Over the course of Slope’s very long history, one item I’ve written about a few times is the tragic loss of young life in our high-pressure little community. These things tend to come in waves, and it’s definitely been happening again lately, such as this item which greeted me this week:
As a father myself, it shakes me up to read of anything like this happening: for a child to end their life at their own hand, particularly in such a horrific and public manner. The high school where the young woman attended, Gunn, has had many suicides over the years, and most of them tend to take place on these CalTrain tracks:
A day or two after the original article, the country’s medical examiner released the name of the victim: Anriya Wang. I did not know her or her family, but I found one photo of her on the web, which was associated with her stint as a writer at her school newspaper in her freshman year at Gunn.
Just a nice, regular-looking kid, and I cannot help to think: what kind of pain was she feeling? What was going on in her life to compel her to such a thing? She only wrote a few articles, and this was a couple of years ago, but they did tend to focus on the pressures of school and the desire to “achieve.”
I do not know how other people in my town react to such articles. For myself, at some point, at least once, I look out the window to the sky and think to myself that, at that very moment, those parents are out there. The mother and the father are in agony over what has happened. Do they blame themselves? If so, is it justified? Or was something else going on? Surely the anguish and emotional tidal wave present the risk of causing much more destruction, such as to the rest of the family and the marriage itself.
Few people are as skilled at self-pity as I am, but when I read of something like this, I kick myself in the ass and tell myself how idiotic I am to think any of my problems are at all a big deal. One glance at the grey sky, and the knowledge of the torment someone else is enduring, right at this very moment, even as I am typing this, is enough to make me feel ashamed that I ever dared to feel that anything I’m dealing with is worth a second thought.
