I ALMOST CRIED in front of my students yesterday. Not once but twice. Two different groups, at two different times of the day. I rarely display my emotions, (since the age of ten I’ve cried maybe four times in total — I turned 40 last month), much less discuss them. My wife puts this down to “toxic masculinity”. Maybe, maybe not. But the point is I’m not a man who cries, (nor a man comfortable when someone cries in front of him).
The first time I nearly cried in front of my students was yesterday morning. I was sitting at my desk in the classroom, twenty faces in front of me, (Master’s students at the business school I teach English at in France), the room silent because they were doing a written assessment as part of their midterms.
The prompt for their piece of writing was:
“Imagine receiving a letter from your future self, 20 years from now. What advice, encouragement, or insights would your future self want to share with you today?”
The students were a mix of personalities, backgrounds, ethnicities, all in their early twenties. As soon as they had completed the task, they were to bring their work to the front, leave it on my desk, and then they were free to leave; providing me a headstart on reading and marking while the more thoughtful students took their time.
The first handful of early finishers wrote mostly superficial letters explaining how rich they had become, sitting in big offices as the CEOs of large multinational companies. Pretty boring, but not surprising at a business school.
But the letters that began trickling in after the first batch were different. They were deep, honest letters, full of exposed vulnerability, fear, anxiety, pain, worry, struggle.
The common pieces of advice they were offering themselves were: Believe in yourself more. Stop procrastinating. Spend more time doing the things that make you happy. Drink less. Stop hurting yourself. When it feels like you can no longer go on, that life is too unbearable, the pressure too great and you don’t want to get out of bed, know that it does get better, you just can’t see the light yet through the dark clouds.
They wrote things like:
“You are feeling a lot of things and you don’t know how to manage them all. But you can do it, because I did it. When life is difficult, just breathe, take a seat and write down everything you are feeling. It is important to not keep it inside you.”
“I’m sure what you would like to hear right now is, Just follow your dreams! Make your dreams come true! Except we know, you and I, the reality of this world and the incompatibility of our aspirations within it.”
“You are 42 years old and for the first time in your life happy. You quit your highly-paid bullshit job to live on a farm in the mountains with your five best friends.”
“Along the way, you learn how to forgive and not hold grudges, even when people don’t apologise. You come to understand that you too have hurt people without apologising, and that everybody makes mistakes. But only by making these mistakes can we learn and grow.”
One student’s description of the debilitating physical pain they feel just from the effort of walking to school in the morning, due to a medical condition, was the straw that almost broke the camel’s back. As I read these deeply personal admissions, looking up from time to time at the students focussed on the lined paper in front of them, I felt a surge of sadness, a lump forming in my throat, my eyes becoming moist.
The day before, I had learnt of the suicide of an ex-student. one of the students whom, over the twenty years since I started teaching, I had most identified with.
Lou studied at the school of Political Science where I also teach. My wife teaches Spanish at the same school and that semester in 2019 we were both fortunate enough to have Lou in our classroom. Lou was brilliant. Exceptionally intelligent, both academically and emotionally. Warm. Quick-witted, with a dry sense of humour. Lou never made it to the 8am class on time, often an hour late, but when she eventually walked in, long leather trenchcoat, embarrassed smile and apology, you could only smile too, because you appreciated the effort she’d made to turn up at all. At the end of the class she would come and apologise again — she was having sleeping problems she said, mornings were a struggle but she would try harder. She looked you in the eye when she spoke. She was able to laugh at herself. She was authentic.
Lou was eighteen years old, but when she spoke, slowly and with purpose, no hint of a foreign accent despite English not being her native tongue, you felt you were talking to a wise, cynical adult in the queue at the post office, an old soul who understood humanity and the world on a deep level. Only her young, innocent face reminded you she was still a kid, away from home and family for the first time, just starting out on “the journey.” Lou was an artist. Bohemian vibes. Uninterested in the superficial. Her own person. She wasted no words. She would sit silently during class discussions, looking bored, sipping her coffee, fiddling with a stick of cigarette filters. Then suddenly she’d respond to something said, make an observation no one else’s mind had considered, mine included. The rest of the class would listen in silent admiration.
My wife and I would share over dinner the nuggets of wisdom Lou had imparted in our classes that morning — she was no less perfect in Spanish than English — and laugh affectionately at her effortless genius, her likeable nature. We would despair over how easy it all seemed for her, compared to other students who worked their arses off without reaching Lou’s level. If only she could appreciate how far she has the potential to go in this world … if only she would just make an effort!
