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On Personal Tragedy
The news seems to unfold like a something slowly falling off a shelf. First it just sort of hangs there, and you aren’t sure what is happening, then it begins to move, and before you know it, the thing hits the floor. That’s how it was with Vylit Vander Giessen.
First, there was a report on Facebook, Thursday afternoon, of something happening at the Lion’s Head apartments, over by the High School. Low rent apartments often mean crime, so it wasn’t a huge surprise. Still, this is a small town, so when the police show up somewhere in numbers, it’s news. By the evening we were hearing that a teenager had passed away. “What could it be?” we wondered. Drugs? Alcohol? A fight? Then someone said a teenager shot another teenager? “What the hell?” we thought. Then on Friday morning we learned the truth: a middle school girl had been found dead in her apartment. Before our kids were off to school we learned that Vylit, a friend of our daughter, and in the same grade (7th), had hanged herself.
I had never met Vylit. She’d never been to the house. She was good friends with girls our daughter is good friends with. Though Moriah and Vylit were not close, the news was devastating for us. We learned that Vylit had struggled with kids teasing her. Some called her “Violent Vylit.” One kid is reported to have told her she should just kill herself. Moriah told us that kids teased her without mercy. Though we don’t know for sure, the general consensus from family and friends is that the bullying and teasing is what led to her decision to end her own life.
This hits close to us because we have been helping Moriah through some bullying at school. We’ve tried to encourage her to ignore the kids who tease her, to remember that all kids in middle school are uncomfortable, and that probably the bullies had first been bullied. It is hard not to imagine Vylit’s fate befalling our little girl.
So, like many other families in our little town, we’ve had to come to grips with this thing. It has been a week, but it still brings many emotions. I write about them here in part to deal with them myself.
I am hurt. I cannot stand the thought of a poor little girl, who barely understands the world around her, feeling so lost and alone that she felt the only way out was death. We were not created to live alone. If only I had known…
I feel guilty. What have I done in my community to reach little girls whose lives are miserable? As I said in our church council meeting on Monday night: “In three years of serving on this council, I have not participated in a single decision, the results of which make it less likely that someone who is lost and hurting will take their own life. Not one. What the hell are we doing here?”
I am angry. Who teased that poor girl? Who the hell do they think they are? Why didn’t her parents do more? Her grandparents? The school? This is irrational, I know. Everyone gets teased in middle school. Suicide almost always happens in the context of deep mental illness, as I am told. So it likely wasn’t just the teasing. But anger is a powerful emotion.
I’m afraid. Have I done enough to protect my daughter? She is at a vulnerable age. She is going though that girlish change (if you know what I mean). Is she at risk? Have I loved her enough? Hugged her enough? Told her I love her, enough? I’m afraid.
More than anything, I feel a call to action. I am a Christian. I am called, first and foremost, to seek the lost, the broken, the hurting, and show them that God loves them. Have I been doing that? Or have I gone the way of the typical American Christian? Wringing my hands about things that don’t matter? I want my life to mean something to the people around me.
I know that good articles are supposed to have a good ending. I don’t have one. There isn’t one to this story, not yet. Our family has not fully processed this terrible tragedy. But we are working on it. If you are a praying person, please pray for us, for our daughter Moriah, and especially for little Vylit, and her family.
Funny, I was with people who were negotiating disability and junior high – ’til I was mainstreamed about halfway through. I don’t remember having time to be terrified – or reasons to…The more we infantilize our kids (insurance from the folks ’til 26?!) the worse this will get.
I’m really glad you were not. But most of the middle school kids I got to know through my volunteer work in the schools were very nervous.
It’s not infantilizing them. They are children–many of them are living adult-like lives.
A suicidal person is not necessarily a person who feels unloved. It is typically a person who does not love himself or herself, often in secret.
Because human beings are social creatures, interaction with others changes us from moment to moment. One person makes you laugh. Another makes you tense. And alone you are different. Alone, you might be more introspective or more daring, more serious or more silly, singing to yourself or crying to yourself, etc.
