Weāve been in the new apartment for a week. My wife, six months pregnant, belly large in a turquoise blouse and hair cut short,
arranges the terra-cotta planter pots on the balcony. Iām in the living room, flattening and folding empty cardboard moving
boxes. Over the past decade Iāve become pretty competent in this routine of packing and unpacking. In our twenties we moved
around a lot, for work, for graduate school, for adventure and opportunity, living in Boston, New York, and briefly Baltimore,
followed by a fifteen-month sojourn in San Francisco. Weāve decided that 2009 will be the year that we settle down and create
a permanent home in which to raise a family. My wife began looking for a job that would bring us out of the city. My work
as a freelance science writer unmoored me from any particular location, thus her offer from Google moved us from the trendy
Mission District to the sleepy hamlet of Palo Alto.
An ambulance siren is going off maybe a mile away. Another siren closely trails behind it. āI wonder whatās going on out there,ā
she says offhandedly. I finish making my morning coffee in the kitchen, and with mug in hand I head to the balcony where she
is looking over the railing. āThere must be an accident nearby.ā
Even before entering the low heat of the summer I can hear the traffic thatās gathered two stories below. Just beyond our
apartment complex, maple trees block the partial view we have of Hoover Tower rising above Stanford University, a pink-hued
emblem of the region and those who have brought to it a touch of wunderkind in the form of geniuses, masterminds, idea incubators,
and dream originators. Below us, cars collect along El Camino Real and east along Oregon Expressway toward the interstate.
The streetlights cycle through from green to red and the traffic doesnāt budge. Somewhere overhead a helicopter thumps the
sky.
Later that evening I read online that the bumper-to-bumper traffic was due to a fatality not on the road but on the Caltrain
tracks close by. The casualty halted the lines for hours. Delayed commuters scrambled for alternate routes to work, causing
an ugly cascade of backups on the roads. While Iād been deconstructing our moving boxes up in our apartment, down below a
boy named Jean-Paul āHan-Weiā Blanchard, a junior at nearby Henry M. Gunn High School, was walking off of the campus. Heād
moved along Arastradero Road, past dozens of tidy, brightly painted homes, crossed the wide span of El Camino Real, and, in
broad daylight, stepped onto the railroad.
Weāve been in town for less than a week, but Iām still certain that a train hitting and killing a local student is unusual
in Silicon Valley, where the spectrum of intellect runs a parallel track to a kind of acceptable madness of professors, scientists,
writers, investors, and entrepreneurs who run this distinct Bellevue of ambition.
The news is doubly unusual given the particular school the boy attended. By academic measures the students at Gunn Highāand
all the schools in the area, for that matterāare among Californiaās brightest. In the past five years, Gunn High in particular
has boasted more National Merit Scholarship Program semifinalists than 90 percent of schools in the country. Recently, half
of its students took roughly two thousand Advanced Placement tests for college credit, 93 percent of whom scored three or
higher on a scale of one to five. These are the kind of facts people in this town like to quote, especially those whoāve moved
here expressly so that their children can take advantage of the public school system.
But for a couple of days the litany of academic praise ends. Short sound bites and tiny paragraphs in local newspapers carry
the unusual story of the boyās death. People talk about it. Then they stop talking about it. They return to their lives, and
I return to unpacking.
Ā
It has been three weeks since Blanchardās suicide when all of the trains on the Caltrain line receive an emergency order to
stop. Passenger cars in the night stagnate at points along their routes. The Santa Clara County coroner investigates what
appears to be another body on the same length of tracks near Gunn High.
Reporting on the incident within hours of her death, media reveal that authorities have recovered Sonya Raymakers, a graduating
senior preparing to attend NYUās prestigious theater program in the fall. The town is already beginning to speculate about
her motivation. People point to the regionās ethos of scholastic pressure, its common burden to achieve, its unspoken but
understood dictum of success at any cost. They consider the effects of undiagnosed or undisclosed mental illness. They talk
about copycat behavior.
Growing up, you heard about kids who died by suicide, but oftentimes these tragedies were isolated situations, happened behind
closed doors, and remained private family affairs. These two events, however, took place in an unbelievably open fashion,
practically forcing public outcry and reflection. I donāt know much about the pathos of suicidal thinking, but I canāt help
but wonder if there is a connection between the two children. Then again, reading into these tragic moments might simply be
an exercise in attempting to reason away the unreasonable.
Even as a relative newcomer to this community and stationed on the sidelines of grief, I find myself caught up in the shock.
At the same time, the natural distance of my station grants me some perspective. I watch the town absorb the wave without
it knowing quite what to make of its power or source. People in turn pivot to focus on everyday tribulations, relying on the
trajectories of life as usual to steady them from the blow; no one can stand to have this glue mucking up the chambers of
their heart.
And neither can I, frankly. Iām about to be a father. The most pressing personal issue at the moment is the nursery I have
to build. I frame illustrations and hang the pictures from blue ribbon on the walls. Climb a stepladder and lock metal rings
through heavy curtain fabric. Stand before sections of a white crib spread out on the floor like kindling, uncertain how to
decipher the instructions or interpret how the pieces fit together.
When my son is born, I wrap him in folds of a thin and gauzy blanket and place his warm body in the crook of my wifeās arm, where he will remain, more often than not, for the next three months.
He is enamored with her. Endlessly stares into her face. Watches her eyes widen and her mouth turn out big expressions. He responds to her as though engaged in conversation, his own eyes opening wide, and his mouth mimicking her smile.
From our first moments, our understanding beyond the womb is dependent on our natural instinct to mirror. We are built to receive and perceive cues, to understand displays of happiness, fear, and sadness, and to create with others a harmony of movements. While writing The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin observed the collective makeup of human countenance. Despite age, ethnicity, and gender, people articulate the same state of mind as someone they observe. Every person is unique, and yet by way of a smile, a frown, a grimace, a wince, they hold universal commonality. Expressions cue recognition and activate in us similar empathetic responses. Remarkably, the mechanism for mirroring others takes place so fast and automatically itās nearly imperceptible. The social psychologist Elaine Hatfield credits this to a kind of automatic attunement bred by a nonconscious imitator within each of us. We capitalize on moments during which the mind registers the tiniest flickers of expression from the world around it, activating a primal process of reflecting and aligning.
I watch my son, a face surrounded by folds of a moon-...
