Jim and Stacy could not believe what they’d been told on the phone. Maddy was not, could not be, gone. “Part of me was simply convinced: I don’t think this is real; I don’t think this happened,” Jim says.
No logic existed to explain how Maddy’s buoyancy, her spirit—eighteen years in the making—could be extinguished in one moment. Think of all the life that had been breathed into her: the hugs, the laughter, the birthday parties with friends, the Saturday morning car rides to soccer practice, the juice boxes and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the crusts cut off, the tears, the stern words, the I love yous, the endless list of things done for every loved child. So much energy poured into one being: their daughter.
This love, in bodily form, could not be erased from the world so quickly, could it?
Early the next morning, while Ashley was flying home from Alabama, Jim sat in the car, stunned. His good friends drove him to the medical examiner’s office in Philadelphia. The head of security for Penn was there, too. And so were two Philly police officers. There, he was shown a photo of his daughter’s body, confirming that no mistake had been made, though really the photo felt like proof that a million mistakes had been made. He was also given the toxicology report. Madison had been sober, not a drop of alcohol in her blood—a fact that seems reassuring at first, but quickly becomes soul-crushing.
Maddy did not look dead. She looked like she was sleeping. And this felt like a small kindness, though such kindnesses often shatter a cracked heart.
At the examiner’s office Jim received Maddy’s offering, the bag of gifts she had left for her family. The small tokens of love and explanation summoned a dangerous cocktail of emotions. Jim found the picture of Maddy as a kid. He pulled it out of the book, held it. “She had shown me that picture over break, while she was home, and she goes, ‘I want this picture,’ and I was like, ‘Why?’ It’s just this cute picture of her holding a tennis racquet when she’s six years old, and she’s like, ‘I want to put it in my room in my collage.’ So maybe it was little things like that that made me think she had been planning this. We had no idea, it was just seeing that picture, and it being there among everything, that made me wonder.”
“I’m still confused about that bag of gifts,” Jim said later. “I mean, the time and the effort that it appears she put into it, that maybe she planned this and to go ahead and, in her greatest time of need, still be thinking of others. It’s just, it’s unbelievable.”
Jim needed to go to the parking garage. He had to see where his daughter had died. He had to know what the building looked like, what his daughter had seen in her final moments, how she could have decided to let go—so literally. “Seeing is believing,” he says. “And I couldn’t believe it, so I had to see everything.”
He did not go alone. His friends went with him to the corner of 15th and Spruce. They walked to the top of the garage: nine flights. Jim stepped into the pain of knowing, of seeing through his daughter’s eyes. He walked to the railing and looked down. He kept looking. He allowed himself to picture what Maddy had seen just hours before. He imagined the fall, but he did not stop there. He imagined the hardness, the crushing stop. He let his mind hold these images for as long as he could, until they imprinted into his memory.
Jim turned to his friends and said: “I could not have done this.”
Ashley Holleran arrived home about the same time as her dad. Jim had with him the crucial items the authorities thought they would want: Maddy’s phone and her computer from her dorm room, as well as everything she had left atop the parking garage.
The house was already filling with people as the news spread through the community, and as Maddy’s high school and college friends began making the pilgrimage to Allendale so they could all be near one another, so they could all try to make sense of the hole that had just been blasted into their hearts.
Nobody understood, Ashley especially, how one of their favorite people in the world had decided, so swiftly and suddenly, to leave them. Ashley had talked to Maddy every day, over text or on Facebook. She told herself that if anybody could have known, she should have. “I talked to her seven hours before she jumped,” she said. “How did that not come up in conversation?”
Ashley wanted to look at Madison’s computer. She was so thirsty for answers that she didn’t allow herself time to feel anxious about what she might find. She felt she was working against a clock; that something could still be done to rewind what had happened. She had to find the thing that had set all this in motion so she could fix it, so she could say or do exactly what Maddy needed.
Ashley opened every message, most e-mails, and searched through the documents. But there was nothing. The only insight came from the absence of clues. Maddy had deleted her Internet history. Whatever she had searched over the previous few weeks, she did not want seen by others. Or maybe it’s possible that she routinely cleared her Internet cache, though that also seems unlikely. More likely, Ashley believed, was that Maddy had been researching methods for suicide and didn’t want her family to know exactly what she had contemplated. Maybe, even at the end, she wanted to control her story. She was sharing some thoughts—in the notes, in the choice of gifts—about why she had made this choice. Her family didn’t need to know the desperate thinking that had gone into what looked like a tidy ending. This thinking was, in a striking way, similar to the concept of the Penn Face, the idea that most students at Penn aimed to project a calm, collected, placid exterior, while beneath the surface they were furiously pedaling to stay afloat. Even in her suicide, which seemed to convey the message that life had overwhelmed her, Maddy apparently still cared about projecting a collected, determined image.
Ashley had launched Maddy’s iMessages, and since the computer had automatically connected to the house’s wireless, and since Maddy’s cell number was still active, the application began processing the text messages that were still coming in. At first the hundreds of texts were asking if she was okay, asking her to please text back, to call, that a horrible rumor was going around.
