My triplet sister committed suicide a year ago today.
The biggest question is always: why?
Kelly, after all, pretty much had it all as far as most people can see.
- She was an Olympic medalist by the age of 21, and multiple time world champion. She almost certainly had greater strength and future victories ahead.
- She was a masters student in data science at Stanford, one of the most, if not the most, premier programs in the world. She had finished a Bachelor’s in Mathematics with perfect grades. Once athletics was done, she should have had another promising career.
- She was doing quite well financially for someone her age, had traveled extensively, and had a group of teammates and friends, arguably a stronger social life than any time in her past life.
- She was a fluent speaker of Mandarin Chinese, she was a highly-skilled violin player, and she liked to write.
She had life-long absolute focus on strength and perfection, far more than most people can even dream of themselves having. Yet this led to, an early death?
I have spent much time thinking about, and discussing this question of why she died, over the last year. The short answer is, it is complicated.
Here I have attached copies of some of the notes Kelly wrote as she approached her first, unsuccessful, attempt in the end of January 2019 and the second, successful, suicide attempt on March 7th, 2019. I interpret that as, I believe undeniably, the one person who knew her best. I have lived with her longest, and most importantly, was probably the only person toward which she had absolutely no concern for her image and reputation. Thus I saw the various faces that made up the ‘real’ Kelly Catlin.
A Brief Intro to the Real Kelly
Kelly can be summarized fairly simply:
Kelly was strength.
She was determined to appear to be invincible. She was determined to be stronger and more ferocious than anyone else. She wanted to be viewed with a mixture of awe and fear. And she generally was. Kelly wanted to be great. She committed to this absolutely, and in doing so showed herself far stronger than anyone else you are every likely to meet.
And she was committed to this more deeply than you have ever seen anyone committed to anything. She lived and breathed this goal. Living with her, she ate, slept, did life chores, studied, and trained. Unless I forced her to do something else, she rarely would do anything but work. She was relentless.
Perhaps the one exception was reading. She and I shared a heavy mutual interest in science fiction and fantasy. She spent a massive amount of time buried in her Kindle, albeit usually with at least a show of multi-tasking – reading and eating or such. The works of Brandon Sanderson, Martha Wells (Murderbot and Kelly have some remarkable similarities), Ann Leckie (Justice of Toren has similarities to Kelly as well) stand out as examples.
She did have a strong inner life. She loved horses, velociraptors and dinosaurs, oriental and Egyptian culture, and generally liked pretty, well-organized things. She loved fantasy, as I said. Yet I don’t think she had any real life goals in or from these worlds. This was simply a place of things she enjoyed, an inner garden that gave her a place to relax, if she felt alone and accomplished enough to indulge in dreams.
Friends and relationships were largely a burden to her. The biggest issue was that she felt compelled to maintain her image, and any situation in which other people were around put her under a burden. I think this was starting to change with some of her teammates, but it presented her with a great challenge and uncertainty – if she wasn’t constantly focused on maintaining superiority, then what was she to focus on? Being something… less?
Kelly was strength.
But strength is a wild fire, the fear of losing it or misusing it consumed her.
And is death really that bad?
Reasons for Suicide
- Injury and Stress
- Numerous serious injuries in the months leading up to death.
- Very competitive grad school. Very competitive racing.
- Lots of stressful travel.
- Memory and focus issues following concussion.
- Unstoppable
- Inability to take a break.
- Inability to show any weakness.
- Rejection of close relationships as signs of weakness.
- Determined to attempt suicide again, and succeed at all costs.
- A Decision to Die
- Goals accomplished.
- Future uncertain.
- Mystique of death .
- Other factors
- Absolutely inept parental response to first suicide attempt.
- A lack of relevant professional help who could understand the unusual person she was.
- Lonely day-to-day, unsupported by me.
Injury and Stress
Kelly crashed not once, but three times badly in the 8 months or so before her death. She broke her arm. She gave herself a nasty concussion, possibly two. She suffered deep physical trauma that impacted her strength for many months after. She could not ride as fast. Her memory was suffering from the concussion. She had headaches.
School was harder than ever. She was now up against a very elite group of students. She was used to absolutely crushing fellow university students, beating the next highest score by 20% and such crazy feats as her normal everyday. But now she was up against even harder competition, with a severe handicap – she had to train four hours a day and frequently travel to races while her classmates focused on school alone. Then she got concussions, and suddenly couldn’t focus or memorize as well as before.
