Lisa Parsley: Must know more, must do more

Meredith was a poet, a superlative English major, who put herself through the paces of the curriculum, then schooled the rest of us outside of class on the big lawn in front of the graduate library at the University of Maryland, College Park. She antagonized fellow poets into writing better; she loved all of us who tried to write. She got published right and left.

She wrote biting, incisive commentary on the fools and jesters in politics, academia and the student body. I secretly loved her to pieces. But I tried to act cool about it. She was applying somewhere Ivy to a graduate program in creative writing. She had started her first novel. She read us bits, and they were good.

Meredith was my heroine. She dared to write her own poetry on walls, would tell us where she had written her latest, then her loyal retinue would go hunt down the place: under the staircase in one building, on a desk in the library, in the boy's bathroom of the English building. A friend and I kept trying to sneak in to the latter spot. We made a pact.

We waited for the men to finish, and tried to reroute those going in, but they pushed past us. "Hey!" I said meekly. I grabbed my friend's arm. I think it was Helen Teitelbaum.

"You first," she said. "OK, but you're coming."

"Oh, no! I don't think so."

"Are we feminists or are we wussies?" I asked squirming Helen. "We are feminist wussies," she said. I pushed her in.

"Girls are coming in!" I hollered.

"Women, not girls," she protested.

"OK, women are coming in! Shut up, Helen!" We stood in the threshold, shrieking and slapping each other. A few men cursed; one said "Alright!" Then they dispersed.

We found much that was surprising that day on the walls of the men's room, Helen Teitelbaum and I. I don't remember the poem. I just remember that I was in the stinky boys' bathroom on a quest, finding walls that read like the mindblowing parts of Kinsey's survey on male sexual attitudes.

When we found Meredith's craggy script, we tried to find fault with it.

Meredith had worked in Ecclesiastes with a plaintive commentary on human nature. Flawless.

We ran out, still silly, shrieking. Meredith was a one-woman institution. I never even envied her.

When she withdrew from us, stopped hanging out on the lawn, we attributed it to cold weather, to boredom with us, to the demands of writing an honest-to-God novel. Her closest friends were concerned about her. She gained weight. We silly girls awaited her triumphant, dramatic return.

When the front page of the student newspaper showed a ragdoll in black, with a cracked skull, bleeding from the ears and nostrils, I went blank. The punkish hairdo looked familiar.

For a millisecond I had horrible knowledge, then complete denial. The high-rises. Meredith didn't live in the high-rises. We were all safe.

But Meredith had made a special trip that spring day when the tips of the trees came back to life. I found her best friend, and asked him if Meredith knew this person. Big tears welled up in his great, sad eyes. He said, "Lisa, it was Meredith."

He was wearing a scarf. I buried my face in it and shook uncontrollably.

I lost my flesh and blood heroine and despised the thing that drove her to abandon all of us, to leave herself. The university community responded bloodlessly.

Individuals called her "weak" and "broken." I fought this point of view, but grew fatigued to find that I knew not much more about depression than the worst of them, who had made her a virago in their ignorance, a forensic photo-op.

I started to investigate depression. The more I learned about it, the more I healed. Our collective failure to respond to this disease shows that our nation has not begun to address this illness that is a leading cause of death, one that decimates families and friends. It left me wondering why God would give me a gift, then take it away before I knew I had it. It left me asking what could have been done to recognize a disease that stopped being a death sentence years ago.

We must know more; we must do more. At the tail end of every winter, when the tips of the trees show that the world is not dead but sleeping, all at once I feel a vivid, terrifying remnant.

It might be so for everyone suffering right now. The azure sky of September will trigger a flood of emotion. For me, it is raw spring, then the dizzying pain. Then, in the same way, at the same time every year, I remember why. Lisa Parsley is a third-year Nursing master's student from Baltimore, Md.

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