“Do you have any questions for me?”
“Um. Yeah. My mom calls you Anna, but should I call you Dr. Henderson? It felt kind of weird.”
“You can call me Anna, or Ms. Henderson, if that makes you feel more comfortable. I don’t have a doctorate; the letters after my name stand for licensed clinical social worker. I still have a lot of education, just not the kind most people think of. Anything else?”
“Oh. No, that’s it.”
“Okay. Now, your mom explained to me what was going on, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to hear it from you. It isn’t often my teenage clients’ own idea to come to therapy, so I don’t want you to feel like I’m assuming what help you might need, if any.”
I press my lips together. “Uh-huh. Well, my best friend died.”
“How did she die?”
“Suicide.” I pause. “I get that we’re supposed to say she killed herself, not that she committed suicide, but whatever.”
“You can say died by suicide, if you prefer,” says Anna. “It’s not the word ‘suicide’ that’s the problem so much as the idea that a crime was committed. Truthfully, in here you can say it however you like.”
“But you’re going to judge how I say it, right?”
“Not judge, no, but the words you use do help me get a better picture of how you feel about the situation. Talk about it however feels right for you, no matter what the words are.”
I mull this over. “Right. Anyway, she jumped in Moss River and drowned. That’s what happened.”
As I say “jumped,” something shifts in my chest and throat, and the second half of the word comes out strangled. It’s like my body knows I shouldn’t be talking so flippantly about this. I clamp down on my emotions, on my thoughts. Getting emotional is too much work. It’s exhausting. I just want to get through this appointment and get back to my game.
“I’m so sorry this happened,” Anna says. “That grief is a heavy burden to bear no matter how old you are. When did you find out about this?”
“Last Sunday.”
“So it hasn’t even been a week.”
“No.”
“How did you find out?”
“The news. Then my mom called her parents. They’d been looking for her after she didn’t come home. She hadn’t gone to school either. I went and checked a few places I thought she might be.”
“You helped with the search?”
“Yeah. A bit.”
“What were you thinking about, while you were searching?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you think something terrible had happened, or did you think you would find her? What thoughts were going throughyour head while you were looking?”
I shift to a more comfortable position, trying to remember that day. I know I drove around town for several hours, checking all the usual spots—the parks where we played sports as kids, the three fast-food places we rotated between each week, the athletic fields behind school, the food court at the mall, the old movie theater with the broken-down seats—but my memory of that time feels hazy, almost like I wasn’t thinking anything.
“I know that I thought about how weird it would be if I found her at the movie theater,” I say. “Because, like, maybe she skipped school to watch movies all day. But it was weird because that was a story my brain made up, like, that’s where she would be if this was an emotional sitcom episode. I’d find her in the movie theater and we’d have a talk about what was bothering her and everything would be okay in the end. Alissa would never skip school to go to the movies, especially without telling anyone,especiallywithout tellingme.And she wouldn’t sit in there all day, and she wouldn’t have...” I huff in frustration. I’m blabbing and I need to get to the point. “And so by the time I checked there, that was when I started to really think something was wrong. But I didn’t think...” I realize I’m jabbing my thumbnail into the meat of my thigh, and I stop. “I thought it would be, like, kidnapping or something. I guess I didn’t pay attention to her closely enough.”
“It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking we could have knownif we’d paid more attention, but the truth is that we don’t always pick up on the symptoms of severe mental illness, even when we see them in someone we’re very close to. And mental illness in teenagers is often overlooked because of excuses like hormones or age.”
“But I would have known if she was super sad.”
“Depression doesn’t always manifest as sadness. It is, sometimes. Other times it’s anger, or fear. And many times, the person who has depression is very good at hiding it behind their behaviors. Was Alissa very loud or outgoing?”
“Kind of the opposite.”
