I am sitting in the lobby of my hotel. Slightly nervous about the meet I have requested. The temperature have dropped dramatically the last few days. I look outside. Snow is falling. As if God Himself is trying to remind me of what happened 8 years ago. I feel slightly uncomfortable. Not knowing what to expect. Had been thinking about doing this for weeks before I finally conjured up the courage to ask. A bit surprisingly, I got a yes. There are two stories, worlds apart that meet today. Two stories that started at the same time, on opposite sides of the world. Both physically and metaphorically.
Portage, Michigan, USA December 3th, 2005 around midnight, local time:
A blistering snowstorm is covering the town in a white and cold carpet.
15 year old Kristina Calco arrives home after attending a dance at school. She shows her dress to her younger sister and two younger brothers before going online to chat with friends on AIM. Her mother is ready to go to bed. Kristina comes and asks her mother to take a photo of her in her dress. She does, as many times before, and goes to bed. Kristina puts on her pyjamas and goes back to chatting online.
Siem Reap, Cambodia, a few hours later, evening local time :
I have just been invited to dine with a beautiful, young English woman. We sit for hours. Talking, laughing and enjoying a wonderful meal consisting of local cuisine. I am having the time of my life. After we have finished the meal, she kisses me goodbye and thanks me before leaving on a “moto”. I walk back to my hotel. Enjoying the pleasant evening. Back at my hotel, I walk outside on the balcony and look at the stars above. Smiling. Life is good.
At the same time, in Portage, now early morning the 4th.
The Calco family is awakened to a living nightmare. Their younger daughter have found Kristina in the basement. She had been sitting in front of the computer, chatting until around 2AM. Sometime after this, she took a piece of paper, a pencil and her dress with her down to the basement. She put her dress back on. Wrote a poem on the piece of paper, folded it into a small square and tucked it inside the bodice of her dress. Turned off the lights, and hung herself. Feeling ugly, sad, alone and hurt.
Present day, at the hotel
Almost exactly 18 months ago, I learned about Amanda Todd. The Canadian teen who took her own life after intense bullying, both online and in school. It put me on a quest to learn more. Maybe help. At least do something. Instead of just becoming someone who reads about it, shakes my head and maybe sheds a tear and then goes on with my life. I have sought videos on YouTube. And have found many desperate calls for help. And many memorial videos for people who have committed suicide. At one point, I went into a period of depression from all the tragedy and heartbreaking stories. So I stopped for a while. I had to in order to recover.
Of all the stories, one had caught my attention more than any other. The story of a 15 year old high school student from a small town in Michigan. Intelligent, beautiful and well liked. But inside, she had a tormented soul. After years of bullying, she felt ugly and nasty. When looking in the mirror, she saw what she had been told. Something finally broke that night, and she made the decision to check out of life for good. How do you get to the point when having no life is better than the one you have?
At first, I thought it was because she was beautiful that I noticed her story. And I have to admit, I felt a bit ashamed by that. Some of the comments for her memorial videos said “She was beautiful, she didn’t deserve to be bullied!”. I know that is probably not what they meant, but I don’t think anybody deserves to be bullied. Whether ugly or beautiful.
After a while, I realized it wasn’t her beauty, it was her story. I recognized it from my own life. How I felt when I was her age.
Kristina’s parents were, in lack of a better word, “fortunate” enough to have diaries, printouts from IM conversations and so forth. This gave them the opportunity to piece together a sort of reply to the “why” question that relatives and friends of suicide victims always have. And her mother could write a lengthy and detailed piece in the book “Bullycide in America”, called “Recipe for disaster.” I read it with tears in my eyes. I decided to write a message to her. Commending her for doing what she did with this tragedy. Kristina may be gone, but there are lots of others like her around, and the question remains; what can we do to save them?
I was brought back from my chain of thoughts by a woman’s voice saying “meeting a gentleman” in the reception. The receptionist said something. A few moments later, a woman not much older than myself, appeared. I got up from the coach. “You must be Michelle Calco”, I said and stretched my arm forward. She nodded and shook my hand. “I’m Ragnar. Thank you for meeting me!”
She sat down on the couch in front of me. We exchanged some pleasantries before I told her I had written something down that I wanted to say. I feel much more comfortable writing than talking from the top of my head, so I wrote down everything I wanted to say to her. It is like I think clearer when I do. She listened as I read it to her.
I used to be bullied every week, sometimes daily, throughout the nine years of primary school. When reading about all those bully-victims that have committed suicide, I cannot help but feel like a survivor of a plane crash. Stumbling through the smoldering wreckage. Looking at all the dead people around me and asking “Why me? Why did I survive? What have I done to ‘deserve’ this?”.
