13 Reasons Why: Final Thoughts

                I am not sure how I really feel about them showing the suicide.  I do believe that showing her parents find her, the devastation they portray, the breaking down of their spirit they reveal throughout the entire show, the backlash they receive, the business they lose because the community can’t handle looking at them, those are important scenes to show.  In the end, Mrs. Baker gets her answers.  That is the truth that she needed to be able to move on.  I do not believe this show glorifies suicide.  I believe it shows every dark moment that leads to the decisions, and every dark moment that follows.  I believe it reveals so many important issues that students deal with today.  I believe it reveals the most heartbreaking destruction of the people that are left behind.  I believe that Alex’s suicide and the portrayal of his demise are a reality of what happens to people when they go through something like this.

                I think my favorite part of the ending is when Jessica finally reaches out to her father and tells him what happened to her, when she washes away the shame, when she decides to stop destroying herself.  The most heartbreaking, other than the rapes, was hearing the principle tell Mr. Porter that Alex Standall shot himself in the head, watching him be riddled with guilt more and more as the show went on, watching him die inside over one stupid decision, watching him take the weight of Hannah’s death on himself.  I remember when I final got alone after Daniel Janes killed himself.  I knew the gospel, but I never shared it with him, not even once.  I never even mentioned the name of Jesus to him.  By the time Daniel had died, I had fallen away, gotten worse.  When I finally got home and the house was empty, all I could think of was Daniel standing before God and being condemned to hell.  I saw him fall into the pit as he cursed God and pleaded with him at the same time, and I wailed.  I literally wailed.  I was consumed with grief and guilt.  I know that is not how all of us responded to his death, but that is how I responded.  I thought that, if I had just witnessed to him one time, if I hadn’t fallen away and gotten to the point that sharing the gospel was a tragedy, I could have saved his life.  After 15 years, I know that I am not responsible for Daniel’s death, but for the first few years, I would go to the hotel we stayed at the night before his funeral, or I would go to the grave and apologize.  It took me a long time to forgive myself.

                If you are reading this, and you are contemplating suicide, I pray you will stop and think about the people you are leaving behind.  I know that you may feel like no one will care.  You may think that everyone will be just fine.  Even if someone does care, they will be okay soon.  I promise you, more people care than you think.  There will be at least one person that will carry that heartache with them for the rest of their lives, however long that may be.  If you cannot live for yourself, at least live for them.  Choose resilience.  Choose hope.  Choose to keep fighting, even if you feel like you don’t have the strength to fight anymore.  You are stronger than you give yourself credit for.  I have experienced so much tragedy, so much trauma.  If I can get up every day and keep fighting for those that I love, then so can you.  If you need or want someone to talk to, please leave a comment and I will get back to you with a way for us to communicate.  You are not alone!

“The cross we carry is never so heavy as the chains from which we were freed.”   --J. A. Lacy

Mr. Porter: 13 Reasons...Episode 13

                The man that has eluded the responsibility for his inactions throughout the entire show finally comes to his tape.  The kids begin testifying.  Clay is finished with the tapes.  It is time to pass them on to the last person.

                Hannah describes her process as she makes the tapes.  She started with 12.  Hannah says, “I started with Justin, and then Jessica, who each broke my heart.  Alex, Tyler, Courtney, Marcus, who each helped to destroy my reputation.  On through Zach and Ryan, who broke my spirit.  Through tape number 12, Bryce Walker, who broke my soul.  But a funny thing happened when I finished number 12.  I felt something shift.  I had poured it all out, and for a minute, just a minute, I felt like maybe I could beat this.  I decided to give life one more chance, but this time I was asking for help because I know I can’t do it alone.  I know that now.”  Hannah put everything she had left onto one person.  Did he ever really have a chance?

                Hannah went to see Mr. Porter, the school counselor.  As Hannah begins telling Mr. Porter how desperately she needs everything to stop, including life, he responds the same way he did with Tyler.  He seems to be trying to help.  I think he really did, but somewhere, he turns what they are feeling around on them, holding them responsible for what has happened, where they have ended up.  Clay goes to see Mr. Porter to give him the tapes.  Before he hands them over, he confronts Mr. Porter.  As typical with rape victims, Hannah is unsure whether it really was rape.  They tend to blame themselves, so Hannah could not say, without a doubt, that it was rape.  Hannah asked him to promise her that he would go to jail, he tells her that if she cannot prove that he raped her, she can just move on.  That’s what I said, he told her to move on, and then he let her walk away.  Hannah had been recording the entire conversation with him.  Her last attempt at life, in her eyes, failed.  The next scenes of the episode reveal her last day in this life.  They show her fill the tub, open the razor blades, get in the water, and then cut her wrists.  They show the whole brutal moment, the hesitation and contemplation, the moment she got up the courage, if you can call it that, and then every bloody and painful moment of the blade slicing her veins open.  Then, it shows her fade away as the blood-stained water pours into the floor.  They show the moment her mother walks in, then her father, the whole time Clay is telling Mr. Porter it is his fault.  Then, after Mr. Porter tells Clay there is no way of knowing why Hannah did what she did, Clay pulls out the tapes, and tells him that he is tape number 13.

