Opening the Door to Haunting Loss and Memory: Teaching the Courage to Reach Out

Virginia Evans’ novel The Correspondent opened me to something deeply human and generous, helping me unlock a door I had kept closed for over two decades. In its pages, I found a way to face the deaths of my sister and a close friend, and to bring those lessons into the classroom with my students.

We meet protagonist Sybil Van Antwerp at seventy-three, retired after an illustrious legal career. She writes letters, some to authors who move her. Some write back, like Joan Didion. Long curious about what makes someone a writer, she comes to see what has always been true. She is one herself, a correspondent. As she loses her eyesight, loss that robs her of writing, she begins to see more clearly, confronting the death of her middle child, Gilbert. That reckoning unexpectedly drew me toward my sister’s death and into the classroom with my students.

Memories of Gilbert haunt Sybil. She believes she enabled his death through negligence, absorbed in work, encouraging him without watching him. The novel somehow makes this safe to witness, at least it did for me, lighting the way toward a door I had kept closed for decades. Losing a child you feel you failed robs even good memories of comfort. They can feel accusatory, as if life itself were charging you with a crime you did not commit. The feeling is irrational and nearly impossible to escape.

I recognized this immediately in Sybil because my mother lived it after her first child, Beth, died in 2000. Death arrived and never quite left. Talking about Beth, her humor, her energy, her beauty, felt impossible. Depression killed her. What silenced my mother was a deep sense of complicity. She could not open that door, just like Sybil. My father, my two living sisters, Lora and Ellen, and I did not open it either.

Beth was extraordinary. Warm, witty, and effortlessly funny. She was a national tennis competitor, a state champion swimmer, runner-up for homecoming queen, and a straight-A student. Everyone loved Beth, except Beth. Her death brought guilt and anger toward ourselves, not toward her, even though two psychiatrists confirmed her depression was untreatable with known medications. She underwent electroshock therapy, but could not finish. The side effects were too much. Nothing helped.

Beth’s depressive episodes lasted a few months. We protected her on her terms, telling employers she had pneumonia, bronchitis, mono, or Valley Fever. Once, I went to her first date at a comedy club to explain she was vomiting. He asked me to stay. I did.

Depression gradually pushed her out of jobs people aspire to. She was good at starting again. That day, May 7th, my parents sensed something was wrong, but did not know at the same time. She was not answering her phone. Ellen broke in and found her dead, at first thinking she was asleep.

For years, I believed silence was a form of loyalty. But here, silence teaches nothing. Eventually, I realized that what I had lived alongside carried a responsibility to teach.

I teach a first-year seminar at Gettysburg College, Death and the Meaning of Life. The course asks not only how we understand death, but how we respond to it while people are still alive. We discuss what it means to be a friend to someone ideating suicide. Many students initially believe the right response is to check in, but tell no one, prioritizing confidentiality. We then read 13 Reasons Why, a novel in which a high school girl named Hannah dies by suicide. Students write essays as one of Hannah’s friends, reflecting on the kind of friend they had been. The papers are honest and disarmingly mature.

By the end of the unit, students grasp something crucial. Someone expressing a wish not to live may no longer be responsible for their own life. They learn when and how to get help. At Gettysburg College, that means calling the health center where a trained professional is available twenty-four hours a day and protects the caller’s identity.

It was in this class that I began speaking more openly about Beth and about a close college friend, Noel Florence, who also died from depression. Noel was already a great actor, brilliant, magnetic, a comet, a star, and loving. Days before the opening of the play she was starring in at UC Berkeley, Noel was hospitalized for incomprehensible depression. After a bit, she persuaded her psychiatrist to remove the twenty-four-hour watch. Hours later, she was dead at twenty years old.

I spoke to my students about guilt, including my own. We can get it wrong and still change, not because we are bad, but because we act with limited information. For the first time last fall, I said aloud that Beth had called me two days before she died. I had not yet called her back when my father called.

Because of Beth and Noel, and Hannah, my students are ready for what cannot be planned, the unexpected call for help. And because of my students, and of the correspondent Sybil Van Antwerp, I am able to open the door. In teaching and in witnessing, Beth and Noel are no longer sealed behind it. They move through us, shaping care, attention, and the courage to reach out.