“I sometime think about this myself. Why Kristina? Why did I have to be the one that had to go through this? I do believe that everything happens for a reason. That there is a purpose to everything. And I have something that others don’t. And I should use it for the good. And I am sure that the reason you survived is that you may use your experiences for something too. I don’t know what, but there might be something you can do with it.”
I have heard about several suicides. Both during my youth and my adult years. And always, the question remains. Why? I knew Michelle had a lot of information to go on from Kristina’s diaries and her online chat records. So I asked her if she knew what happened that night.
“I don’t know exactly what triggered the suicide. Everything was like any other Saturday. We went to the mall. She bought a purse.” She paused for a second. “Why does anyone buy a purse if they’re not going to continue? She went to the library to get some books for a project she was working on. Everything seemed normal. She decided last minute to go to the dance. Nothing on that day seemed out of the ordinary. I wish I could tell you exactly what caused it to happen. I have been thinking about what if I could go back in time and change something. What would I have done to stop this? And I honestly don’t know. There is not one thing that happened to her. It was a combination of things. She got called ugly by several classmates on a daily basis. Girls would lock her in the bathroom and refuse to let her out. Kristina was always a very sensitive girl. From she was a baby, we knew she was very sensitive. She would almost cry if you just looked at her. Well, not exactly, but you understand. She was very sensitive and that made the bullying very hard on her. All the things that was said and done, it all affected her. Profoundly. And she became depressed. And she started believing what they said about her.”
I have read a number of obituaries during the last year. And they all have one thing in common. They all read “died unexpectedly”. There is an aura of shame or tabu around suicide. Like there is something especially uncomfortable about it that we do not want to talk about. Like as if we want to pretend it didn’t happen. Even Kristina’s obituary had those words.
“I wanted them to write that it was a suicide, but it ended up like that in the paper. I didn’t want it to be a secret. I was told ‘do not tell anybody it was suicide. Say she died of an aneurysm or something’. But I didn’t want it to be a secret. So three days after her death, I started writing the “shabby castle” article. I wanted all of her friends to know what had happened. But it also had a negative effect. After she died, whenever we walked outside, everybody stared. Like we were crazy or something. We were the family where our daughter had killed herself. My other children also said that people stared at them in the street. But I didn’t want it to be a secret. I wanted the world to know what had happened. Some journalist came to our house to interview me about the suicide. But I think I made a mess of the interview. So they just printed what I had written on ‘shabby castle’. It was published on the front page of the paper. Hundreds of thousands read it.”
Michelle has worked to get new legislations in place in Michigan about bullying in school. Now, all schools are required to give lectures on the warning signs that adolescents are suicidal or depressed and how to prevent suicide.
“There was a meeting about depression and suicide, and I urged people to attend through the local paper. But nobody showed up. It was sad to see. I think maybe they didn’t want to go because ‘the crazy lady’ was recommending it.” She laughed.
“Or maybe they all think ‘not my kid’? Because we all like to think that this will never happen to anybody we know. It only happens to ‘crazy people’.” I suggested.
She nodded.
“I think maybe you’re right. But it is sad. Only recently, it happened again to a boy in a school here in Portage.”
It is a bit surprising to me how we believe that something only happens in “special” families. That some things never will happen in “our” family. It needn’t have to have anything to do with the family. It may be something on the outside that causes this to happen. And when it is like with Kristina (and many others), they don’t tell anybody about their problems. They don’t want to “snitch”. And end up locking it all up inside.
“How are you? How do you cope with what happened?”
“I cope by staying in the eye of the storm. You know what is in the eye of the storm?”
“Silence.”
She nodded.
“You know, after she died, we were devastated. We walked around like in a daze. We didn’t shower, we didn’t eat. But during this time, we also experienced something wonderful. People would come to our door. They had been to the store and bought a tray of sandwiches that they brought to us. Or maybe they brought coupons to local restaurants. We could just order food and go down to pick it up and bring home. We couldn’t go out. We were just a mess. It meant a lot to us. Without this, we would have starved. And some of these people, I still don’t know who they were. I have never met them before. Another thing that also was heartwarming, was at her visitation. Hundreds of people showed up for the service. Most people I had never met. And they all told us how Kristina had touched their lives in different ways. It was heartwarming to see and hear. And I wish Kristina could have known how many lives she had touched by who she was.”
“How did your daughter cope with what she had seen?”
