Some crossover between Maddy’s worlds existed, but not much. And those who had known her when she was a kid, and noticed a shift in behavior once she got to college, could not see the change happening. As her friends sat together swapping stories, they realized that no one person knew enough to have helped Maddy. Perhaps a boyfriend, a partner, might have been the person intimate enough to see all the warning signs. In fact, it was one of Maddy’s ex-boyfriends from high school who may have possessed a clue that even Ashley Holleran hadn’t known: “He told me, ‘Madison started going to church at Penn.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ I said, ‘She never did that in high school.’ My dad goes to church all the time, and if anyone would go with him, it was usually me, but not really anyone else in my family. So when he said, ‘Yeah, she started going during the fall semester,’ I thought to myself: She never told me that, or anyone else, really, except for him. He said, ‘I don’t know, she just said that she felt comforted by it; that it helped her.’ And I guess, in retrospect, that does make sense.”
More than two years after Madison’s death, Ashley still can’t quite wrap her mind around the dearth of answers. “I kept thinking there was definitely more to this,” she says. “I just felt like there was a secret or something, like someone must have known, that one specific thing had happened, that she had told someone about her plan. I just kept wishing I knew the extent of everything, but obviously I can’t ask her. So now I know that I’m not going to know. And I guess I’ve just kind of accepted that.”
About a year after Madison’s death, one of her teammates decided to quit the track team. She sent the following explanation to her teammates and included Maddy’s e-mail address among those who received the message:
I don’t want to bore all of you with the nitty gritty details of why I ultimately decided to leave, but I thought I owed it to my teammates to give some sort of explanation… Like some of you know, for a large part of my freshman year I was really, really sick and was on and off running for a while because of that… I went into summer with a new and excited mentality about running, and I faced new health problems so my training was pretty spotty. Obviously for a while I felt really discouraged about my running, and going to practice became something I stressed out about rather than something I looked forward to. And unfortunately, as I have finally started to come back every day to practice to run, I feel the same way more than ever. And if there is any positive message I have taken away from the tragic weekend with Madison, it’s that we need to do what makes us happy.
I’ve realized that there are a lot of things I want to take advantage of during my time here at Penn, and I want running to continue to be something I love, not something that stresses me out or ruins my health again.
Maybe “why” is not the question to ask about Madison’s death. Or whether she deliberately chose this at all; that is, other than in the very moment she started climbing the stairs. A definitive story is needed for those of us left behind, so we can feel better. Amid chaos, order and understanding feel paramount. We feel we must find a reason for why she jumped—a reason that makes sense to a healthy mind.
But there is no one thing. There are rivers that merge and create a powerful current. And we can’t fully know why they all merged, right then, right there, around Maddy. Still, we can try to analyze each one, the way it bends and curves, what it turns into when it blends with another. We can do this, learn everything we can, how to talk to others about their pain or our own, in the hope that fewer people get caught in this same, fierce swirl.
Acknowledgments
This book exists only because the Holleran family has placed the duty of public service above their pain. A thank-you to each of them, as well as to Madison’s friends, who provided invaluable insight even while processing an unthinkable loss. To everyone I spoke with: thank you for your time and willingness to share. A special thank-you to Bob and Meg Weckworth, who knew and loved Maddy, and who now run the Madison Holleran Foundation: if not for them, the meaning behind this book would be muddled. Thanks also to Bob Gebbia and Christine Moutier of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention for their guidance on how to respectfully tell Madison’s story.
My own family and friends provided support throughout this process, offering advice and counsel when needed. My mom, Kathy, my dad, Chris, and my sister, Ryan, were generous with their time and energy, and the love of my life, Kathryn, heard me discuss the ideas in this book for two years and never fatigued. (I love you, GC.) Thanks to the team at Little, Brown, especially my editor, Vanessa Mobley, as well as Kait Boudah, Carina Guiterman, Ben Allen, Katharine Myers, and Craig Young, for believing in this book’s importance, and to my agent, Michael Klein, who helped shepherd this story to the proper home. Many people helped shape this book, including Jay and Gay Lovinger, as well as my mom, who read everything I sent her within minutes. I am eternally grateful to my best friend, Shawna Hawes, for… everything, always. Last but not least, a huge thanks to espnW, specifically Alison Overholt and Laura Gentile, for shaping the original story, and for supporting me throughout this process.
About the Author
KATE FAGAN is a columnist and feature writer for espnW, ESPN.com, and ESPN The Magazine. She is a regular panelist on ESPN’s Around the Horn and can also be seen on Outside the Lines and SportsCenter. Fagan spent three seasons covering the 76ers for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She is the author of a memoir, The Reappearing Act, and is cohost of the espnW podcast Free Cookies. Fagan lives in Brooklyn with her girlfriend, Kathryn Budig, and their two dogs.