September is always a complicated month…you have to let go of summer, the colors, the sounds, the promises of summer. The days are gradually getting shorter, the air is cooler, the body is returning to the rhythms of daily commitments…the school year begins again.
Every time is different, every time is a transition, a new chapter opens, we must find a new way of being and being in the world, even when we pretend it isn’t so, even when we simply let it happen, without thinking too much about it.
This September 2025, however, begins with a wound, a gash that has brutally thrown me out of summer. In the space of a month, two young people have died. Two suicides. A 17-year-old student from Latina who took her own life after failing for the second time in September, and a 14-year-old student who lived in the province of Latina, for reasons related to alleged bullying. The media circus began immediately: social media, newspapers, television, statements from politicians, ministerial inspections of the schools attended by the two young people. Yes… the “school” was obviously immediately implicated, in deliberately sensational and sometimes violent ways, as if it were the root of all evil.
We are hastily looking for a “culprit” because accepting the reality of two young lives cut short is painful, because little boys and girls shouldn’t die, not like this, because failing to understand their suffering is our responsibility, whether we like it or not.
I believe this is precisely the point: understanding what we missed, when we were distracted, perhaps caught up in our institutional role, and failed to empathize with their delicate, young human reality. Were they fragile children? Probably so. The pain, the unbearable anguish that I can only imagine had ancient roots and complex dynamics? Certainly. So what?
So I don’t think we can place all the blame on the school, but I firmly believe that before failing a 17-year-old girl for the second time, we need to ask ourselves whether she will be able to handle it. Because at that age, failing is often a failure, or at least the confirmation of other, older and deeper failures. And since we’re talking about people, not numbers or performances, perhaps I should ask myself a few questions about the reality of the person I’m “failing.” Likewise, if I haven’t captured the suffering, the profound discomfort, the loneliness of a 15-year-old boy, I’ve certainly missed something; I certainly haven’t “seen” that boy.
Young men and women shouldn’t die, not like this… no pointless inquisitions, no scapegoats, but the awareness that more than one thing didn’t work, yes. This is where we need to start again.
Sara Lazzaro
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