Together, these things deeply shook her confidence in her strength. They were the basic reason suicide became an present and viable option to consider for her.
Still what my dad claims, which is that her concussion resulted in a random and erroneous desire to kill herself, is clearly wrong to any who actually understood her. In many ways, her decision was very logical, if perhaps forced, based on pessimistic assumptions of her own future.
Unstoppable
Kelly was unstoppable.
As in, she really, really, could not stop.
It meant that she had watched only one episode of a TV show in the 8 months or so since she stopped living with me, before her death. Before her move to San Francisco, we were routinely watching TV shows, hardly binge watching, but usually a few TV episodes or a movie or two each week. She also chatted with my friends, we went out for dinner, went to campus events, and many other things. It hadn’t usually been hard for me to force her to take a break, but it still required effort. Without me around, breaks did not occur, it seems. Neither Kelly nor I grasped just how important we were to each other, until it was too late.
No breaks, no weakness of any kind. At least not where others could see. Having a largely unknown roommate was likely an issue, it meant that she felt watched even at home. This increased the stress even more.
The see-it-through-whatever-the-cost mindset became a particular issue after her first suicide attempt. I think her first suicide attempt was slightly erratic, more the result of stress and shock from the concussion. Her second suicide attempt was, however, more rational.
Her stubbornness set in, especially after seeing ‘the fools’ she called the attention-seeking suicide attempters she got mixed with in healthcare after her first attempt. She wanted to prove she could kill herself. She wanted to prove she had much better reasons than a plea for attention.
Her first suicide attempt was a mistake, she realized, and at some level she saw a second, successful attempt as a means of fixing that mistake.
A Decision to Die
It is better to die strong, than to face ridicule and downfall.
Our society has a tendency to embrace such imagery, of a hero in death, and Kelly did even more.
It should be noted that Kelly had accomplished all of her life goals.
- She had successfully become an Olympic medalist.
- She had successfully entered an elite university program.
- She had achieved minor celebrity status that admired her ferocious strength.
That was all I know she wanted, completing the arc of her story since her youngest days. She had also managed to do so without once failing in any major way. There were no skeletons in her closest – which is great, because one of those skeletons would probably have been mine.
On the other hand, there was a lot of uncertainty, and probability of mistakes ahead. Kelly, in a few more years, would likely have gone through a major transformation of character. While that excited her in some ways, overall, it scared her more.
- Possible permanent brain damage from the concussions. This prospect terrified her.
- The rising star of Chloe Dygert. Kelly told me that she liked Chloe, but that undeniably Chloe was genetically superior, able to go faster with less effort. Kelly could be close, but probably never the best, no matter her efforts. And only the best is good enough for Kelly.
- The prospect of having real friends which was actually threatening to normalize her, removing her mystique and replace it with unfamiliar social maneuvers.
- Her physical unattractiveness – Kelly’s large muscles and short hair made her look like a guy to many people at first, even second, glance. She knew such awkwardness would be a social liability ahead. In general, she would always be an ‘other’, always managing a difficult image.
- Uncertainty of career. Kelly was well suited to data science, but lacked any particular desires to work a corporate job of any kind. She was a doer of great things, which there is not a job for.
Overall, she faced a life ahead of great stress, pain, and uncertainty, all for what, exactly? Probably less than she already had.
An important note is that Kelly had always been fascinated by death. Her earliest writings dating to elementary and middle school often contain death as the leading and dramatic theme. More recently, her choice of music and culture had a tendency to further emphasize the mystique of death.
Her life had been a story of a similar mystique, strength and ferocity to an almost divine level compared to those around. That aura was the one thing she loved about her life above all else, and she knew that she was probably going to lose it in the years ahead, becoming a more normal, if still great, person. On the other hand, the mystery of death, offered her one last way to further enhance her image.
So she made a choice, she chose to sacrifice her life to do one last thing to uphold and strengthen the mystique she loved.
And it appears to have worked, if not in quite the way she imagined. Her death was not quite as magical as I think she hoped for, but certainly mysterious, leaving questions that made a much bigger impression in the news than any of us could have imagined.
So perhaps her suicide was the right choice for her. It may indeed be the best in the end, although that, sadly, we can never really know.
