My primary school was pitched into a state of shock by the news that a popular and admired teacher had died on a solo hunting trip.
He'd been climbing through a fence, we were told, when the gun slung over his shoulder discharged.
I clearly remember wondering - as artlessly as any 7-year-old would - how a straight, tight strand of No. 8 wire could snag a shotgun trigger (the geometry of stocks and sights and trigger guards was familiar to this backyard cowboy even though he'd never seen a real gun).
But I was well into my teens before someone explained - sneering at my credulity - that people didn't die because guns went off when they climbed through fences. They killed themselves. The fence story was a socially acceptable explanation of a death that dared not speak its name.
When people do commit suicide (and I have no way of knowing that my teacher did not meet his death by misadventure) it's not hard to see why the loved ones left behind would seek to cloak the fact in comforting euphemism.
What's harder to understand is why those charged with addressing the epidemic of youth suicide - more than three people under 25 take their lives each week - would think the issue best dealt with by not talking about it.
That point of view was roundly rebuked by Questions, the 50-minute drama that made up the first part of a programme addressing the issue on TV3 last night.
Based on a two-year-old stage play by Wellington writer Moira Wairama as a response to the suicides of two young men she knew, it was conceived by its producer and director, Ross Jennings, as a television project because he had been told repeatedly by young people who had attempted suicide - and by the bereft parents of those who had succeeded - that they wanted the subject talked about.
I didn't get the chance to preview the panel discussion broadcast after the drama - it was delivered only at the last moment to TV3 - and I am keenly aware that the discussion was an inseparable companion piece to the story that raised the questions.
But on the strength of what was served up first, it's clear Jennings and his team made a sober and responsible contribution to a vexed debate.
It was commendably vague about the methods used by its three characters to create what I once heard described as a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
And, better still, it focused no more on the lead-up than it did on the aftermath.
We were left in no doubt that the greatest tragedy about suicide is the havoc it wreaks on the living.
As a parent of teenagers, I found myself riveted by the anguish of the story's parents - good people making a well-meaning mess of the hardest job on the planet, bringing up children.
"I thought it was the usual adolescent stuff," one mother wailed. "How are you supposed to know that it's more serious?"
"How do you help someone who won't let you?" asked another mum.
A Maori priest at one point - poignantly, desperately - described these as questions with no answers.
That may be so. But that does not mean asking them is a mistake. Uncomfortable as it may be for many of us, this country is a better place today for their having been asked, whatever the experts say.
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