Then came a different kind of text: searching, heartbroken.
—I love you. God rest your soul.
—I’ll miss you Madison. More than you knew.
—I just don’t get it mad. You had it all.
—I’m sorry if you needed more from me. I had no idea.
—But I loved you like no one else. Just know that.
Part of the grieving process, that’s what these were—the opening days. And this behavior was no different from that exhibited by the brokenhearted over the years. They continued to communicate with Madison the way they always had. Maddy had always been in their phones when she wasn’t there in person, and so for a fleeting moment they could convince themselves that nothing at all had changed. She was just somewhere else, as usual, and they could just write her a text.
Everyone seemed to have a piece, an insight, an anecdote, that illuminated some aspect of their friend that others had never seen. The kids from Penn drove to New Jersey, where they met the kids from Allendale, her lifelong friends. “It was a pretty crazy experience,” says Ashley Montgomery. “It was almost like we were putting together a puzzle of somebody’s full life, like all the pieces were kind of coming together, and I think that was maybe more for me than her high school friends that it felt that way. I had only been with her through the college chapter of our lives, a few months of it, anyway. To actually hear people say, ‘Yeah, this is how she was here,’ was just really interesting. But the fact was, I knew she was a great person when I met her, but I didn’t see as distinct of a change because there hadn’t been the experience with ‘the old her’—the ‘her’ at home.”
Oddly, the transition to college was both the trigger for depression and the reason she could hide her pain so well. Picture Madison walking a bridge connecting Allendale to Philadelphia. She looks down and notices how high she is; she looks across and notices how far there still is to go; she looks back, longingly, but that direction is no longer accessible to her. She takes a deep breath. She stops, rests on her knees, sweat dripping from her brow. This journey is longer and harder than she thought. And when she arrives in Philly, the walk has stripped her of a layer of buoyancy. Yet nobody in Philly notices the change, because they have never before met Maddy—any version at all. And you can only spot the after if you’ve known the before.
Some crossover between Maddy’s worlds existed, but not much. And those who had known her when she was a kid, and noticed a shift in behavior once she got to college, could not see the change happening. As her friends sat together swapping stories, they realized that no one person knew enough to have helped Maddy. Perhaps a boyfriend, a partner, might have been the person intimate enough to see all the warning signs. In fact, it was one of Maddy’s ex-boyfriends from high school who may have possessed a clue that even Ashley Holleran hadn’t known: “He told me, ‘Madison started going to church at Penn.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ I said, ‘She never did that in high school.’ My dad goes to church all the time, and if anyone would go with him, it was usually me, but not really anyone else in my family. So when he said, ‘Yeah, she started going during the fall semester,’ I thought to myself: She never told me that, or anyone else, really, except for him. He said, ‘I don’t know, she just said that she felt comforted by it; that it helped her.’ And I guess, in retrospect, that does make sense.”
More than two years after Madison’s death, Ashley still can’t quite wrap her mind around the dearth of answers. “I kept thinking there was definitely more to this,” she says. “I just felt like there was a secret or something, like someone must have known, that one specific thing had happened, that she had told someone about her plan. I just kept wishing I knew the extent of everything, but obviously I can’t ask her. So now I know that I’m not going to know. And I guess I’ve just kind of accepted that.”
About a year after Madison’s death, one of her teammates decided to quit the track team. She sent the following explanation to her teammates and included Maddy’s e-mail address among those who received the message:
I don’t want to bore all of you with the nitty gritty details of why I ultimately decided to leave, but I thought I owed it to my teammates to give some sort of explanation… Like some of you know, for a large part of my freshman year I was really, really sick and was on and off running for a while because of that… I went into summer with a new and excited mentality about running, and I faced new health problems so my training was pretty spotty. Obviously for a while I felt really discouraged about my running, and going to practice became something I stressed out about rather than something I looked forward to. And unfortunately, as I have finally started to come back every day to practice to run, I feel the same way more than ever. And if there is any positive message I have taken away from the tragic weekend with Madison, it’s that we need to do what makes us happy.
I’ve realized that there are a lot of things I want to take advantage of during my time here at Penn, and I want running to continue to be something I love, not something that stresses me out or ruins my health again.
Maybe “why” is not the question to ask about Madison’s death. Or whether she deliberately chose this at all; that is, other than in the very moment she started climbing the stairs. A definitive story is needed for those of us left behind, so we can feel better. Amid chaos, order and understanding feel paramount. We feel we must find a reason for why she jumped—a reason that makes sense to a healthy mind.
But there is no one thing. There are rivers that merge and create a powerful current. And we can’t fully know why they all merged, right then, right there, around Maddy. Still, we can try to analyze each one, the way it bends and curves, what it turns into when it blends with another. We can do this, learn everything we can, how to talk to others about their pain or our own, in the hope that fewer people get caught in this same, fierce swirl.