Daniel’s pain and my memories
The last number of days, I have closed my eyes to see the wonderful, innocent and smiling face of 13-year-old Daniel Fitzpatrick from Staten Island. With my eyes still closed, I think, “That’s a smile and a goodness that is meant to help light the world.”
When I open my eyes, I see the surreal and shocking headlines reporting that young Daniel chose to end the torment of constant bullying and dysfunction by taking his own life.
This incomprehensible tragedy fills my mind for two reasons. The first is my fear that this loss and the critically important lessons to be learned because of it will be swept away and forgotten in both our disposable society and in our news cycles now measured in seconds.
The second reason Daniel’s story fills my mind is because it eerily mirrors my own.
In a chilling, handwritten letter he left behind, Daniel outlined the bullying he endured from five boys at Holy Angels Catholic Academy in Brooklyn. He further mentioned teachers who ignored his plight, while also making sure to mention one teacher who did try to help.
“She was the nicest teacher ever,” he wrote. “She understood and did something, but it didn’t last long.”
None of young Daniel’s issues or pain are theoretical to me. When I was 13, I attended the worst school of my highly dysfunctional young life. It was the Gate of Heaven High School in South Boston.
I came from a home marked by poverty and instability. Many of my classmates did not. There, every single day of my freshman year, three boys and two girls would bully and torment me as cruelly as possible. Oftentimes, they did this right in front of the nuns, who simply ignored it.
To them, I was the “dirty and smelly kid” not only in that class, but in the whole school — and I could never, not for a moment, be allowed to forget it. The bullies would grab me, point out my torn and dirty clothes, my shoes with missing soles. They would scream at me that I did not belong.
Thankfully, there was one kind and strong female lay teacher who taught English at the school. She not only recognized what I was enduring, but tried to counsel me as best she could given the circumstances.
From the nightmare that was Gate of Heaven, I would walk into a much worse one at home. There, if they were awake, I would be greeted by my alcoholic parents. While we may never know young Daniel’s circumstances at home, I can say with certainty that my own mother (whom I still love and miss) did have anger-management issues when she drank — which was every day.
By the time I was 17, we had moved 34 times, all evictions. I am decades removed from that bullying and that pain, but I read of the loss of Daniel and it all flooded back. Thirteen years of age, five bullies, one compassionate teacher.
My own experience taught me that no matter what anyone says, when a child is being bullied at school or going through unimaginable abuse at home, someone knows. Because of that truth, at some point in our lives, there will be a moment when any and all of us can stand up to bullying or help rescue a child trapped in dysfunction.
Clearly, tragically and obscenely, young Daniel Fitzpatrick was not saved. That said, his smile, his light and his goodness can and should go on.
As I now close my eyes and see young Daniel’s smiling and innocent face, I think how wonderful it would be if a school could be named in his memory. That school would honor him and so many innocent children no longer with us.
MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official and author of the memoir “Rolling Pennies in the Dark.”
If you see bullying, intervene. Someone must.