MINNEAPOLIS — On the day he’d bury his daughter, Mark Catlin stepped out of a chapel and into the fresh air.
“Nice day for a walk,” he said, looking up, and on this morning in late March, the weather was flawless: cloudless, crisp, a bright blue sky.
He took a breath and set off, heading down the cemetery’s path and falling behind the procession of cars ahead, talking as gravel crunched beneath his shoes. He asked if the memorial service, laboriously planned near the lakefront cycling trails Kelly Catlin had explored before becoming a silver medalist in the 2016 Olympics, had been good enough. He apologized if it had been too sad. The afternoon reception, he assured friends and visitors, should be more lively.
A few paces up the winding path, a longtime friend shook his head. Mark, the friend whispered, would do anything to distract himself — he always had — in this case to avoid facing “the darkness”: Kelly’s suicide two weeks earlier, her thoughts during those final days and weeks, the way she’d planned her death in the same meticulous, results-oriented way she’d lived her life.
Back on the walkway, Mark wore a blank expression as he accepted condolences and told people about his plans for the coming weeks. Eventually he reached a gravesite surrounded by mourners, and he stopped at the rear of the group as if happening upon a stranger’s funeral.
Gradually the faces turned, and after a moment Mark noticed his wife and two other children waiting near a charcoal-colored casket.
“I guess we’ll go lay her to rest now,” he said, stepping forward.
If you or someone you know needs help, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255). You can also text a crisis counselor by messaging the Crisis Text Line at 741741.
Next to the computer in the basement of his home, Mark has a notebook labeled “To Do: Kelly” with seven projects listed: photos to organize by year, 60 hours of video to edit, a bio to write, calls to make and emails he’ll send after jolting awake most nights around 2. But now he’s working on No. 1: the enormous memorial he’s designing alongside a touch-screen information kiosk, like something at a museum, he imagines at Kelly’s graveside.
“So people can remember,” he says.
He wants people to know Kelly wasn’t just the daughter of Carolyn and Mark, the triplet sister of Christine and Colin. She was more than an intelligent but socially awkward 23-year-old from the Twin Cities. Kelly built herself into an Olympian and a three-time world champion in the four-rider group race known as the team pursuit. She was fluent in Chinese and had been first-chair violinist in her high school orchestra, a competitive pit bull who folded origami and played badminton with the same joyless ferocity that she brought into a velodrome or classroom.
Kelly’s father wants you to know all of it: She took classes at the University of Minnesota in 11th grade, notched a perfect score on the SAT, had enrolled last fall in the computational mathematics program at Stanford’s graduate school. This was a young woman who had become convinced, like so many of her high-achieving peers, that pedaling to the peak of one mountain only meant a better view of the other, taller ones in the distance.
“The very characteristics that made you successful will be self-destructive,” Mark says he’s realized, though he prefers to keep himself busy than think too deeply about it, and indeed as much as his daughter was an outlier in life, she was part of a trend in death.
Mark is a retired medical pathologist, and he’s learned these past few months that young people in the United States — and, in particular, young women and girls — are killing themselves at a rate the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers a national health crisis. Between 2007 and 2015, according to a CDC study, the suicide rate doubled among females aged 15 to 19 and reached a 40-year high. Major depressive episodes and suicide attempts have skyrocketed among women under 35, according to a 12-year analysis by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, as a society fixated on collecting and comparing achievements seemingly has conditioned a promising generation of young people to ignore emotional alarms — insomnia, anxiety and depression — and work toward the next goal.
Sometimes that pressure comes from family or peer groups, and it can manifest itself in ways good and bad: pushing certain individuals to astonishing heights and others to alarming depths. Kelly, though, found herself at both extremes — climbing the Olympic medal stand three years before taking her own life in the bedroom of her Stanford apartment — and seemed determined from an early age to prove herself in increasingly intense arenas, only exacerbating her best and worst tendencies.
And even that, mental health experts say, is more and more common as suicide has been on a consistent rise among individuals born between 1982 and 1999. Kat Giordano, Kelly’s former roommate at Stanford who discovered her body, has experienced the highs and lows of existing in a culture that seems to have convinced its young people that being average is unacceptable — leading some to grow up believing they must be exceptional or die trying.
“I am someone who thrives under pressure, but … you’re surrounded by it,” said Giordano, a Stanford Law School student who in 2018 graduated magna cum laude from Princeton. “It feels like the best motivation and something dangerous simultaneously.”
