I don't know how much this pertains to the phenomenon of leaving the fold -- I suspect more than it would appear -- but it's important to me nonetheless. I suspect it fits in here somewhere. So, then, here follows the story of a girl we'll call Kayla.
Years ago, when I was a junior in high school, I met the girl of my dreams. Literally. Well, okay, I'd seen Kayla in the halls of Camden Central High School before I ever had the dream about her. But it was a dream (all innocent, just talking and holding hands) that made me think, "I really gotta meet this girl." So meet her I did, through a friend who was in the marching band with her.
Now, the person I was at 15 or 16 would never believe you if you'd told him how I'd be at age 25. I had been raised General Baptist (you know, the ones who think that liberals like the Southern Baptist Convention are going to hell), but I was nearing the end of that period, leaning towards Methodism. I point all this out because today Kayla wouldn't have attracted me -- yes, she was very beautiful, but now I'd be so scared of her religion that I'd run. Kayla was Pentecostal. At the time that only struck me as a little odd, whereas today I'd be terrified. (And yes, I know that not every Pentecostal is a brainwashed fanatic... Kayla taught me that!... but the religion, overall, scares me more than any other brand of "mainline" Christianity.)
But, anyway, I fell head-over-heels for this flute player with the strawberry blond hair, the expressive eyes, and those dimples that framed her smile. Kayla smiled a lot, and she blushed easily, even over the most innocent of things. (And I say that with no irony at all. I was squeaky clean like Ivory soap back then. I blushed a lot, too.) I refuse to use the term "puppy love," because although it never went past G-rated, Y-4 in TV terms, there was real affection there.
Kayla was the first girl I ever called for longer than two minutes; the first girl I ever called for anything other than getting a homework assignment, actually. "Late bloomer" doesn't begin to describe me; I was so nervous I kept a list of possible conversation topics on hand when I called her. She was the first girl I ever bought a flower for; it was a corsage the band was selling for Homecoming, and seeing her march with it made my heart swell. I really wanted to go to the Homecoming dance with her, but she was Pentecostal -- as far as I knew, her church didn't allow dancing -- so I didn't ask.
You couldn't really call Kayla my high-school sweetheart. Because right when we were starting to get to know one another, she moved. She only moved a town away, but it was far enough to be a long-distance call, and I didn't have my driver's license yet, so she might as well have been in Vienna. One day we were talking about our classes; the next I was handing her a going-away card. I like to remember that she hugged me when I gave her the card; that may not be what happened, because that's been over eight years, but I can't swear she did.
Bob Dylan's song "Tangled Up In blue" reminds me a lot of Kayla. Especially the opening lines:

I had a lot of those mornings, even when we were still somewhat in touch for the next couple of years. Kayla and I kept in touch through letters and the occasional public forum for about two years. I'd go to sporting events (and I hate sports!) when our schools met, just to see her; she was still in band, and she'd become a basketball team manager. After she switched to a Baptist church, I'd go with Baptist friends to youth rallies hoping to see her. And then there were the letters.

