Each had written somewhere near the scene of their death the symbol A11.
What did it mean? Why those numbers, that letter?
In the next eight days, three more teenagers in Madison would die by their own hand—concern rising to panic among parents in the area. Wisconsin residents took to watching their children while they slept. They suggested that younger kids potty with the door open. Three counties over, the homecoming queen swallowed a bottle of pills, washing them down with vodka and Red Bull. At the southwestern tip of the state, five girls on the swim team made a suicide pact and jumped from the city hall clocktower.
CNN took notice. The New York Times published an exposé. Mental health professionals held hurriedly scheduled town halls, answering questions from corralled teenagers and their parents. People took to crossing themselves whenever their children left the room. Twitter and Facebook put headers on their homepages, listing phone numbers you could call. But still, we thought of suicide as a local phenomenon, even as we admitted that technology may have increased its reach.
In Travis County, Texas, Nadine Ort came home from work and found her sixteen-year-old daughter with a garbage bag over her head. The next morning Nadine’s hair had turned from gray to white. Around the country, strangers held each other in public, crying until they were numb.
Delaware was next. Hawaii. On May 21 there was a cluster of twenty-five in Nebraska. A week later, forty-three teenagers killed themselves across the state of Missouri. If there were an emoji for this growing crisis, it would be the openmouthed scream. Newspapers filled with photographs of parents falling to their knees, their lips spread in an impossible O. All that nail-biting work, the investment of time, love, money. The sheer willpower it took to keep our children from suffocating in their cribs, from running into traffic, all those nights felting costumes for the school play, the hours spent driving them to playdates, hosting sleepovers, all the tears, the fights, pushing them to do their homework, the extracurriculars, soccer Saturdays, the onset of adolescent hormones, voices changing, hair growing on private areas, taking and retaking SAT prep courses, all the bullies and broken hearts. All of it wiped away with little more than a gesture.
Those of us yet untouched saw footage of their windy funerals and held our kids closer. We felt their foreheads and asked if they were feeling okay. We smelled their breath and looked at their eyes under bright lights. Was it drugs? Were they sad? Hopeless? They shrugged us off—teenagers to the end—and said they were fine. Some, though, broke down crying, racked with nerves, tired of fighting, drawn toward the ledge of some dark mystery—like sailors caught in a whirlpool, sucked down into the depths.
We held them and wept, fear building in our hearts.
Things were picking up speed.
In the next few weeks, when the trend had become first national, then global, we scoured the internet for theories. We read the news and analyses, as if our children’s lives depended on it, which, of course, they did. We hushed our spouses on the way to supermarkets, turning up the radio whenever we heard the words cry for help. We read articles about the terrible costs of cyberbullying, about the perils of sexting. But these were but trees in a forest we couldn’t yet see.
A11. What could it mean? Why did it keep appearing in suicide notes, scrawled on walls, written on bathroom mirrors in blood?
Three of the president’s cabinet secretaries lost a child in early June. And just like that, the national number reached one thousand kids a day. Movie stars recorded PSAs. High school classrooms took on a visible tension. Op-eds were written—Is this the end? It was, of course, just a few years earlier that the COVID-19 plague had swept the planet, locking us in our homes, dooming the elderly and the infirm to panicked suffocation, spurring the almost-civil war, the flashpoint of a brewing culture clash, where the word mask became an invocation or an insult.
Now we had to wonder, had the “Lost Year,” that endless lockdown our children endured, had long-term mental health effects—all that computer schooling, the chronic fear of falling behind academically, socially, the endless months of heightened anxiety and uncertainty? But there was no way to know for sure, enmeshed as those factors were with “Stop the Steal” and the Big Lie, which had turned the country into a nation with two presidents—one legitimate and the other not—where QAnon shamans peeled back the layers of an invisible, untraceable fraud and patriots beat police officers with flagpoles. Our histories had been revised recently to highlight the stories of all Americans. Now they were being revised again in state houses across the country, angry crowds roiling at school board hearings, demanding a more patriotic curriculum. And so new textbooks were issued decreeing that accusations of racism were now themselves racist. This was who we had become, a nation of symbolic acts, where what “we” believed and what “they” believed were not just contrary, but opposite. Up is down; black is white. This final fracture of reality had given birth to an existential riddle: What skills must our children master to survive in a world where reality itself is polarized? Had this impossible struggle driven them mad?