ColumnWhen I was a junior in high school, two girls took their own lives. Twenty years later, I realize how writing about a friend’s suicide has shaped my outlook on storytelling.

Twenty years ago this week, my mom was standing in the kitchen and asked me a simple question: Do you know Mari Mannion and Liz Gallagher?

There was something about the way she said it, or maybe the look on her face, that sent a shockwave through my body. I did know them.

On April 30th, 1994, when we were juniors in high school, Mari and Liz took their own lives and everything changed. It seemed like the whole world was focused on our school. The adults did what they could to protect us from the media (two young, popular girls committing suicide in a nice Chicago suburb is news, whether it should be or not, and our school was bombarded).

The sense that outsiders saw our collective loss as “a story” was troubling and set the stage for how I think about writing today.

I worry a lot about whether some of the stories I share are mine to tell.

I hadn’t planned to write about Mari and Liz, or suicide, but today, I can’t think about anything else. I woke up and was instantly transported back to 1994 via Facebook. Old photos. Names popping up that I hadn’t thought about in years. I dug out a photo from camp and a cartoon Mari gave me when I was sad after a breakup in high school.

Liz had been an acquaintance of mine. I didn’t know her well and don’t mean to diminish the impact of her loss by focusing more on Mari. Hundreds of other people have Liz stories.

Mari and I met in grade school at a girl scout camp and I instantly decided she was the coolest person ever. We went to different schools, and so didn’t really reconnect until a year or so later when we were in a production of “Little Guys and Little Dolls.” Mari was thrown into the chorus as a Hot Box girl and I was cast as General Cartwright. A role I got because it involved not singing and not dancing. Basically, I marched.

Our parts left us with lots of downtime. My biggest memory of that show was during one rehearsal, the director saying, “Libby and Mari, if you can’t stop talking you might as well just leave.” So we left.

While we hung out with different crowds in high school, we chose to be dance partners in a gym class called Dance of the Decades — which shockingly few boys signed up for — and worked on the school newspaper together.

I write all of this for context, but also, I recognize, as a self-conscious way to legitimize my relationship with Mari. To give myself permission to write this story. Which is exactly what I felt I needed to do in high school when I wrote a profile of her for the school newspaper.

Because I was a junior, the profile should have been written by one of the senior editors. But, as my friend and I remember it, I basically freaked out at a staff meeting and said that I would be writing the profile. I don’t know if I cried or just looked so intense and scary that someone said yes, but I was the one who went to Mari’s house and talked to her mom about Mari’s life.

As I walked into her living room, I felt for the first time a very specific sense of anxiety that has resurfaced over and over again in my career: Fear that others might think I am using their pain for my own self-interest.

I felt an intense need for her mom to know that Mari was my friend, even though I wasn’t in her close circle and she probably hadn’t heard my name in years. I wanted to be recognized as someone who loved her, not seen as another asshole reporter chasing the Oak Park Suicide Story.

My only goal was to to write something her mom, family members and her closest friends would like.

I was intensely conscious of the fact that her best friends might be like, “Who the hell are YOU to write about Mari?” It was high school; she was popular, I was a grunge kid. While the social divides weren’t pulled from a John Hughes movie, people did tend to have school friends and friend friends. We were school friends.

I was consumed with the idea that people would think I was trying to act like I was closer to Mari than I was. It’s highly possible that no one gave a shit and that, as a 16-year-old, I was only at the center of my own mind, not anyone else’s. But try telling a 16-year-old that.

It’s a fact that nothing that happens to me and me alone is worth writing about. So, even when I’m writing a personal essay, I’m almost always telling someone else’s story — whether they agreed to let me or not.

Years later, I read David Sedaris’ story, “Repeat After Me,” and thought: “Oh god, yes. That.” In the story, Sedaris writes about how no one is safe around him. All of his family’s stories become his. There’s a parrot involved. It’s a wonderful story.

At the time I read it, it resonated because I was writing about my grandmother’s suicide attempt and wondering what she would think if she could have read the story.

The answer, for some, is not to do this — to leave these stories unwritten. But I can’t.

So, I have decided that if what I am writing is true, and if I am writing a story because, like today, I cannot imagine not writing it, I have to trust that my intention will be felt by readers.

In all of the back and forth on Facebook, a close friend of Mari and Liz’s posted a comment: “Libby, I just re-read the profile that you did on Mari. I’m not sure how you were able to do that back then, but I’m so glad that you did.”

How much that comment means to me is impossible to explain. All I know is that 20 years ago, I felt consumed by the need to write something true, which is exactly how I feel now.

That Happened is Libby Lowe’s weekly column for EcoSalon. Here, she shares personal stories, and analyzes news and pop culture through a feminist lens. Keep in touch with Libby @LibbyLowe.

Images: Libby Lowe

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I used to make fun of people who drove Hummers. I would see those suburban road warriors taking up a lane and a half on the highway and I would say something rude and cutting about insecure twits who needed an off-road monster car to protect them from fender benders in a Whole Foods’ parking lot. I would speculate as to what type of “inadequacies” a man might be compensating for by wanting to drive a really big car. Oh, I was tough. Brutal even.

