Point 5: An Elegy
UPenn Track runner Madison Holleran's suicide in 2014 hit me deeply. Here is a personal essay I wrote at the time...

    

January 24, 2014, Philadelphia, PA: Yesterday I headed over to the site where 19-year-old Madison Holleran took her life by jumping off of a parking garage. She had come here to Philadelphia just 5 months before to go to the University of Pennsylvania and run on the track team. In college I’m guessing that she expected to continue in the same trajectory as high school--winning races, getting straight A’s. If this is the way the world has been, there is no reason why it could be any different in the mind of a teenager--a teenager who was recruited by college coaches not just in one sport, but two. 

Serious runners--like many athletes--measure things in numbers. But not just whole numbers, specific numbers, like, point something. “How far did you run today?” I ran 8.7 miles. “What’s your marathon time?” 2:59.57. “What did you run in the 800?” 2:08.87. That last number was actually Madison’s time when she won the event in last spring’s NJ Meet of Champions. She was also a standout soccer star with offers to play that sport collegiately at other schools. Madison chose instead to run at an Ivy League school. Wouldn’t you?

When I heard of Madison’s suicide, I was disappointed and pissed off. It hit close to home. I had been a collegiate track runner, as well, and two girls on the team at different times had tried to commit suicide. Fortunately for all of us, they had succeeded in living. I decided to head over to 15th and Spruce to retrace Madison’s steps, and try to sort out the thoughts I had.

High above the sidewalk, yellow caution tape swung in the cold afternoon air out of the opening in the parking garage where she jumped. Below was an altar of sorts--large vigil candles in glass containers, notes from friends taped to the wall, and a frozen pile of flowers in their store-bought paper wraps. The notes read like the common teenage sentiments in a school yearbook. "Madison, you were so beautiful." "You were such a good friend." "I wish I had known you longer."

In grad school one of my areas of interest is sport as a rite of passage. Coincidentally, one of the early sociologists who developed the theories on rites of passage also extensively studied and wrote about suicide. Émile Durkheim, a turn-of the 20th century french sociologist, suggested that suicide is a fact of society, and it arises from rules that govern behavior and group attachment. He believed that society is formed from the collective consciousness of a group of individuals, and that we are bound together by strong emotional and moral ties. These ties are reinforced through our rituals, like birthdays and sporting events, where we celebrate our common values, and recognize the passage of our members to new roles and privileges. Conversely, these shared beliefs that fuel our collectiveness, also constrain us. Some members who feel this constraint opt out, and choose to live outside of the broader society, like the Amish, or Timothy Treadwell, the infamous ‘Grizzly Man,’ or Henry David Thoreau. Some, however, opt out totally. They choose to die.

In one research study on college student-athletes, the sport of track and field has the 4th highest suicide rate behind football, basketball, and swimming. As I write this, I'm looking out over Rittenhouse Square from the Barnes and Noble Cafe. It's the same view where Madison posted her last Instagram, after she'd walked or run across the Walnut St. bridge from the Penn campus, before she wound her way through smaller streets to a parking garage, above a sports bar, and across from a CVS. The banality of it was surreal. I remember writing a poem years ago about what it must have been like for my father to meet his end on a train platform in Orange, NJ--the sudden collapsing to his knees from a heart attack, the swirling drone of concrete and overcoats, the usualness of a Wednesday morning commute in America. My conclusion? What an absurd place to die.

The Physics Fact Book says that a single raindrop falls at 25 feet per second. The more compact and dense the object, the higher its terminal velocity will be. How long did it take her to walk or run the 1.6 miles to her destination? How much time did it take to ascend in the elevator, to get up the nerve to jump, how much time to land? How many seconds and milliseconds did it take for her to fly 85 feet, before being stopped in our memories at the age of 19 forever? Did it take 2.19 seconds? Did it take 1.5? Did it take less? It’s a number I don’t ever want to know. 

Speaking of decimals, Madison’s GPA in her first semester at Penn was 3.5. That number is exactly .5 lower than what she had always expected to receive. Exactly .5 lower than what she had always gotten. Point 5 is the time it can take to go from 1st to 6th when you fumble the baton pass in a sprint relay, or 1st to 3rd in the epic closing of a distance race. Or the time it takes to let your feet leave a high ledge and soar down past the first few floors of a parking garage. Point 5. That is what it came down to. Point 5. Not even a whole number--a fraction. And that fraction made all of the difference in the world--our world, now that we live in it without her.