People close to those who commit suicide often think there must have been signs they missed. It’s not so. Take it from someone with a lifetime of suicidal thoughts — A person can be genuinely happy among others and yet miserable alone. And there might be no one that person is more inclined to hide the pain from than loved ones.
I admire your drive to help people, Spin. God is with you.
Good luck with that…Sounds like something we need to mentor. (No ‘participation trophies’, please; existence is a gift, not an achievement.) If everyone is a VIP, no one is…We need to be balanced and tread carefully. Too bad school clubs for hobbies and Scouting have gone down the tube/off the deep end.
This is critical if we expect 12-13-year-olds to be adults at 18.
@spin, this is a book you might want to check out.
The only way to stop a bully is a more powerful protector or being able to break the jerk’s nose. Violence solves everything – it just often creates more problems along the way.
I hated being bullied, and I wanted to kill all of the people bullying me. The problem is that bullying is a cascade effect from the ringleaders, and people join up out of fear rather than hatred of the unfortunate target.
@aaronmiller, your description perfectly describes my internal dialogue. Maybe it is more common than we know. For me being a Catholic has saved me over and over.
No matter what the evil one plants in my thoughts, and I really believe that is the source of most hopelessness in the midst of objective plenty, I have to remind myself constantly that all the people we imagine might be better off without us, would in reality be devastated by our loss.
Even people we have tenuous connections to, like our fellow ricochet members, may need us now and in the future for some part we have to play in their lives.
Someone once told me that I had saved her life because of a rather glib and offhand comment I made to her. She said everything she was dealing with just turned on that silly remark and in a split second everything changed.
We are truly incapable of measuring our own worth.
Granted, your volunteer experience may bring you into contact with kids who can’t be kids…Bless your efforts, Marci!
When I speak of infantilizing children, I’m referring to helicopter and lawnmower parents who don’t allow their kids to age-appropriately try, fail, try again – until they succeed. We need to inoculate kids against external pressures by helping them build a strong core and a somewhat thick skin. Otherwise, we’re growing snowflakes; and if we’re not part of the solution for young family, friends, community members, we haven’t the right to bemoan the problem; Big Brothers/Big Sisters, mentoring of a similar kind, for instance.
Well, @spin, a lot of the chores middle-class teens are expected to do around the house may not be all that meaningful. It just isn’t so obvious that, without the teens around to do them, their parents’ life would be harder and poorer – indeed, even when chores are the norm for teens in the household, it may seem quite the reverse!
I had older parents, which meant becoming their elder-care provider ahead of all my peers, but still, that didn’t happen in my teens! (Twenties? Yes. Teens? No.)
It wasn’t till I had been off at college and was home on break doing big project my parents had saved up for us that I had any sense that my doing my chores made my parents lives appreciably easier. Ackshully, the expectation that children do chores for their parents has had its most meaningful payoff for my parents once their kids hit their twenties and into their thirties.
Just wondering: Where is the father in all of this? Does it make a difference where there is an assertive father, supported by the mother, at home?
This is more common than you might think. Usually you don’t get to find out. You were lucky.
Most of the kids in the group are anxious to avoid getting on the wrong side of the ringleader bullies. So, they go with the flow by shunning the one these ringleaders are targeting or they join in picking on him or her.
Midget Faded Rattlesnake’s link to info on pure bullies is refreshing. I was for a few years very bullied as a child. I was told by adults to reflect on how insecure my tormenters must be. I knew the worst of them weren’t any such thing. So what I heard from being told this was that they (the adults) were either (1) stone stupid or (2) they didn’t know what I should do any more than I did. And they didn’t respect me, or care enough about me, to say so and spend time and attention working on the problem with me.
Vylit felt alone and worthless to anyone who mattered to her, my guess is. I’m sorry, Spin.
It can get bad in the midwest, too. But it’s amazing how these things vary. Being new and exotic might’ve brought with it some protection. Or not. Who knows?
In a way I was lucky, I suppose: in middle school, my whole family was the target of a particularly vile smear campaign. I will not reveal what it was, only that the bullying children at school and the bullying adults in the local government seemed to be in cahoots, and fabricated the most shaming rumors possible about us given the demographics of the town we lived in.