“It was terrible for her. They shared a room, and were best friends. They loved each other very much. After Kristina died, we talked about what had happened. Every day. All the terrible details. It was painful, and we all cried a lot. But I am glad we did. It helped us cope with what we had gone through. I used to go to meetings for people who had lost someone to suicide. All gory details were talked about. And when I came home, I would share it all. I think we needed to get it out of our system. Not hide anything. Not pretend it was more beautiful than it was.”
“One last thing : I wanted to lay down flowers at Kristina’s grave. To me it feels like that would be a some sort of closure after this.”
“She doesn’t have a grave. I made a moments decision to have her cremated. I couldn’t bear the thought of having to leave her here should we ever have to move. So we brought her ashes home. So I am sorry, no grave to visit.“
This is just an excerpt of the more than four hour long meet. We talked a lot about suicide in general and about Kristina in particular. I told Michelle at the beginning of our meet that “I am not going to insult you by saying ‘I understand how you feel’, because I have no clue.” And after all these hours, I still couldn’t say I did. I think I know what Kristina felt though. We all react differently to what happens to us in our lives. Some grow stronger, some crumble. Same goes for those who succumb to bullying.
There are lots of reasons why people commit suicide. But I have felt a special “attention” if you like, to this special kind. Now often referred to as bullycide. Suicide caused by bullying amongst adolescents. Because I have been there myself. I thought about suicide several times when I was a teenager too. Feeling ugly, sad and alone. In addition to that, Kristina felt hurt also. She got her first boyfriend that year. He broke up with her a few weeks before she died. And I try to think of how she would have felt about that. Most girls would be devastated. But I can imagine that to her, the breakup must have been like a nuke. Turning her life into a wasteland. Wherever she looked, she would just see smoldering remains of her life. She probably tried to pick up the pieces and rebuild. Maybe she gave up trying to fix it? Maybe this was the trigger? I do not know. But the breakup wasn’t the reason for the suicide. Years of bullying was. Making her feel unlovable, ugly and worthless.
So why do we still wave bullying off as “kids will be kids”. As if this is just the way it is? And even supposed to be? “I got teased when I was in school too!” is often the excuse. As if those committing suicide are just weaklings. Being weeded out by evolution. We all react differently. And bullying may be harder to cope for some. We are all different, and we cannot expect to know how others feel. Was Kristina weak? No. Was I strong? By no means. So why did she commit suicide and I didn’t? I don’t know. But I do know that we are all different.
I am an introvert, and that makes me handle social situations differently than an extrovert. To many extroverts, I am probably weird. One of my girlfriends was convinced that our relationship was failing when I told her I needed some time alone to recharge my batteries. It is how I am. But as an extrovert herself, she waved it off. Because she got energy from being with others. So she concluded that I was lying. If we expect everybody to be like ourselves, then our conclusions about their behaviour or reactions may be seriously off.
When I was Kristina’s age, I was contemplating suicide myself. My self-esteem was low. My self-image terrible. I was ugly, worthless and unlovable. When I see the image below of myself at that age, I think of all the pain I was hiding. I may be smiling in the picture, but it was a mask I put on to pretend it didn’t hurt inside. And I get the feeling that this is what most bullycide victims do. Because telling someone about the bullying could make it worse. So you just go on. Pretending everything is OK.
On my way back to New York, I decided to visit the grave of another suicide victim. She “died unexpectedly” one month after her 17th birthday. Why she committed suicide, nobody seems to know. And it makes me wonder how her parents cope with not even having a clue. As written before, Kristina’s family were “fortunate” enough to have a trail they could follow. But many don’t have anything. And are left with a big “WHY?!”
I stopped by the small church. In a beautiful setting in the woods. On the other side of the road was a small graveyard. Maybe a dozen graves. I found hers. Beautifully decorated with lots of small solar powered lights, and a beautifully decorated gravestone. Below the gravestone, another stone was laid, with a small poem carved into it.
“No farewell words were spoken
No time to say goodbye
You left before we knew it
and only God knows why”
I had bought a bouquet of flowers that I put down in one of the vases on the gravestone. I stood there for a while, thinking about her relatives, her boyfriend and other friends. Not knowing what happened. Only left with a “why?”.
So why do people commit suicide in general, and because of bullying in particular? I think the following quote by the writer David Foster Wallace (who committed suicide himself) describes very well the logic of what goes through the mind of a suicidal person.
«The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. Yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.»
If you are reading this, and feel the flames getting too close, seek help. It is no more a sign of weakness than it would be if you stood in the window of the burning highrise yelling for help. In most countries, there are people and organizations who are there to help. To talk to you. To help you get out of the window safely. Or to put out the flames. Contact them. Even when the flames haven’t burnt you yet. Don’t wait until you are caught in the decision between jumping or burning.
