Death of a Supposed Smack-talker.

Early this morning, I awoke to realize that I had not yet washed the dishes in the sink, and got up to make sure they were clean before my roommate arose at her usual 5 am. Like all things I intend to do, my chore was put off by swinging by my laptop to see if there was anything going on of interest. Strangely enough, there was.

Normally, I’m not in a big hurry to read blogs. But for some reason, when I got a notification in my Facebook that Kevin Smith* had updated his blog, I headed over to take a look. The post was about the suicide of a young girl named Megan Meier, an overweight, depressed teenager who once lived in St. Louis. I say “once lived” because events that took place between she and an imaginary boy named Josh Evans over MySpace became the impetus for Megan to hang herself by a belt in her bedroom closet. The worst part (as if that isn’t bad enough)… Josh never existed. He was the creation of the 48 year-old mother of a neighborhood friend who had been fishing for whether or not Megan was talking shit about her daughter.

I’ll get to my perspective on the tragedy of what happened to Megan at the hands of her so-called friend’s harpy mother in just a minute. But first, my thoughts about how I came upon this story.

What struck me about Smith’s post, aside from the disturbing content, was that it was an unusual experience for me to hear/read a man’s genuine perspective on something like this. That is not to say that men don’t have opinions on such matters; it’s just that more often than not when they do speak their mind about something this distressing it is rarely with any passion and usually said in a way that says, “I want to show you that I think this is awful and it bothers me, but I am not comfortable discussing such things so I am not going to leave my statement open-ended. Please call your female friends for further dialogue.” I have known some fairly sensitive males in my day that still wouldn’t want to talk about some 13 year old girl’s life with that way. Still, Kevin is, after all, a father and a writer so is more likely to discuss than others might be; but that doesn't mean he doesn't deserve some respect for having spoken his piece about something like this. Bravo Kevin.

Another thing that struck me is that Smith had a somewhat similar story to share, about how an ex-girlfriend's mother's involvement in their relationship became the motivation to basically harass him after the breakup. In her fight to regain him for her daughter (so it seems), this woman’s last ditch attempt to wear him down was to hand Kevin a note essentially ssuggesting that at the ripe, old age at 18 he admit that he would be a failure as a writer. Luckily in Kevin’s case, it didn't become his undoing and he used her words as further motivation to succeed (or at the very least saved her note as a reminder of how she was wrong). I can't speak for all of his fans, but I - for one - am really glad she didn't succeed in her ploy. I’d love to say I’d never heard something like that before, but I would be lying.

So now I find myself wondering what is burning most on my mind? Is it the question of the responsibility of adults when it comes to how they communicate with kids or even one another, particularly on the internet? I’ve had more adults misrepresent themselves to me online than I can count! Is it the overzealousness of a nearly fifty year-old woman and her sociopathic route to protecting her child (because I think we all know that when someone goes to that kind of sick length, it is more about their own pathos than that of their child)? Or is it the dangers of trying to find love on the internet, the perils of being an overweight teenage girl or my rant on how easily people – especially children - are “diagnosed” with depression these days and how I feel that to tell someone in that state that they are clinically so is basically condemning them to a life of excusing sullenness on their “condition”?

I’ll start here…

There are a million and one misconceptions I have uncovered in my life and there are bound to be at least that many more that I haven’t yet stumbled upon. One thing I know in the most intimate way is that just because a person is older, married, has children, a great job, a house or what-have-you, doesn’t mean they are a reasonable, rational human being. Sure, once upon a time the word “adult” denoted trustworthiness, wisdom, authority, responsibility. “If you are in trouble, find the nearest adult” was once a reasonable suggestion for a child who might become frightened. That is not to say it was always true and based on reason, but it was what a lot of people in my generation were raised to believe; that most adults were protective, wise and caring and the only ones to be scared of were the ones who wanted to get you into their car and give you candy. My mother was a perfect example of how wrong that assumption can be. Nobody on Earth has filled me with more lies, more misguided notions of the world and it’s workings than she did and it wasn’t out of some cruel design. She was mentally damaged, selfish and ignorant (among other things) and a like a lot of “adults” she believed that because she had all the trappings of authority, that she must be right. Then I was reminded of how many adults I had known in my childhood who had a profoundly negative influence on my life and it is clear that she wasn’t alone. (side note: I can remember watching a film in my grade school cafeteria/auditorium about how some man might want to lure me into his car with candy and how I was supposed to run away, and distinctly recall wondering if my mother had put the school up to it because she had me on diets from the time I was four).

