So high above it all, so far from happiness

MELONE E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times
published January 8, 2002

Boys like Charles Bishop are always good boys.

Their parents never noticed anything was wrong.

Now a hole has been blown straight through their hearts.

Their school teachers weep.

They go over the boy's tracks, the times he got the answers right, the times he got them wrong, the times he shied away.

The trail goes cold.

On Monday, I tried to follow the trail.

I talked to an expert on suicide, Dale Emme, the executive director of the Yellow Ribbon Suicide Prevention Program in Colorado. He knows. His son killed himself. But Michael Emme was 17.

Charles Bishop is in a very special tragic group. His act is among "the rarest of the rare," Emme said. Suicide is hardly ever carried out in public, first of all, and it is almost unheard of among children too young to drive.

In 1998, the last year for which Emme had figures, 324 children 15 or under committed suicide.

Charles Bishop was a good boy.

They always are.

Still, flying is an unusual pastime for a boy. Bishop was so tied up in it, he volunteered for chores at the flight school at St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport so he could earn a chance for extra hours. He loved it that much.

You can guess what it must have felt like up in the sky, removed from the ordinary world, free, and powerful beyond the power of other boys around him.

And you can only imagine how his mother and grandmother felt when he left the house, when they took him to the airport.

Would he come back, or drop out of the sky like a stone?

Those were their scary thoughts, their nightmares, not much different than that of a parent watching his child leave the house with the car keys on his own.

Charles Bishop was a good boy.

They always are.

That suicide expert, Dale Emme, said Charles Bishop also stands out because his weapon was so remarkable, far more sophisticated than a gun or pills.

But Emme said that nobody should be surprised Bishop didn't clue in his family that he was in trouble.

Often, suicidal kids consider their silence an act of love, as a way of not burdening their family with their trouble -- until the problem and the silence become too much.

Troubled people who think their world stinks often see what goes on around them as proof of just how right they are, Emme said.

Planes smash into the World Trade Center. It is not so great a leap to see someone using the public stage, the drama of Sept. 11, as a stage on which to act their own drama, then die.

Emme said that most suicides -- those of kids too -- are usually committed in places where the person feels comfortable. Charles Bishop must have felt much at home in his tiny aircraft, as at home as the rest of us feel walking the sidewalk.

It happened that I was shopping in the Publix supermarket across the Hillsborough River from downtown when Charles Bishop flew his plane into the Bank of America building.

I heard nothing. I was later in the crowd that looked up west to see the tail of the plane flapping gently in the wind.

From where I stood, it seemed like so much paper, not the last act of a good boy, good in the ways they always are.

-- You can reach Mary Jo Melone at mjmelone@sptimes.com or 226-3402.

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