My “friend” (I knew him for years but eventually he was kind of an asshole to me) hanged himself in HS over the weekend and I found out between classes.
I had just talked to him the Friday prior, when the last thing he said to me was I was a fatass because I got a 5 peice chicken combo instead of 3.
Someone told me in the hallway after math and although I didn’t like him too much, it was a shock. I go to my next class, history with the edgy “cool” teacher that says “shit” and “damn” sometimes, because he is so relatable and just like us.
Some dude next to me sees I’m upset and asks what happened. I say “my friend hanged himself” and he says “how’d they do it?” and I repeated and he says “yeah but what’d he do?” and I was confused and upset and said it again. He says “ohh” and turns around. The dumbass thought “to hang yourself” was a general term for suicide I guess…
So class starts and cool teacher says “I’m sure you all heard about the death of blah blah” and rather than approach the subject with some kind of class, he decides to go into a lesson about hanging and how there is a formula for properly performing it without suffocating or popping your head off and how they don’t do it right in the movies.
If you are a teacher, know that this method of handling the death of a student is not ideal.
Later one of the other “friends” from the group tells me “wouldn’t want you at their funeral”…so that was nice. I was basically a kid this group kept around to make fun of. I was raised in poverty by a single mother and I guess they just couldn’t reconcile with how different I was. I just wanted friends and didn’t know that they weren’t that.
Later that year my dad attempted suicide while I was the only one around. I had to physically struggle with him as he explained that to properly kill yourself with pills you take the stuff that makes you drowsy first, then you take the things that kill you. That way you slip off to sleep and don’t feel the terrible part.
He laughed at me while I tried to stop him as he was a much bigger man. I only succeeded when he was getting really high off the painkillers he had taken and I said “let’s go to taco bell”. He seemed to forget what he was doing and we went to my car. When he got in I locked the child safety locks and got out.
When I called 911 the dispatcher couldn’t understand me because I was crying too much and hung up. I called again and the police eventually rapped on the window and took us to the hospital.
Naturally no one gives a shit about anything, so they left me in the hospital room with my father after he got his stomach pumped. He told me I ruined his life. That I made a mistake. That I fucked up. It felt like hours.
Thanks to the drugs no one even has to know about the details of the experience but me. To this day I resent my “friend” and my “father” for stealing my thunder, so to speak, as I was building up the nerve to kill myself around the same time.
Anyways, no one gives a fuck.
When you have a loaded gun to your head and don’t have the nerve to add those final lbs of pressure to the trigger, you feel the ultimate disgust and hatred for the coward inside. In that moment you know you are truly fucked. In this hell you are the warden and the prisoner.
I had someone in my school pass. I didn’t know them well, but my teacher did the best she could to explain. She asked if anyone had lost a pet or family member before and compared it to that. She made sure that we would think about the good memories and not just remember the other student for passing. Sadly I didn’t know them that well but it taught me a valuable lesson that I never forgot. 😢
Not a teacher. In Grade 1 a girl died at our school. I remember our teachers being very sad. She was always sick and very tiny. On her last birthday she brought lots of nice stuff for us cake, junk food and we had so much fun. I remember these meringue thingies with different colours. Apparently she died of HIV. It was the late 90’s. I don’t remember what we were told exactly just that she wouldn’t see her again.
Not a teacher, but we had a student in one of my smaller university classes pass away unexpectedly one day. The teacher came into class looking clearly upset and simply told us what had happened. We all just sat there and took a few minutes to soak the news in. I’m pretty sure we wrote some condolences to their family at one point. No one could really believe it. They were really outgoing and had a good rapport with everyone, so the whole dynamic of the class felt a little off after that. It felt so strange seeing that one desk remain empty for the rest of the semester.
Teachers have a really hard job