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that a 48 year-old has no way of knowing what kind of damage she can do to a 13 year-old girl’s psyche. But I am going to tell you that to expect her to know the correct way to approach a child about her concerns for her daughter are dangerously flawed. To believe that is to assume that she has no ulterior motive, no deep-seated mental illness that this incident brought forth, and more importantly, that she is a mature enough, deep enough, well-rounded enough human being to have the tools to deal with something like this on the higher ground. How many people do you know that can do that? How many of them are someone you would trust to speak to your child about anything of importance (whether you have a child or not)? My God, adults have a hard enough time getting along with one another! I still have an adult out there who attempts to wage wars with me and slander me over the internet that I have not so much as sassed in over fifteen years. So how do we expect people, just because they are older, to know how to deal?

The thing is, this woman is not blameless because she is not a well developed, well-rounded human. She is responsible for the death of the girl. And I’ll tell you why…

She conversed with this Megan, a 13 year old, overweight girl looking for love. Megan was lovely, too; gorgeous eyes, sweet smile (braces or not). But of course, that wasn’t enough for some reason (be it social alienation, her mother, the media or whatever oppressive influence made her feel like she was not good enough). And this woman, this busybody mother, emailed back and forth with such a girl in MySpace. So she had to have had intimate details of how lonely, alienated, sad and desperate for romantic acceptance Megan must have been through that correspondence. There could be no doubt in her mind that she was going to devastate the girl when she turned on her, started calling her names and ultimately crushed her dreams of romance. Who doesn’t remember how much the loss of potential romantic connection makes you wish you were dead when you’re 13? Even so, she continued to torture this girl’s heart and soul. If that doesn’t imply sickness, honey I don’t know what does. She is guilty of torture, no matter what excuse she conjures in her defense. But murder? I can’t say.

See, I was tortured myself when I was younger. I was overweight, and not nearly as lovely (I was being informed regularly by my mother that I was a troll because I wasn’t skinny and popular, so much so that I believed it until I was well into my late 20s, and it showed on the outside). Boys played with my heart for fun, adults made hideous, hurtful comments and not one of them gave another thought as to the damage they might inflict. While I often wished for death, I was too strong or too scared to do it myself. I would find a reason to go on living. Even if it was something as trivial as knowing that I would get to go to Disneyland in two years, or foolishly believed my mother’s empty promises of braces for my teeth or a new bike. I refused to give up that easily. I refused to die. And so to that end, I imagine that Megan must have been far less driven than I was at her age to see how being a grown-up would be. She did, after all, choose how to resolve her pain. She chose death on her own.

Not everyone can suffer through the kind of agony she must have been feeling. I’m still shocked and pleasantly surprised that I did. And when I was well into my thirties a forty year-old friend said to me, “I’ve not heard half of the things that happened to you when you were a kid and I know that if I had been in your shoes, I wouldn’t have made it.” I was shocked and bewildered by that statement from a strong, independent woman. That was the first time I knew that not everyone had the same reserve of determination to go on. Now, I don’t expect it so easily in others. But I don’t know that many people who put enough thought into… well… anything, to know the effect they will have on another’s life and certainly not when it comes to their agenda. So I don’t believe for a moment that the over-zealous mother had any intention to see Megan die over her imagined smack-talking. If she wanted the girl dead, she would have killed her.

I feel for Megan’s parents. They must wonder if there is anything more they could have done, if they could have somehow foiled their neighbor’s plan or proved that Josh Evans was a hoax and saved their beautiful little girl. To my mind, there isn’t a whole lot they could have done. The mother seemed to have her eye on things and it still went out of control. But does the father wonder what he might have done? Maybe if fathers were more involved in their daughters’, they would be able to spare them the endless wondering of why boys do what they do. Maybe Megan’s father would have known that his daughter wasn’t actually talking to a boy at all. Who knows? But you have to admit… it wouldn’t have hurt. It’s nice to see at least one dad is paying attention.

*If you don’t know who Kevin Smith is, you have clearly been living in a cave and have never seen or heard of such cult classics as Clerks, Chasing Amy and Dogma. If you have, indeed, been cave dwelling for the past 15 or so years, go here to see out what he’s all about.