I wasn’t crazy about Suburbans or Escalades either, but I reserved a singular fury for the behemoth Hummers, unique even among big SUVs for their overkill and gas guzzling. Three times as big as a typical sport utility vehicle, with a frightening lack of emissions efficiency, these cars struck me as iconic symbols of waste, excess, and arrogant disregard for the atmosphere. But not anymore. Oh, how things have changed.

As I write this, Hummer has gone out of business, a victim of its own hubris and rising gas prices. In related news, sort of, my daughter has been driving for just under a year and my heart constricts every single time she pulls out of our driveway. There are a number of factors that worry me, but of particular concern are icy winter roads, other (stupid) drivers, and the gravitational pull of her cell phone. I am afraid that she will miss something in the blind spot, that treacherous dead zone where danger lurks, just out of sight.

It seems insane to me that a girl so young, so slight, so lacking in life and vehicular experience, should be allowed to hurl herself down weather impaired roads, with nothing between her and other cars but a dainty and insubstantial Honda Civic. I would like her in something bigger and stronger, something heavy and completely unyielding. I want her in a four wheel fortress.

Like any responsible parent, I have logged hours with my daughter in the car. We have practiced merging and lane changes, we’ve gone uphill and downhill in all kinds of weather, in daylight and dark. I have warned her till I’m hoarse and yet I still wonder: will she look away from the road to answer a text? Put on lip gloss? Will she lose control of her car while turning on an Ingrid Michaelson CD? This is a child who has mastered AP Calculus, but I’m not sure she’ll remember that oncoming traffic has the right-of -way when she’s making a left turn. She is a smart girl but she’s still a teenager, not too far removed from wearing braces and reading books about vampire love triangles.

If I can’t always be sitting next to her when she drives, then I want the car to step in and protect her for me. I want her car to be imposing. Scary. I want it to bully other cars on the road, show them who’s boss. And the fact is, emissions or not, if Hummer hadn’t gone out of business I would genuinely love to put her in one. It comforts me to imagine her in something big and tank-like, wearing a helmet, encased in bubble wrap and packed in with Styrofoam peanuts (still more environmental no-nos.) This makes me a hypocrite, I know, but from where I stand – at the intersection of mother love and civic responsibility – I would choose my daughter’s safety without a second thought. Yes, I want her to inherit a cleaner planet, but first I want her to emerge unscathed from her first years behind the wheel.

And the eco rage I once felt for the road-hogging cretins I used to berate? It’s still there, but it’s tucked away, hidden someplace where I don’t have to see it or deal with it. It’s in my blind spot.

Editor’s Note: Susan Goldberg is a slightly lapsed treehugger. Although known to overuse paper products, she has the best of intentions – and a really small SUV. Catch her column, The Goldberg Variations, each week here at EcoSalon.

Images: TheFriendlyFiend, fujisan3 (Mr.mt)

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When my daughter told me she had joined a club at school called “Silent Earth,” I felt a moment of pure maternal panic. I couldn’t help feeling that Silent Earth sounded like a group of excessively emo girls dressed completely in black, wearing goth eyeliner and cutting themselves. I could easily picture this group holding Wiccan worship meetings in a dark corner of the school cafeteria. I braced myself for a long and serious talk about teen angst.

My daughter is a gentle and kind-hearted girl, but when I voiced these concerns she rolled her eyes with enough force to detach both retinas; I correctly interpreted this as a positive sign. If you’re unfamiliar with high school-age females, let me enlighten you: eye rolling is an extremely healthy outlet for teenage girls. It means that the girl in question feels comfortable enough to express her innermost feelings. Also, she finds you utterly ridiculous.

My daughter quickly informed me that Silent Earth was the name of her school’s environmental awareness club. It is a collection of high minded students working together to protect the planet, to encourage recycling and, incidentally, to gain admittance to prestigious colleges.

These are all laudable goals, but I couldn’t help asking why the club burdened themselves with such a depressing name.  My question was answered with a shrug – that universal, all-purpose teenage gesture. Depending on the conversation it can mean:  “I don’t know,” “I don’t care,” or “get a life.” It almost always means “please get out of my room.”

At my daughter’s school, Silent Earth has a reputation for attracting kids who are not merely padding their resumes for college admittance. Its members tend to be earnest and well-meaning young people who are genuinely committed to environmental issues. The club members encourage other students to ride the school bus, they promote locally grown produce, and they teach elementary school kids to be more eco-friendly. They have won awards from local government for the impact they’ve had in helping the environment. But I can’t help feeling that they would attract more members if the name was less of a buzzkill.

My daughter actually agrees that the club should be called something a little less grim, but at the same time she wouldn’t necessarily prefer something that sounded too upbeat. Recently we had dinner with friends and found out that their son was a member of his school’s environmental club, an organization with the far perkier title of “POP” (an acronym for preserve our planet). My daughter accepted this news with mild interest, since she had no idea this young man was concerned about the environment. But when I mentioned liking his club’s name, she could barely hide her distaste. She explained to me, at great length, that no one at her school would ever join a club with an oppressively cheerful name like POP. “Way too Disney,” she said, with a quick but dismissive roll of her eyes.

The Earth may be silent but teenage girls, happily, are not.

Editor’s Note: Susan Goldberg is a slightly lapsed treehugger. Although known to overuse paper products, she has the best of intentions – and a really small SUV. Catch her column, The Goldberg Variations, each week here at EcoSalon.

Image: burgundavia

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