Stefano was a year ahead of me in high school, but we had a couple of courses together. One of them was first-period gym class, for which we both routinely showed up early. We got to know each other playing basketball and badminton before the rest of the kids showed up each morning, and hanging out in the library at lunch. On Monday in December he didn’t come to class. Overnight while he was sleeping, his heart had simply stopped beating. He turned out to have some kind of heart defect I hadn’t known about; I think he was in grade 12 at the time he died.
Travis was in my Air Cadet squadron, he was a couple of years younger than me, but his older brother, also a cadet, was my age. He was well-liked, and had plenty of friends at Cadets, but late one autumn his attendance at the weekly training got spotty, and in early December we heard that he’d quit the program. I got one or two second-hand news updates about him over the coming weeks. It was between Christmas and New Year’s that he committed suicide. I think he was 15 years old. His brother, a musician in the squadron’s band, played the bagpipes at the funeral, and a group of senior cadets, including myself, acted as pallbearers.
Finally there was Chase, who I knew mostly as the kid who teased me in junior kindergarten. He ended up getting held back a year, and so I didn’t see him much after that. He was attending a different high school than me, even, but somehow my mother found out about the funeral when he, too, committed suicide in about grade 10 – once again right about the end of December.
. . .
I think Stefano’s was the first funeral I cried at. It was a lesson in the risk of heartbreak that comes with forming relationships, and in the fragility of human life. He’d seemed entirely healthy and suddenly he was gone; he went to bed and didn’t wake up. The suicides were different; particularly Travis, since Chase hadn’t been much more than a memory to me for years at that point. A lot of us cadets didn’t know how to act or react after it happened. Here was a young man that had been our friend and colleague, known as happy and eager and part of our little community. We were surprised when he disappeared, and then shocked at his last act. Should we have known? Could we have helped? A lot of people who knew him had thoughts like that afterward.
Nowadays I’m an instructor for the cadet program. I work closely as a teacher, coach, and mentor for these young people, and some of them I get to know pretty well. I put a huge amount of work into helping them learn, succeed, and grow up. It would absolutely break my heart if one of them made the same decision Travis did. My main role is as a flight instructor and checkpilot for the cadet flight training program, and it comes with a responsibility to teach them how to fly, and verify that they have the skills to do so safely on their own. We’ve never had a fatal accident – partly because we take such great care in training and supervision – and I hope we never do.
