Asher Brown and Seth Walsh, both 13-year-olds, and Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old college student, took their lives recently in response to being bullied because of their homosexuality.
Although I do not agree with it, nor do I support gay marriage, I believe bullying someone to the point of suicide is the most appalling thing I have ever heard.
Regardless of one’s beliefs, I think I can speak for everyone when I say that cruelty and abuse, physical or verbal, is not the answer to anything. As a person who has been affected by the tragedy of suicide, my heart shattered as I heard their stories unfold.
Human nature baffles me. How could someone ever think it was okay to torment a certain demographic of people so badly and so maliciously that it would cause them to take their own lives?
Do bullies get some kind of sick pleasure in tormenting another person?
Are they so insecure in their own lives that they must seek the vulnerability in someone else and abuse them?
These recent stories are not the first cases of bullying-inflicted suicide to surface. Back in 2007, Megan Meier committed suicide after a MySpace hoax in which a neighborhood family pretending to be a young boy who was interested Megan.
“He” abruptly ended their cyber friendship and began to slanderize her on the social network.
I doubt the family that created the fake account intended for Meier to kill herself, but what were they thinking?
Grown adults were tormenting a fragile, 13-year-old girl,  with a history of depression, by means of a fake social network account. That is sad, disturbing and pathetic.
I am unable to comprehend suicide. I am blessed enough to say that I have never reached a point in my life where I wanted to end it.
Every time I see the picture of a person who has committed suicide, my heart sinks into my chest. That person was a son, daughter, sister, brother, niece, nephew, friend, husband, wife, mother, father — all the people who have committed suicide held a place in this world.
But now they are gone.
The people they left behind have to face every day knowing their loved one willfully took his or her own life.
With cases of suicide from bullying, families of the deceased have to face the fact that their loved  ones killed themselves because someone else was making their lives living nightmares.
This really makes me wonder about what kind of battles people I’m around are facing.
What if someone I know is struggling and hurting to the point of contemplating suicide?
What if I could be that person who is there for them when they need someone?
Am I doing enough to make myself available and approachable to someone who might just need someone to talk to? Never miss an opportunity to be there for someone. And if a reader of this article is someone who is guilty of intentional bullying, for heaven’s sake, stop.
Put aside your beliefs, prejudices and insecurities and think about how one’s actions can affect another person’s life.
Mary Chase Breedlove is a sophomore majoring in communication. She can be contacted at [email protected].