Loss. Prevention.

This morning is the funeral for a Century student, Jeremy Caulkins, who took his own life last week. His brother Chris is on our faculty and has been working on raising campus awareness about depression, the apparent cause of his brother's death (and the cause of Chris's wife's suicide some years ago).

Yesterday afternoon, I listened to the amazing writer Kate Bornstein talk about many things, among them her six close-calls with suicide: she planned it down to "a T six times," she said, but she never attempted it. She always found something to stop her, and she wrote a book about those alternatives, a radical-truth-telling book I immediately bought: Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws.

I'm going to recommend that our library order this book. Perhaps books truly are medicine.