The front pages of both the Pasadena Star-News and the Los Angeles Times today have major articles on the death of Aydin Salek, a popular and promising senior at South Pasadena High School who succumbed to apparent alcohol poisoning after a weekend party. Salek, the son of Iranian immigrants, represented his entire high school on the local board of education, was a staff writer for the student newspaper, and was widely regarded as a leader of his class. He died after consuming a large but undisclosed amount of alcohol; one factor in his death may have been that his friends, worried about getting in trouble for drinking underage, initially transported him by car to the house of another friend whom they thought knew CPR, rather than taking him directly to the hospital. An investigation continues.
I didn’t know the boy, but am confident that many kids I know did; many of my students here at the college come from South Pas, as it’s known, and that school was a major feeder into the All Saints youth program which I helped lead for seven years.
Of course, it’s an unspeakable tragedy to have a child die young. If I were inclined to turn this post into social commentary, I would note that the death of a student leader at a middle-class suburban high school receives front-page attention across the region, while deaths due to drugs, alcohol, suicide or homicide among the student bodies at less prosperous institutions happen on a weekly (if not daily) basis in Los Angeles County, but almost never make the front pages. (The Los Angeles Times this morning even printed a timeline of the final hours of Salek’s life. The last time Southern California’s paper of record offered something similar about an overdose was the day after Michael Jackson died.) If I were the parent of, say, a Hispanic or black teen in South Los Angeles who had died in a similar manner — and whose death was noted in a single sentence deep within the paper — I might be a bit miffed at the rather obvious classism of the Salek coverage.
But I’m not going to belabor the point; the Salek family doesn’t need anyone suggesting that their grief is undeserving of respectful coverage.
What I’d like to post on, briefly, is the heartbreaking reality that on some occasions, a single mistake can indeed ruin or even end a life. I blog a great deal about the resilience of young people (and of human beings in general). I’ve railed against the myths of male weakness and of female frailty. I’ve seen the damage done by baby-boomer “helicopter parents” who infantilize their teenage children, and — against all historical evidence — imagine that this generation of adolescents face greater peril than any before. I’ve seen time and again how well-meaning parental concern becomes a teen’s crippling, even incapacitating anxiety. Empowering young people means allowing them to risk more and more each year that they grow; healthy parenting (as I am beginning to learn firsthand) means resisting the powerful urge to cover the child in bubblewrap.
I’ve written many times about my own life, noting that I abused alcohol and drugs for many years, starting in high school when I was considerably younger than Aydin Salek. My drinking career began at a high school party in April 1982, and ended sixteen years turbulent years later. I was hospitalized many times, had my stomach pumped again and again, catheters and IVs inserted up and down my body. Recklessly and willfully and episodically, I put toxin after toxin into my system. My sexual habits were compulsive and undiscriminating, and though I ruined quite a few relationships and a couple of marriages as a result, my body remained strangely impervious to harm. I never “caught” an STI or HIV, when people who did far less than I did, did.
I talk about this narrative to stress the possibility of change and transformation, an enduring theme in my writing and my mentoring. I leave out details of the sort that seem overly titillating or likely to wound; I’m keenly aware that my daughter will someday wince at the words I write, and I do my best not to compound (in advance) her embarrassment. But I worry that the message that many of the young people I work with get from me is “You can survive anything, and therefore it’s okay to try anything. Look at Hugo — he screwed up six ways to Sunday and is now blissfully sober with his lovely wife and child. If he can make it through the drugs and the booze and the other compulsive acting-out behaviors, so can I.”
I like to attribute my survival to divine grace, excellent therapy, wonderful Twelve Step sponsors, and my own tenacious will to live. But the truth is that there’s another factor I’m less inclined to credit, and that’s pure old-fashioned luck. To be honest, “luck” doesn’t fit my worldview; it isn’t something I can encourage others to pursue, it isn’t something I can directly credit God or my therapists or my “program” for. If it could be drunk or snorted or smoked, I did, and I survived (though I needed a few urgent medical interventions along the way). I have — gratias deo ago, baruch hashem — no enduring physical or psychological damage to my body. I have scars a-plenty, but they are all on the surface. And the plain truth is that a great many people out there, including some I knew and loved, did the same things I did and they didn’t make it.
That we can survive anything isn’t a guarantee that we always will. Resilience varies, and what might kill one leaves another bruised and sick but otherwise unscathed. Those of us whose hearts were just a bit stronger, whose timing just a bit better, whose guardian angels a bit more attentive — we make a huge mistake when we look back on our lives and imagine that luck wasn’t a huge part of our survival. And when we talk to young people, who are often both a cynical and superstitious lot, we need to emphasize that our good fortune might not be theirs.
Many young people know Nietzsche’s famous maxim that “What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger” (Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker). I’ve never liked that much, which might be a surprise; Yeats came closer to the truth when he pointed out that “too long a suffering makes a stone of the heart.” I’ve seen people survive trauma but remain incapacitated by it physically and mentally for the rest of their lives. But the real problem with the Nietzsche maxim is that in order for the second part of the statement to come true, you need to manage not to die — and young people are, for all their surprising durability, not impervious to lethal substances — and other choices with lethal consequences.
We who were strong enough or lucky enough or graced enough to have both survived and thrived mustn’t reinforce the myth of post hoc ergo propter hoc. Yes, I have a certain amount of wisdom as a result of the life I’ve lived, but I’m not at all sure even now that I might not have turned out to be a better, kinder, and more successful human being had I been a little less reckless in my younger years. The pain I caused others left lasting injuries; even now, I suspect my mother still fears another phone call in the middle of the night. Though I did no lasting injury to body or mind or soul that I can discern, I can see the damage I inflicted in the people who still won’t speak to me after all these years, and in the flash of suspicion I see sometimes on the faces of my nearest and dearest.
Not every kid who drinks too much meets an unfortunate end like Aydin Salek. We must avoid hysterically overselling the risks; when we do, we earn the derision of young people who know better. (Think of the sex ed scenes from Mean Girls for an example.) At the same time, we mustn’t be too blasé about the fact that sometimes, some kids really do die doing things that others do with impunity. Striking that balance in a way that resonates with young people is at the heart of good mentoring, teaching, and coaching, and it is something to which I am re-committing myself today.
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