As a starting point, I suggest you take a quick look at this post from a decade ago as well as this more recent one. They both relate to something I’ve written about a number of times, which is teens hurling themselves in front of trains here in my otherwise gentle town of Palo Alto.
It happened again this week, with one Summer Devi Mehta, a young person at Palo Alto High School who threw herself in front of CalTrain at 10:13 on Tuesday morning. What’s quite unusual is that Summer published a suicide note for all to see before she killed herself. It reads as follows.
I didn’t know Summer or her family. More broadly, I’ve never had to deal with any trans issues in any fashion, either within my own family or with anyone I know well. What I do know is that a 16-year-old felt hopeless, useless, and destined for a young death, so she took on the absolutely unimaginable terror of stepping in front of a speeding locomotive and destroying her life and the lives of those close to her, to say nothing of the locomotive engineer who had to witness it.
I am moved by this bit: “Rich girl in the middle of the suburbs, why did she kill herself? Turns out I just wasn’t built for the rich life.”
Look, Palo Alto isn’t “rich,” but I suspect being a rather ordinary-looking, chubby Indian trans person in high school was no walk in the park. There was probably plenty of bullying, and as the note makes clear, the overarching reason for her decision was the suicide of Summer’s friend Ash just last year. That was just eleven months ago.
These are cruel times we live in. They will get crueler as 2026 wears on. Human nature seems to crave a common enemy, and since the good old days of the Cold War are long gone, we increasingly turn to hating one another.
As a parent, and as more or less of a human being, it simply makes me sad to read the words of someone who had decided to end their life at such a young age. There’s really nothing more to say.
