Three of the president’s cabinet secretaries lost a child in early June. And just like that, the national number reached one thousand kids a day. Movie stars recorded PSAs. High school classrooms took on a visible tension. Op-eds were written—Is this the end? It was, of course, just a few years earlier that the COVID-19 plague had swept the planet, locking us in our homes, dooming the elderly and the infirm to panicked suffocation, spurring the almost-civil war, the flashpoint of a brewing culture clash, where the word mask became an invocation or an insult.
Now we had to wonder, had the “Lost Year,” that endless lockdown our children endured, had long-term mental health effects—all that computer schooling, the chronic fear of falling behind academically, socially, the endless months of heightened anxiety and uncertainty? But there was no way to know for sure, enmeshed as those factors were with “Stop the Steal” and the Big Lie, which had turned the country into a nation with two presidents—one legitimate and the other not—where QAnon shamans peeled back the layers of an invisible, untraceable fraud and patriots beat police officers with flagpoles. Our histories had been revised recently to highlight the stories of all Americans. Now they were being revised again in state houses across the country, angry crowds roiling at school board hearings, demanding a more patriotic curriculum. And so new textbooks were issued decreeing that accusations of racism were now themselves racist. This was who we had become, a nation of symbolic acts, where what “we” believed and what “they” believed were not just contrary, but opposite. Up is down; black is white. This final fracture of reality had given birth to an existential riddle: What skills must our children master to survive in a world where reality itself is polarized? Had this impossible struggle driven them mad?
Is that what A11 was supposed to mean?
Whatever the cause, we were reeling from a new plague now, a plague of surrender. A plague of fatigue. Conversation in public places stopped when teenagers arrived. No one knew what to say to their own children, let alone the children of others.
On May 25, finals began on college campuses around the country. Aggressive new policies were instituted. Harvard and Yale insisted on nightly inspections of all dorms, administrators looking for pills, blades, anything that could be used to aid in self-extermination. And yet each morning dozens more bodies were discovered. By the twenty-seventh, universities across the country closed, parents flying in on red-eyes, racing cross-country in Volvos to rescue their young.
Each child is precious, unique, but once the phenomenon became widespread, their deaths became a statistic. We began to think of our children as a collective. To talk about them as a generation, desperate for some kind of lightning-strike insight. They were less connected, we told ourselves, to each other, to us, while conversely being more connected to the constant flow of misinformation that had become our society. Today’s teenagers were having sex later. They were going out less, spending less time with their friends—less physical time—while staying connected to them electronically close to twenty-four hours a day. Was this a lingering vestige of the pandemic, or had some kind of deep fear of their fellow man settled in their bones, robbing them of the desire to touch? Was that the problem, a chronic sense of dislocation, a fatal remove, or something more immediate, a hidden trigger we couldn’t see? We turned to our priests for answers, to our rabbis and imams, to statisticians and social scientists. They told us that rates of depression and anxiety disorders had been on the rise for years. Why were we just noticing now?
And yet to say that any of this was the cause of their deaths was speculation at best. A fumble in the dark. A way to comprehend the incomprehensible. Some said it was God’s will, others the work of his counterpart who resides deep in the fiery pit. Liberals pointed to elevated environmental toxins, to algae blooms in the Atlantic, to leaching plastics, even as the talking heads of right-wing media denied that suicide was a problem. They saw it as a false flag operation—even as their own children began to eat the gun, in a loop of cause and effect that would seem ironic if it weren’t so tragic.
In the end all that mattered was that we were their parents.
It was our job to keep them safe, to make them happy, to keep them alive.
In June the phenomenon expanded. Young adults up to age twenty-five were declared at risk. Children as young as twelve. Parents took their kids’ phones and tablets and smashed them with hammers. They canceled their social media accounts. Televisions were moved to the garage, newspaper subscriptions canceled. If this were a wildfire, we would starve it of oxygen, instituting blackout conditions. Still the death rate climbed, crossing oceans. Europe was first, then Russia and China. Financial markets nosedived. In July, Major League Baseball canceled the rest of the season.
With a virus, you could inoculate. You could isolate. You could watch for physical symptoms. But this—this was something heretofore unseen in human existence. An act of collective surrender. It felt to many of us as if the species itself was giving up. We took to sleeping in bed with our grown children, watching their chests rise and fall, listening for their breath, as if they were babies once more.
Help us, we prayed in the midnight silence. But to who? And why did no one answer?
The Olivers
Later, people would say that it was just like Claire to leave an essay in the wake of her death by pharmaceutical overdose entitled Notes on the name “Claire” in the place of a traditional suicide note. She had always been that person, smarter than you, a bit world-weary, like a character out of a Salinger short story. Her wit had bite. Her eyes held a knowing sadness. She had a way of talking to her father that resembled the slumped disappointment a PhD professor shows the worst student in her class. To properly transcribe their conversations, one would need to include a parenthetical sigh before each of her responses.
To wit—