Despair difficult to face, combat
Familiar, haunting questions linger in the wake of the tragedy that unfolded Friday afternoon at Lakeside High School.
Answers that emerge are imperfect and incomplete.
The culture sanitizes and in some cases celebrates violence. Guns are too easy to get. Suicidal thoughts are prohibitively uncomfortable topics of conversation, not only for those who entertain them but even more so for those to whom they are tentatively offered. Agencies and other resources are insufficient for the amount of intervention that is needed.
The list of challenges goes on … and on.
A period of emotional introspection will follow. Friends, family, teachers and counselors, neighbors and the community at large will agonize over how 16-year-old Skyler Cullitan’s self-destruction could have been averted. And over how other Skylers’ internal devils can be exorcised before it comes again to this.
The irreversible reality is that Cullitan is dead, the victim of a public suicide that sent waves of shock and grief spreading across the Nine Mile Falls School District and beyond.
What gave rise to such despair? How could it have been arrested? Were warning signs missed or, worse, dismissed as just a normal manifestation adolescent angst – a “phase”? The painful fact is, Skyler’s horrors didn’t begin with the single gunshot that rang out at 1:25 on Friday afternoon in the lobby area of his school. They germinated sometime earlier and had been growing since. Society can’t help asking how many other youngsters are in our midst, struggling silently with the same ghosts that tortured Skyler Cullitan, inching their way to a similar outcome.
At the same time, however, we should ask how many such cases have, in fact, been prevented because we learned from previous catastrophes and took appropriate steps.
How many calls to crisis hotlines such as First Call for Help in Spokane (509-838-4428) and Regional Mental Health Services in Coeur d’Alene (208-769-1406) have steered troubled callers to life-saving help? How much emotional scarring has been avoided by anti-bullying programs in the schools? How many friends and acquaintances, heeding the messages that arose from earlier tragedies, have provided the listening ear, the comforting shoulder and the frank encouragement that nudged a potential suicide to seek professional help?
How many lives have been saved because the community reacted appropriately? We don’t know. Successes are impossible to quantify, while failures are tallied with crisp precision – sometimes in glaring headlines and sometimes in bleak statistics in coroners’ files.
Caring communities can’t help but feel anguish over the failures, but we must take heart in the successes and expand the efforts that made them possible.