Turnstile

by Emily Swartzlander

During my four-year tenure at The Post, my coworkers and I have covered numerous deaths – some of OU students, some of professors and some of Athens-area residents. I vividly remember the circumstances surrounding each of them.

Normally, I devote this space to my own rants, ravings or explanations about the world of journalism. Today, I give you someone else's, because his words are exactly what I would want to say.

***

Coulda-shouldas crowd in at time of grief

by Bill Toland
Times Staff

Life isn't supposed to play out like this. Brooke Perkins was supposed to join the Girl Scouts, go to middle school, then to high school, become a cheerleader, play softball.

She was supposed to have her first boyfriend when she turned 15, and she was supposed to lock herself in her bedroom when she and her boyfriend broke up three months later.

Garnet Duzicky was supposed to watch her daughter grow. She was supposed to be proud and melancholy at her daughter's high school graduation, to sob and bite her lip when she dropped Brooke off at college for the first time.

Holidays were supposed to be a special time. The next few Christmases would be filled with Barbie dolls and bicycles and stereos, and even after she grew up and moved out, Brooke would return home each Thanksgiving and Christmas for dinner with her extended family. One year, she would show up with a fiancé. A few years after that, she'd bring a husband and a baby of her own.

Brooke was supposed to know the joys of motherhood, the trials of marriage and the grief that comes with watching your mother die of pneumonia or of heart disease or from old age.

She was, at the very least, supposed to outlive her mother. That was the plan.

It didn't turn out that way.

Brooke, 6, died in February after two ruthless cancers had ravaged her tiny body for 19 months. Garnet struggled mightily with the death, as any mother would, going through abysmal depressions. This holiday season, she forfeited her fight against depression, and on New Year's Day, at age 31, she killed herself. She was found in her Sewickley home that afternoon.

It's not my job to question why. Sometimes, God's plans are so different from everybody else's, and it's beyond my capacity for spiritual rationalization to make sense of an utterly senseless situation. I'll leave that to the priests and ministers and the rabbis.

It is my job as a reporter to tell you what I know of Brooke and Garnet.

Brooke was an adorable girl who loved shopping and professional wrestling, a joy to be around and about as courageous as they come in 30-pound packages.

Garnet was a beautiful woman who rallied against the cancer just as hard as Brooke did.

After her daughter's disease was diagnosed, Garnet slept with Brooke and sang to her at night, and after Brooke died, Garnet would visit her gravesite twice a day, spreading a gray blanket on the St. James Catholic Cemetery grounds and whispering away the hours.

I talked with Garnet many times, once the day after Brooke died, and several times over the spring and summer. She grew progressively more depressed and openly spoke of death and suicide.

"When I talk to Brooke, I sometimes ask her to take me," Garnet once told me. "Every day that passes, I think it's a day closer to being with her. They say that if I was to commit suicide, I wouldn't be with her ... not that I would go and blow my head off or anything ... but you think about it sometimes."

Tragic, depressing stuff, I thought to myself. It's going to make a heart-wrenching story. After talking with her, I wrote a feature piece about Garnet and her coping, her guilt, her personal albatrosses - "The Ultimate Tragedy," our newspaper called it.

It's impossible to know who feels the most culpable in Garnet's death. If you're a parent, you feel guilty about outliving your child. If you're a family member or a close friend, you regret a conversation you may have had, or a conversation you may have avoided.

It's something you'll have to live with, and it's something you'll eventually bear.

And if you're the reporter who wrote the story, you can't help but wonder whether you could have done something to prevent this. Maybe you could have put Garnet in touch with a mental health specialist. Maybe you should have simply abandoned the story.

Maybe you could have done something, anything, besides write the story, make public her suffocating depression, accept kudos from colleagues, then stand idly by as Garnet continued to suffer.

You have your own guilt to bear.

***

Sometimes we have to cover death. When you take a look at the finished product, I hope you understand the feelings behind it.

Swartzlander, a senior journalism major, can be reached at es391197. Bill Toland can be reached at btoland@calkinsnewspapers.com. This column was reprinted with permission from The Beaver County Times.