Somebody’s Children

Three young lives, one national emergency, and the failures we keep calling tragedy

When you find out you are having a child for the first time, you feel life rearrange itself around that fact. Then, after 40 weeks of carrying them beneath your heart and waiting for their arrival, you finally meet them face to face. The moment feels less like surprise than recognition. You look at them and think, Of course it’s you. It has always been you. You are who I was waiting for.

Then you watch their little chest rise and fall while they sleep. You worry whether they are eating enough, sleeping enough, growing as they should. From the moment they enter your life, it becomes impossible to imagine a world without them in it. They do not simply become part of your world. They are the world.

On the far side of that beautiful beginning, and all the ordinary, precious memories that follow, lies the unspeakable tragedy of losing a child. One day, parents wake in the place they never allowed themselves to imagine. Then comes the phone call. The knock at the door. The moment the life they built around their child is shattered.

Parents who lose a child often speak of life in terms of before and after. Before, there is the life they were building: the ordinary happiness and ordinary worry of loving a child through the years. After, there is the unthinkable. Nothing is ordinary again.

Lately, that truth has felt unbearably close.

A mutual friend introduced me to an exuberant, engaging couple who had just moved their business into our community. They were the kind of people who make an impression immediately: warm, generous, eager to be part of the life around them. When I reached out about a fundraiser I am co-chairing for a local arts organization, they said yes without hesitation. Now their lives have been divided into before and after.

It is one thing that this happened at all. It is another to learn that a young person was carrying so much pain that he took his own life. What makes it even more heartbreaking is the kind of young man he was. Jack’s obituary describes him as “a gentle soul who gave freely of his time, his knowledge, and his heart.” Jack was, his family wrote, “made for kindness, for loyalty, for love, and for the quiet moments that bind people together.” It is hard not to ask what kind of world cannot shelter a person like Jack.

He was not the only young person in my orbit failed by the world around him this past week. Another young man, a college senior, seemed by all accounts to be living a happy, promising life. He was bright, athletic, close to finishing school, the sort of person people assume will be fine. Now he is gone too.

And then there is the child of a good friend, who is still fighting to stay here. A trans high school senior, hospitalized twice in the last month after becoming suicidal under relentless bullying. To be a trans child in this country today is too often to live inside a culture that turns vulnerability into a target. Bullying, stigma, and political cruelty do not merely wound; they can make life feel unlivable.

Three very different young people from three very different backgrounds, all brought to the same terrible brink. Two could not make it another day in this world. One is still fighting to stay.

These are not isolated heartbreaks. They are part of a larger American emergency: in 2023, suicide was the second leading cause of death for Americans ages 15 to 24. When a young person is standing at the edge of ending their life, the question is not what they believe or how their parents vote. The question is whether anyone will see their pain and reach them in time.

There is no neat story to tell about these three young people. No single profile. No one kind of young person at risk. Just young lives, deeply loved by family and friends, each carrying pain larger than the world’s ability or willingness to hold it.

That is what I cannot get past. What kind of world are we living in if it cannot hold the kind and gentle, the loyal, the ones simply trying to make their way? What are we handing our children if so many of them are suffering like this, in silence or in plain sight, until the pain becomes unbearable?

I do not have a tidy answer. I know only this: they were somebody’s children. They were loved. They were wanted. They were the world to someone. That should have been enough to keep them here.

Instead, they were left in the care of schools that failed to protect, communities that looked away, and a government that says there is no money for child care, mental health care, housing, or help when children are in crisis, while always finding money for war. This is not only tragedy. It is failure.

And because it is Easter Sunday, the grief carries its own bitter irony. On a day devoted to the promise of life, I keep thinking of the children this world has not protected.

Grief is not enough. Tribute is not enough. Prayer is not enough. We owe the living more than heartbreak after the fact. We owe them vigilance, intervention, protection, and accountability before the fact. Until we are willing to provide those things, we should stop calling these losses unthinkable. They are not unthinkable. They are the result of what we have chosen to tolerate.

And regardless of faith or political party, surely we can ask this much of one another: reach toward the people in your orbit. Let the people in your life know you are here. Reach out to the lonely, the ones who may be struggling, the ones who have gone quiet, the ones you have not heard from in too long. Text them. Call them. Make room at your table for one more today.

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Author’s Note

If you or someone you love is in crisis, call or text 988 or chat with the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline for free, confidential support 24/7. For LGBTQ+ young people, The Trevor Project also offers free, confidential crisis support by phone, text, and chat around the clock. If talking feels too hard, you can also text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line.

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