What can be done about bullying? One obvious thing is to stop bullying. And I think this is particularly true for adults. Think about what you are doing. Are you laughing at people in the street, talking about how stupid, fat, ugly, bitchy, weird others are? How can we expect kids to be kind to each other when their rolemodels can’t? When TV is filled with shows where downright bullying will win you the prize or the applause? When comedy is about mocking people? And when will we stop pretending that kids are some kind of super beings that can handle things no adults would stand for? If any adults were subjected in their workplace to what many kids are on a daily basis in school, there would have been an outcry. We have to take bullying seriously. Not by labeling bullies as psychopaths, but by changing attitudes. Our own attitudes. Towards each other. Towards bullying. Dare to speak up against it. Dare to acknowledge it as a problem, not a “kids will be kids” thing. Taking bully victims seriously. Not forcing them to shake hands with the bully and convince ourselves that this will miraculously fix everything. The only thing it fixes, is our obligation to take care of a problem. “There, fixed it!” No you haven’t. You probably made it worse.
Michelle told me that she and others talked to the parents of bullies about the bullying, but that all of them refused to accept that their child was a bully. I think this is a typical reaction from most parents. “Not my child!”. I don’t know why people tend to ignore the fact. But maybe we all have an image in our heads who the bullies are and how they got that way. Just as we think of parents of suicide victims. There must be something wrong with them. To little love. Crazy. Weird. “So it cannot be that our child is a bully”. If your child had brought a gun to school, scaring other kids, you would probably have grounded him for life. But have you armed him with an arsenal of heart piercing words? Attitude shells that maim and kill? Is he going to school armed to the teeth, ready to strike fear in any victim?
Think before you act. Think before you speak. And speak out against bullying. Teach your kids that it is not ok to bully others. Accept that fact that any child can become a bully, just as any child can become a victim. And tell both adults and adolescents that it is unacceptable behaviour to make others feel like outsiders. Include everyone, even the “uncool”.
There are some signs to look out for if your child is being bullied. They will maybe
- be frightened of walking to and from school
- change their usual route
- not want you to go on the school bus
- beg you to drive them to school
- be unwilling to go to school (or be 'school phobic')
- feel ill in the mornings
- begin truanting
- begin doing poorly in their school work
- come home regularly with clothes or books destroyed
- come home starving (bully taking dinner money)
- become withdrawn, start stammering, lack confidence
- become distressed and anxious, stop eating
- attempt or threaten suicide
- cry themselves to sleep, have nightmares
- have their possessions go missing
- ask for money or start stealing (to pay the bully)
- continually 'lose' their pocket money
- refuse to talk about what's wrong
- have unexplained bruises, cuts, scratches
- begin to bully other children, siblings
- become aggressive and unreasonable
- give improbable excuses for any of the above
How can we tell that an adolescent might be suicidal? There are some danger signs. Any one of these does not necessarily mean that the child is suicidal. Some are normal teen behaviour. But it is worth taking note of.
1. Change in eating / sleeping habits
2. Withdrawal from friends, family, regular activities
3. Violent actions, rebellious behavior, running away
4. Drug & alcohol use
5. Unusual neglect of personal appearance
6. Marked personality change
7. Persistent boredom, difficulty concentrating, or a
decline in the quality of schoolwork
8. Frequent complaints of stomachaches, headaches,
fatigue
9. Loss of interest in pleasurable activities
10. Not tolerating praise or rewards
11. May complain of being a "bad" person or feeling
rotten inside.
12. Give verbal hints such as "I won't be a problem
for you much longer".
13. Put his or her affairs in order: i.e. give away
possessions or clean up their room
14. Become suddenly cheerful after a period of
depression
15. Actually verbalize the desire to kill themself
The road I have travelled the past 18 months have been a depressing one. And far out of my comfort zone. But I feel that I have grown. I know more. I understand more. And I realize how much my own actions impact others. For good or bad. Am I a better person now? I don’t know. I hope so. But I know that I think more before I speak now. Think more before I act. Not that I am perfect. Far from it. I am a child of my time too. For good and bad. But the story of Kristina has reminded me of what a big problem bullying is. And, unfortunately, will be for a long time.
On the same day Kristina reached rock bottom in her life, I was at one of my peaks. Today, I walked in the sun. Letting its rays warm my skin. I smiled. Felt happy. Life is truly wonderful!
I wish Kristina could have experienced that too.
RIP Kristina Arielle Calco, Dec 26th 1989 - Dec 4th 2005.
I would like to thank Michelle Calco for meeting me. For helping me with getting the details surrounding Kristina's suicide as accurate as possible. And for letting me use the photo of Kristina in this blog-article.
