Before the soccer game, teenagers draped their arms over each other’s shoulders and let tears wash down their faces and parents listened in silence as a mother stood in the middle of a stadium to tell everyone there about her boy.
“I’d do anything,” Megan Hanson said into a microphone, “to have my beautiful son back.”
Sam Hanson was 16 years old when he died by suicide on April 5. A sophomore at Central Bucks High School East, a catcher on its baseball team, he was the second student-athlete at the school to take his own life in less than four months. The first — Frankie Pacitti, who was 17 and a standout lacrosse player, a self-described ladies’ man who could get guys guffawing and girls giggling just by being himself, the kid in school everyone knew — had died in December.
A few members of CB East’s girls’ soccer team, among them Mia Forney, a senior forward and perhaps the best female high school soccer player in Pennsylvania, arranged to hold a mental-health awareness night in the aftermath of Sam and Frankie’s deaths. “Once Sam passed,” Forney said, “we realized this is not normal.” When the players asked Megan Hanson if she would speak at the event, she wasn’t certain she was ready. Still, she wanted to try to prevent something like this from happening to someone else. So she wrote a brief speech, and she delivered it Tuesday night, just before the CB East girls’ team beat CB West, 4-0, and she hoped that the people in the bleachers and on the field were listening.
“Parents,” she said, “I’m not here to scare you but to share some insights I’ve learned … I won’t insult you by telling you to ‘talk to your kids.’ We all talk to our kids, and most of us are highly invested in their lives. What I will tell you to do is to talk to your kids directly about their mental health. Don’t be afraid to ask them hard questions, like, ‘Have you thought about suicide?’”
It was her most important, urgent, and accurate message. It aligned perfectly with what Derrick Gordon, an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale University, described as “the myth we have out there is that, if we suspect somebody is suicidal, we shouldn’t raise this with them because we don’t want to put the idea in their head.
“The reality is, you can’t put an idea in their head that’s already there,” Gordon told me in an interview last year. “Actually, the best course of action is to ask the question of the individual, then talk about it and address it. It’s been my experience, and I think other professionals would say this, that if you raise the issue of suicidality with people who are contemplating it, they feel relieved. ‘Oh, Jesus, I can now finally say it out loud.’ You can talk to them about the possibility that if they’re going to hurt themselves, it would impact you. Oftentimes, they get lost in their own experience of what they’re going through, and you want to get them outside of that space.”
Megan Hanson had no idea that her son was considering harming himself, how dark his world could get. How could she have an idea? Sam was pulling A’s and B’s in a roster of advanced-placement and honors courses at CB East. As a fourth grader, he had constructed a gift for his Connie Mack coach, Mike McCardle — a pen-and-pencil holder with a photo of the two of them set into it, a gift that McCardle still keeps on his desk. He died on the day before Easter, and it had been a full and wonderful day. Sam had practiced parallel parking in a middle-school lot in the morning, then passed his driver’s test and earned his license and was proud that he had.
He and Megan had gone out to lunch to celebrate. He had worked a few hours at the local pub and restaurant where he was a familiar and welcome face to the owners and patrons. Megan allowed him to borrow his car to drive to a friend’s house that night, and when he returned they talked about their plans for Easter. They would go to church in the morning and head to her parents’ house in the afternoon, and when she said good night to him she could never have thought, even in her most dismal nightmares, that he would get out of his bed and go downstairs into the basement and never come up again.
“It’s hard with teenagers because they’re moody and they don’t talk,” Megan said in a private moment Tuesday, “and I felt like we were getting to a better place where he was being more open with me, and I felt like we were getting to another level in our relationship. The hardest part is just looking back and saying, ‘Maybe this was a warning sign or a cry for help.’ I truly don’t believe it was something he planned out. I wish whatever went on in his brain, if he had just woken me up …”
She could not finish the sentence, and she did not need to. Home from the soccer game, I called my sons, who are 15 and 12, into the living room. Our family lives in the same school district that Sam Hanson and Frankie Pacitti did. My older son is a sophomore and has a class this semester with Sam’s sister. The boys paused the baseball video game they were playing and plopped on the couch. My wife and I wanted to talk to them directly about something.