It's been my experience that in most friendships that become long-distance, it's about an 85/15 split on the letter-writing, calls, and, more recently, e-mail. Sometimes I'm the active party; other times I'm the one who doesn't have time to reply. I wrote Kayla a lot, but her replies were few; she had become, from third-hand accounts, the "new girl" in school, very popular. Then there were the extracurricular activities and helping take care of younger siblings.
But Kayla did write, at least for a while, just often enough to keep me scribbling. And when I once ran into her at Wal-Mart here in Camden, right after I'd given up on writing her, she thanked me for those letters; she said that re-reading them had helped her remember that someone cared about her during a recent rough spell.
Growing up like I did, struggling to make ends meet, overweight, sickly, I tended to see everyone who had something better off than I did -- money, looks, popularity -- as living in a trouble-free world. Kayla was the most beautiful girl I'd seen at that point (up on the top ten even today, if I had to pick), and so I thought of her in this ideal world. Not so. And this fact that everyone's got pain was just one of many things Kayla taught me.
As I helped put together the high school literary magazine at the end of my junior year, a few months after Kayla had moved away, I ran across a submission from Kayla, a poem she'd turned in some time before she moved and before I'd come on-staff. There was pain in the poem, pain and anger stemming from an absent father. Then in a letter she wrote me some time later, she told me to send mail to her grandmother's house for the time being, because she'd moved in with her due to problems getting along with her stepfather. And then she was juggling her school work with her younger siblings. Yes, other people have had it worse. But this was not a Norman Rockwell painting.
Those letters turned my crush on Kayla into a friendship (although as I learned more about her strength, the attraction grew stronger) and a spiritual kinship. Kayla had more faith than anyone my age that I'd ever met, but at the same time she was level-headed and street-smart. For example, when my cousin got a divorce, she suggested that maybe the reason so many people got divorced was not Satan messing with their lives, but rather people simply marrying too soon and for the wrong reasons. Kayla also seemed to have a Bible verse for almost any situation, although she wasn't preachy. At that time, it impressed me. A lot.
The last time Kayla and I talked was my freshman year of college, some two years after she left Camden. Kayla was up in Martin for a band competition, and she called me up in my dorm room, wanting me to come see her play. Just to see me, period... For some reason, I didn't make it; I really can't remember why, but I seem to think I was going home to get money for something that I can't even recall now.
After that, over six and a half years, I thought of Kayla often, wondering what she was doing, whom she was becoming. I was pretty sure that the answers to both were amazing, given her strength, her integrity, her character. Every once in a while I'd hear about her from someone who'd seen her. I knew she was attending a small Presbyterian college, and that she was even prettier than in high school. I knew she was dating a guy from a nearby Baptist college. Sometimes I'd even see Kayla in passing. One time it was at an intersection in her town; right as I was thinking about her, I looked up, and there she was. I never knew if she saw me; I like to think she did, but I doubt it.
There was never another chance to talk to Kayla, though. No way to know if she ever thought of the guy whose crush she had tolerated with so much more grace than those other girls in high school. No way to know if I'd made an imprint on her memory. In some ways, I was almost relieved; although I'm not ashamed of my atheism, Kayla would have "witnessed" to me, I believed, and I couldn't take having my memories of her marred as just another statistic of the war.
The last time I saw her was about six weeks ago. Kayla was walking out of the post office as I was driving by, about to park so I could check my P.O. box. By the time I got the car parked, she was gone. I tried doing an Internet search for her, but couldn't find her; but I was optimistic I'd see her again soon if she had a P.O. box there as well.
Of course, you can now see where this is all heading. Be careful what you wish for, because if you're a newspaper man you might just find it sitting on top of a stack of obituaries waiting to be typed. That's where I found Kayla on a miserable Monday morning right after Thanksgiving. I expected to type up her having gotten a marriage license or an advanced degree, not to hear that she'd shot herself. (Unique to the very end... most women use poison or razor blades. But she, ever the classy one, managed to do it in such a way that her casket was open. Damn.)
I wasn't thinking of that Bob Dylan song when I went to see her late that night or early the next morning. I was thinking of Brian Wilson's saddest Beach Boys song, "Caroline, No." A song about seeing an old flame and realizing that the years have spit you both out a long more chewed for the effort.
And you do hear these things. If you're in the news business, you can't help but hear it. The child out of wedlock from a girl who'd been so proud of "not succumbing" when last I knew her. The fiance in jail for theft. The police citation for letting her child wander around a parking lot alone while she was somewhere else in a daze after said fiance's petition for early release was turned down. And that's just the stuff that was substantiated enough to run in the opposing newspaper.
(My paper just ran the obituary. I was too distraught to do the legwork for a real news item, and besides, I wanted to spare her family the grief of seeing it brought to light twice. What good could it possibly accomplish?)
Of the things that were never mentioned in the press, the rumors of bipolar disorder make some sense. Apparently, to quote a supermarket-parking-lot conversation with one of my contemporaries from the other side, "she just got too depressed." And to the end Kayla teaches me.
I've suffered off and on with clinical depression. I've contemplated suicide, more times than I can count, especially during the holiday season, even this year. But now I know. Although I feel Kayla had every right to do what she did, and even though I think there's no God out there to judge her one way or the other for having done so, I now know what it feels like to be left behind. Even though I was no longer in her life -- one minute quicker to the post office, and I might have been.
When this happened, I pretty much just stepped back from everything. Web duties, my fiction, e-mails, everything I wouldn't lose my job over. Did a lot of thinking. I told my friends why, of course. And one offered that perhaps situations like this are what religion is good for -- making sense of the unintelligible. I have to agree that yes, it can help, but in the long run... In the long run, I must draw a different conclusion.
As an atheist, I must base my morality on the question, "Will this hurt others?" In the case of suicide, you bet your ass the question is yes. And to the question, "Would I want someone else to do this to me?", the only person who can answer with indifference is someone who's not been through this.
I'm not talking about someone terminally ill ending his or her pain a bit earlier. That, I'm all for. With that, you get time to say goodbye.
But for a 23-year-old woman with a child to put her family, her housemates, her daughter, through that is the height of selfishness. And while depression is a factor, I also blame the baseless teaching that this life is a stepping stone to bigger and better things. I blame the fairy tales of afterlives for giving Kayla the idea that there was something waiting for her on the other side of that bullet. Let's face it, religion -- particularly Christianity -- has never been on the cutting edge of compassion or understanding; earlier today, someone who worked with my father passed away, and Dad rationalized it as, "Maybe God figured by taking someone so young, that would let others realize it's time to worry about their destination. He was a Christian if anyone was, but not everyone there is." My dad's not evil or insensitive, but his religion is seriously misguided.
Because of preachers, because of maybe the stigma attached to mental illness by religion, the woman who was one moving van away from being my high school sweetheart is now the first friend I've lost to what Andrew Vachss calls the Zero. And her faith carried her all the way to the graveyard.
Merry Christmas, indeed. Far better to learn the lesson of the solstices: the days start getting a lot longer and brighter before the warmth actually gets here. Hope exists, but it has to fight against a whole lot of ugliness to win out. And when it does, it's only for a season... then things start over again. In this, as in so many other things, the Pagans know a lot more than the "one, true religion." And so it goes for anyone with a mental illness.
So you'll excuse me when I repeat, "Merry Christmas, indeed."

God Is Dead -- Now What?