In Lou’s evaluation that semester I wrote:
“Missed written assessment through absence. Exceptional in the oral presentation and also in the debate (even if lazy in both with regards preparation).”
When I discovered the news, I was looking up ex-students on LinkedIn, seeing how they were doing. As a general rule, students of this particular school go on to reach excellence in whatever field they decide to dedicate themselves. I wondered if Lou had picked her feet up and achieved what she was supposed to. Usually the gifted students who lack effort in the first year come back for the second reinvigorated by the wake-up call of low grades. Surely Lou would be another example.
I looked through my old class lists on the school’s online platform to remind myself of her surname. I found Lou’s name, and next to it my eyes fell on the word: “decedée.”
Instant nausea hit the pit of my stomach. I had to be misunderstanding the word. Lou couldn’t be deceased. Please! It even crossed my mind for a moment that she had changed her name as a joke.
A Google search confirmed my fears. Lou’s death had made the news. Suicide. By such a definitive method that left no chance of failure. Nor could it be put down to “a cry for help gone wrong.” My whole body went numb. I thought I might vomit.
I messaged my wife: “Remember Lou?”
“Of course!” my wife replied with a smiling emoji. “Why? What’s she done?”
Lou was twenty years old when she died in 2021. Correction: Lou was twenty years young. Today she would still only be twenty-two.
The hopelessness Lou must have felt. The loneliness. Despair. I know, because at Lou’s age I felt it too. I need all my fingers and all my toes to count the times I felt suicidal throughout my early twenties. I spent periods under the care of mental health professionals. Hospitalised. Locked in a police cell once when I was deemed too much of a danger to myself. The only thing I wanted throughout those periods was for it all to end — I knew things could never get better. And that no one could understand.
But they did get better. They always get better. And now I’m forty years old. Married to a kind and beautiful woman. I’ve travelled the world. Lived in many countries. Learnt languages. Loved. Been loved. Had my heart broken. Had my broken heart mended. Time and again. These days, not a day passes in which my students don’t teach me something new, while at the same time I’m able to pass on some of my life experience to them. Whether they are able to take it in is another matter — I couldn’t always at that age.
If I had succeeded in taking my own life as a young man (still a kid, now that I look back), I would have achieved none of these things that I deemed impossible. I wouldn’t have made it to middle age, finally been diagnosed with ADHD, started to understand myself. I would be remembered as a tragedy. And as I write these words, I feel sick, because I survived and Lou didn’t. It’s not fair. Lou won’t pass on her experience to future generations, and that is humanity’s loss. Life’s not fair.
I grew up on a council estate in England. No stranger to suicide. My father was fifty-three when he took his own life. He wasn’t the only man to leave via the tracks of our local train station, there were many. When the policeman confirmed that it was my dad’s body they were picking up in bits from the tracks, I didn’t cry, I threw some chairs, smashed a table up, drank a bottle of Jack Daniels, fought the bouncer of a local bar. My maternal grandmother took her own life (before I was born) at the age of thirty-eight. Both of these suicides I have been able to rationalise to some extent. But neither my wife nor I will ever be able to accept Lou’s passing. It will never not hurt. I can only imagine the grief experienced by Lou’s family and loved ones1. My sympathy for them is enormous.
The second time I nearly cried in front of my students came at the end of the evening. On the same campus Lou’s presence had graced at the school of Political Science. As the students entered the room, I asked them how they were doing. “Stressed,” they said, heads on tables and in hands. The pressure they’re under is immense, even without the added weight that comes with the midterms.
At the end of the lesson I spoke from the heart. Told them I hoped they were all coping. That there are people they can talk to if they’re not. Told them there’d been a student for whom this advice was too late. My eyes filled with water. They understood. I asked them to look after each other, then I let them go.
I stood alone in the empty classroom for a few minutes. Composed myself. Went to the bathroom, looked in the mirror, my eyes were red. I walked home, barely keeping it together. My wife was waiting for me. When I walked in the door, she hugged me and it all came bursting out. The tears flowed from both of us. We cried for Lou.
It took Lou’s tragic story to get me to talk openly about these things. And to cry. But why? (I’ve told you my wife’s assertion). Our mental health is not something we should be ashamed of. We all go through dark patches. Students and young people in particular, no matter what type of school, all experience it. Every one of us old(er) people knows how it feels, we haven’t always been old, you know?
If you are reading this and you’re struggling yourself, please, talk to someone. You can’t see it right now, but there are better days ahead. And there are people who care about you. Keep an eye on your friends and family. Are they doing OK? Check on them.
R.I.P. Lou. You will forever be remembered.
Lou’s mother posted this message on World Suicide Prevention Day. It breaks my heart.