'Your Face Broods From My Table'

My nephew texted me Monday afternoon to say a student had committed suicide in my old high school. She shot herself in the cafeteria. As usual, news of suicide, especially of a young person and despite my total ignorance of the facts, left me looking in vain for explanations. Drugs, mental illness, plain old despair? The school is closed for two days and the district is offering “grief counseling.” Police have not released the identity of the 18-year-old. I find little follow-up news and don’t expect to see much. What’s to report?

 I ate hundreds of lunches in that cafeteria. During one of them a guy tried to convince me that Ayn Rand could write. With a girl I had known since kindergarten I debated the merits of “Give Me Just a Little More Time” by Chairmen of the Board. There I read Max I. Dimant’s Jews, God and History and Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer. And, for the first time, The Dream Songs of John Berryman, who would commit suicide two years later. He writes in “Dream Song 172,” regarding the suicide of Sylvia Plath:

 

“Your face broods from my table, Suicide.

Your force came on like a torrent toward the end

of agony and wrath.”