it.
This father had to endure the loss of his beloved older brother all those years ago and the unimaginable loss of his beloved daughter last week. It’s too much.
In the 30 years in which I taught, his brother was the only student (current or former) that I ever lost to suicide. I lost students to cancer, car wrecks, a bizarre road construction accident, and even to murder, but until last week, he was the only suicide.
Even one suicide, though, is one too many.
Granted, I did not teach the daughter, so the brother is still the only former student I’ve ever lost to suicide, but I’ve known her father for so long, and I’ve been around her many times, so she feels a little like one of mine anyway.
The father is a volunteer firefighter whose own father is the fire chief, and he’s active in a group of men who are responsible each year for putting on one of the best 4th of July celebrations in the area. He’s known and loved by everyone in this community. That’s not even an exaggeration in the least. Everyone loves him.
It’s no surprise that his daughter’s funeral was one of the largest attended funerals I’ve ever witnessed, and, unfortunately, I’ve been to far too many funerals over the years, both as a mourner and as an American Legion Rider.
Far too many that I’ve lost count, but they number well over a hundred easily.
Whatever made her choose death on the final day of October, I’ll certainly never know. If she could have foreseen the sheer number of people who came out in droves to show how much they loved her and her family, I wonder if it would have made a difference? I’d like to believe it would have.
But I fear it wouldn’t have.
Ever since my boyfriend’s middle son died by suicide on April 2, 2019, he and I have spent countless hours in a support group of others who have lost people to suicide or who have tried to kill themselves at some point, and one thing that is painfully clear is that the ones who truly want to kill themselves don’t necessarily care what their deaths will do to those they leave behind.
So, maybe she still would have done it. And maybe she wouldn’t have.
And that’s where the unending, horrible game of “what if” comes into play with its question that can never be answered. The question that haunts my boyfriend every day.
The question that will haunt this girl’s wonderful parents for their rest of theirs.
Before I sat down to write this, I learned of another suicide in a town not that far away from here. The man was twenty-four. My own cousin, the son of my mother’s first cousin, took his life in the middle of October on the side of a highway with a gun in his car. He left behind four children and a wife and a death that none of us can fully fathom yet. The list goes sadly on.
For whatever reason, suicide has become far too prevalent, and we can point fingers over and over and throw around phrases like “mental illness” and words like “bullying,” but it still comes down to this: suicide is the only type of death that a person chooses.
If they can choose to kill themselves, then they can also choose not to do so.
How do we get people to stop choosing to kill themselves?
Thirteen.
Thirteen and sweet and sassy and an animal and book lover and the apple of her father’s eye and the firstborn child with an oh-so-special place in her mother’s heart.
Now gone forever.
Thirteen forever.
To move on from this tragedy and highlight some positives in my life, this has been a momentous couple of weeks for me. I had a wonderful showing at my last author appearance, the new lights in my kitchen went up and we can see in their again, I opted to change my health insurance in 2025 and thus save myself hundreds of dollars each month, my son turned 31, I got some Christmas shopping done, the election is finally behind us, and I made amazing progress on my next novel.
I’m in the reworking phase of it now that I finally completed the first full draft of it. This is the part of the process that I most enjoy because I get to read it as the author but also as a reader. I get to fix all the problems (or try to at least) but I also get to revel in the story and improve anything that doesn’t sit right with me.
I’ll share another chunk of the rough draft with the paying subscribers and continue to do that until I have a polished draft ready to share with my first readers. Then, while they read the entire book and give me their feedback, I’ll share portions of the polished draft with paying subscribers, so if you’re not yet one, consider becoming one for a few months, so you’ll have a sneak peek at the book before its available to everyone. I’m hoping to have it published before March 2025.
Until next week. If you ever doubt it, know that you are loved by more people than you could ever imagine.
Tammy Marshall
Read on for another piece of “Last in the Class” — a mystery/suspense novel.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Tomes and Topics to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.