Ithasn't been a great day," my friend wrote this summer, "I just found out a '96 committed suicide last week. And I knew her too, Sarah Devens."
As I sat in front of the IBM in my mother's office, a small gasp escaped my lips. Not because I knew her well, but rather because if Dartmouth is a sea of faces 4,500 students wide, Sarah Devens' face was a wave I could have picked out. Not having ever met her, I knew she was a lacrosse star, I knew her nickname was "Devil."
And so that faithful psychological cushion, denial, kicked in. It seemed to me that people with playful nicknames could not possibly kill themselves. Nameless, faceless people commit suicide. Homeless people and depressed Wall Street brokers jump from New York City landmarks, but Dartmouth women do not put bullets through their chests.
But of course I realized that my reasoning was faulty. Ivy League juniors, only a few years away from exciting, though unknown, futures do indeed kill themselves, because one had.
So now we are all back on campus and even the '99's know who Sarah Devens is, or was. Many people are ready to offer their own theories on what happened. Many people are eager to repeat the theories that they have already heard. It seems that the only people who are saying nothing are the ones who would seem to have a right to, her closest friends.
There are those people who would have her death ignored, or condemned. After all, suicide is wrong, they say. And, of course, at the other extreme, there are those who joke about the high stress of an Ivy League environment causing her death. They cite Cornell's suicide rate and the recent murder-suicide at Harvard.
The truth is that we, as her fellow students, all owe Sarah more than gossip about why she did what she did. Her suicide should not be treated as a solve-it-yourself mystery, and those of us who did not know her personally perhaps should recognize why we postulate theories on why she would commit suicide.
The bottom line is, Sarah Devens was human, and vulnerable. Most of us have had moments in our lives when we teetered on the precipice of self-destruction; times when we resided in the dark, unseen fringes of our inner hearts; moments where nothing more than chance or a lucky coincidence brought us back from the edge.
Every year, scores of college students commit suicide. Why they do it can be pulled apart and debated eternally. But no matter how long people discuss missed warning signs and potential causes, no person can ever know what internal desperation leads another person to make such an irrevocable choice. The depth of despondency can neither be interpreted nor attributed. Sarah's death was no one's fault.
Sarah Devens was a Dartmouth student. She was one of us and always will be. She deserves our respect. And on October 1st, at her memorial service, she deserves us to recognize her accomplishments and not attempt to judge the "failings" that led to her death.
We can make a literary opus out of the death of a young, talented person. We can lament and eulogize. But in the end I am, in fact, neither sermonizing nor writing her obituary. I am simply noting the influence her decision has had on the community she lived in. We wonder, we ponder, we remember.