What was lucky about it, for me, at least, was that I could stand up for the honor of my parents when the bullies attacked, an honor I knew could not be questioned. Had the bullies not been attacking my family as well, but only my personal self-worth, they might’ve gotten to me easier. (I know one mostly-unrelated middle-school incident, involving sexual bullying on a church retreat, did get to me worse. I was probably right, though, in deciding to keep total silence on that for at least a decade after it happened.)
What an unbearable tragedy. That poor girl. That poor family. What a tragedy.
May Vylit’s memory be for a blessing.
Oh.
No words.
My mother has studied how lawsuits reduce bullying. Yes, really.
It seems that schools are just like people: if you change the incentives, you change the outcomes. When schools are held legally (and financially) responsible for the outcomes of bullying, they put a lot more effort into addressing it.
Bullying is the natural state in nature. Cchildren instinctively understand this. Every chicken coop has a hierarchy. Chickens in a coop routinely kill off those on the bottom. The lowest hen on the pecking order often peck themselves.
The Snowflake Culture has really contributed to this: society tells the bullied that their feelings are the most important thing (instead of simply learning defensive techniques to not be so sensitive), and we also tell the bullies that their desires, because they are “natural”, are inherently validated, too. We allow – and even encourage – a pecking order, because it is what children instinctively crave, and we are told that people should get what they want.
More proof, if it was needed, that morality is not found in a state of nature.
spite was my path out of that place.
I really don’t know the answer to that question. I’ve heard different things from people who know the family, but I won’t put them here because it’s just hearsay.
I told my daughter to “kick ’em in the balls…” One thing I know for sure is that a “pure bully” doesn’t pick on someone who will fight back.
My son and daughter-in-law plan to home school our newest granddaughter, a 2 year old Chinese child with a cleft palate. After this tragic post I am so glad they will.
Jesus looked at the people around him as lost sheep and wept over them. We think we know so much how to handle every problem….and this comes along.
I’ll tell you another story about a girl named Ashton. She has Down’s Syndrome, and she plays on the the High School JV basketball team with my daughter. Now, you’d think she’d never get to play, that no one would ever pass to her. But that isn’t the way it is. She gets the ball a lot, and most of the time the defense gives her a little room. Once she got fouled and had to shoot a couple of free throws. She made both, and each time the entire gym went nuts.
Humans have the capacity to love each other deeply, but they also have the capacity to love each other, just as deeply.
Hate is often born of inordinate self-love, no? Glad to see this re: Ashton…Visible differences may help here…. Thought of this:
Sending prayers out for your daughter Moriah and your family, and Vylit and her family. This is a horrifying event. Very sad.
Would it be better if boys were encouraged to be nicer to girls than they are to other boys? (Boys are naturally jerks to other boys.) I was raised to treat boys and girls and the same. It is honestly one of my school’s/parents’/society’s biggest failures. Not to say I didn’t help contribute to my lack of education.
I hate Rousseauian philosophy with the heat of a thousand angry suns. I feel that Rousseau and his vileness utterly dominate our culture and it is a toxic infection.
Spin,
Please do us all a favor and add “suicide” as a tag to your post.
Suicide is common enough that one of us is likely to want to come back to this post on some unhappy future day.
Thank you for sharing your grief with us. It helps all of us to be mindful of such things.
Speaking of suicide. There has been an unusual increase of suicides lately in America. Particularly among poor white men but suicides are up across the board.
I think that is related to the rise of the “unaffiliated” or “no religion” cohort (although there are plenty of suicides among believers).
I had a nephew who killed himself, and he had always been on top of the world. Popular, good looking, good grades, got into the college he wanted, never unhappy in love.
Yours is a sad, awful story, but I’m not sure anyone is to blame for this poor girl’s death. Many people can recount miserable, tortured high school experiences–from the perspective of a long, successful life later. Mental illness can be as fatal and incurable as cancer. Love and kindness are not a cure for it.