"Maybe her feet were not really on the ground?": On the Death of a Teenager

Caroline posted:
"Went to a memorial for a 15 year old girl tonight. It poured. It was appropriate. No amount of tears feel right. I’m crying for Thea and for the Palestinians."

Its not something anyone ever wants to do.  But that’s what we did yesterday.  My, wife, daughter and I attended a memorial for a friend of our 15 year old daughter.  It seemed all the 15-year-olds I know from or Elizabeth Irwin knew Theadora, their friend who threw herself out of her 16^th story apartment building in April.  Earlier that day, she ran into our daughter and her friend at the Washington Square Park Arch. They stopped and talked about colleges and schools she planned to attend the next year.  They were going to Tompkins Square Park.  She was on her way home.  Come join us, they asked.  No, she needed to go home.   A hour later Thea took flight, crashing to the ground.  Her feet may never have been on the ground at all. But her death rattled everyone who knew her, particularly the kids, whose foundations were shocked, worldviews shaken.

 But what happened? That’s what some of us wondered sitting at Judson yesterday for the memorial.  Her first and sixth grade teachers delivered eulogies, tearing up, recalling a special kid who stood up to bullies.  She made me a friendship bracelet, another friend of her recalled.  The principal  recalled running into her at the student walk-out, kvetching about the walk-out she was participating in. Why is there pain?  Why is there sadness?  Can we look out for each other, he asked, pointing to a pain we all have a hard time shaking.

Sitting listening, I thought of my godfather, dad’s best friend who shot himself in 1975, that desolate 1975 feeling still with me today, all those years ago. Why’d he leave us behind? All those kids in Plano who killed each other in succession in the mid 1980’s. All my clients, it all comes sweeping back.

Walking around afterward, kids grasped each other, crying hysterically, their parents looking on, shell shocked.

What happened?

Why did she do it?

What was going on?

These are mysteries we will not have answers to.

The stories are all we have now, noted Micah, of Judson, after the service. 

We walked out into the rain, the sky screaming with colors. 

Strange now to think of you, gone withoutcorsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village, notedAllen all those years ago.

Now Thea is another of those strange memories, a part of the fabric, the footprints of the village, another of Jim Carrol’s people who died, this one jumping out of the 16^th floor.  

I used to always wonder about what happened to my clients when they died, i told the little one.  I wondered if they were in the sky, in the clouds, their souls floating, liberated from their bodies.

I don’t want her to be with us in the sky, said the little one.  I’m afraid she’d still be sad.

Its been hell of a ninth grade.  In Parkland the kids had seventeen of these memorials.  And lashed back at the machine.  In Palestine, they have these memorial every day. US tax dollars at work, taking em out, grotesque. 

Can we still be connected to Thea like the hands in John Donne’s clock, making their way through time together?

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

Like th' other foot, obliquely run;

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

And makes me end where I begun. 

But we’re not connected said the little one.

When we die everything is gone.

Is it?

We turn into dirt and then grow out into trees and become leaves in the spring and fly away in the fall, becoming part of the earth and growing again.  That's the most beautiful thing i can think of. 

Then we see them in our dreams, in the stories and memories, thousands of memories emanating out of the hundreds of bodies making their way out of Judson, going out into the city, to eat, sleep, and dream

Maybe her feet were not really on the ground?

Maybe she already was in the clouds?

Her psyche floating, somewhere else.

Maybe she was only half here?

And then she was leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when she’ll be back again.  So sad to see her go.

That's a hell of a departure, the worst decision she ever made, lamented her mother.

We’re all young for a bit, tasting the pain of growing, the delight in experiencing, even when the experiences we endure exist on double edged sword.

But its her life, her choice to leave or stay.

The little one danced and explored and participated in walkouts in the Greenwich Village her first year of high school.  She hung in the park and met other kids and talked and felt it all, including this premature goodbye.  It wouldn’t be a year in the village without someone dying, Jim Carroll reminded us all those years ago.

And maybe a part of her is still here, lingering.

As Carl Jung pontificated in an interview toward the end of his life.

I know that you say death is psychologically just as important as birth and like it is an integral part of life, but surely, it can’t be like birth if it is an end. Can it?

Jung: Yes, if it is an end. And there we are not quite certain about this end because we know that there are these peculiar faculties of the psyche – that it isn’t entirely confined to space and time. You can have dreams or visions of the future. You can see around corners and such things. Only ignorants deny these facts. It’s quite evident that they do exist and have existed always. Now these facts show that the psyche – in part, at least – is not dependent on these confinements. And then what? When the psyche is not under that obligation to live in time and space alone – and obviously, it doesn’t – then to that extent, the psyche is not submitted to those laws and that means a practical continuation of life of a sort of psychical existence beyond time and space.

Interviewer: Do you, yourself, believe that death is probably the end or do you believe…?

Jung: Well, I can’t say. You see, the word “believe” is a difficult thing for me. I don’t “believe.” I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing; and when I KNOW it, I don’t need to believe it. I don’t allow myself, for instance, to believe a thing just for sake of believing it. I can’t believe it! But when there are sufficient reasons for a certain hypothesis, I shall accept these reasons naturally. I shall say “We have to recon with the possibility of so and so.” You know?

Interviewer: Well, now you told us that we should regard death as being a goal and to stray away from it is to evade life and life’s purpose. What advice would you give to people in their later life to enable them to do this when most of them must, in fact, believe that death is the end of everything?

Jung: Well, you see I have treated many old people and it’s quite interesting to watch what their conscious is doing with the fact that it is apparently threatened with the complete end. It disregards it. Life behaves as if it were going on and so I think it is better for old people to live on, to look forward to the next day as if he had to spend centuries and then he lives happily. But when he is afraid and he doesn’t look forward; he looks back. He petrifies. He gets stiff and he dies before his time, but when he’s living on, looking forward to the great adventure that is ahead, then he lives. And that is about what your conscious is intending to do.

Of course it is quite obvious that we’re all going to die and this is the sad finale of everything, but nevertheless, there is something in us that doesn’t believe it…

Jim Carroll People Who Died

Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and just died

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Herbie pushed Tony from the Boys' Club roof
Tony thought that his rage was just some goof
But Herbie sure gave Tony some, some bitchin' proof
"Hey," Herbie said, "Tony, can you fly?"
But Tony couldn't fly, Tony died

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Brian got busted on a narco rap
He beat the rap by rattin' on some bikers
He said, "Hey, I know it's dangerous, but it sure beats Riker's"
But the next day he got offed by the very same bikers

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and why did they die?

Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and why did they die?

G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet in the head
Bobby OD'd on Drano on the night that he was wed
They were two more friends of mine
I miss 'em, they died

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, they just died

Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others
This song is for you, my brother

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Caroline later posted. 

Went to a memorial for a 15 year old girl tonight. It poured. It was appropriate. No amount of tears feel right. I’m crying for Thea and for the Palestinians.



We'll miss you Thea. 

April 18,  2018.