Bryce Walker: 13 Reasons...Episode 12

                As the kids are subpoenaed to testify about Hannah’s suicide, Bryce tries to reach out to Justin and the kids contemplate telling the truth.  To me, none of that is relevant.  Instead, my mind is drawn to that one moment. 
              Hannah happens upon a small party at Bryce’s house.  There are a few people in the hot tub.  They convince Hannah to jump in.  After a while, Hannah is left in the hot tub alone.  As she sits there, trying to relax, Bryce jumps in.  As Bryce starts to make his move, Hannah tries to get out, but Bryce won’t let her.  Instead, he turns her around, and he rapes her.  That’s right, Bryce raped Hannah.  As he had his way with her, she died inside.  Hannah says there are two kinds of death.  One is the natural way your body runs out.  The other is to die a little bit at a time until it is too late.  After everything that had happened, after the entire school slut shamed her, after the boys in the school took a piece of her innocence at a time, Hannah lost her virginity being raped by the guy everyone treated like a god.  If that was all that happened in the episode, I would have turned it off and never watched the last one.  Oddly, it reminds me of the gospel.  If Jesus dying on the cross was the end of the story, then there is no hope.  But He rose, and all is not lost.  In the show, Hannah did not rise from the dead.  Instead, Clay found justice.  See, he hid a tape recorder in his backpack.  Since Marcus had set him up to get caught with weed in his backpack before, Clay used that to his advantage.  He went to Bryce’s house under the pretense of buying weed.  Then, he confronted Bryce about the rape, got beat up, and then got the confession.  When you think that is the best part, it gets better.  Courtney tells her fathers the truth.  Sheri turns herself in to the cops.  Jessica dumps out all her alcohol and then takes a very hot and long shower to clean all the guilt off.  It begins to feel like there is going to be a happy ending, until someone decides to follow Hannah’s example.

Clay Jensen: 13 Reasons...Episode 11

                 This is the episode we have all been waiting for.  After so much suspense, so much bonding with Clay Jensen’s character, we need to know what he did to Hannah.  As Clay and Tony sit on the swings at the park, Tony warns Clay that his tape is next.  He offers to sit with him while he listens.  Clay hesitates because he is afraid.  He asks Tony repeatedly if he killed Hannah Baker.  Tony tries to avoid the question, but Clay asks again.  “Did I kill Hannah Baker?”  Tony shakes his head yes.

                Hannah surprises her listeners by saying that, even though this is Clay’s tape, the blame is on her.  As the tape goes on, Clay is shocked at a statement that Hannah makes and tells Tony that she isn’t telling the truth.  Tony responds, “She is telling her truth.”  When Clay asks Tony why he has to be there, Tony says, “Because I don’t know what your truth is or what you are going to do when you find out hers.”  So, what really happened?  Everything that has already happened came crashing down on Hannah when Clay finally makes his move.  She had already been too hurt.  She had already been traumatized.  At this point, even a healthy relationship was traumatizing for her.  All the moments that left her feeling objectified were transferred onto Clay in that moment.  So, Clay’s tape is not Hannah’s way of telling him how he killed her, it is Hannah’s way of apologizing to him.  Clay was the one person that could have saved her, but she was too afraid to let him.  She was too afraid to hope.

                Throughout the episode, Jessica spends time with Bryce to provoke Justin into telling her the truth about Bryce raping her.  She had been getting bits and pieces of that night, that moment.  She knew the truth, but Justin kept telling her it was not true, so she forced his hand.  In the end, he broke.  He finally tells her the truth.  It was the only way she would have ever been able to heal anyway.  Otherwise, it would have destroyed her.  Believe me, I know.  The truth will truly set you free. 

Sherri Holland: 13 Reasons...Episode 10

After Hannah leaves the room where Jessica is raped, she gets a ride from Sherri Holland.  Sherri is the captain of the cheerleading team, the sweet girl, the girl I never expected to be on the tapes.  What does she do?  She does the wrong thing.  She makes a mistake, and then she ignores it, or tries to.  Sherri takes Hannah home, but as she looks for her cell phone while driving, Sherri hits a stop sign.  Hannah tries to get Sherri to call the police, but Sherri insists that she can’t do that because her father will be angry.  When Hannah fights back, Sherri leaves Hannah on the side of the road.  While Hannah looks for a phone to inform the police that the stop sign is down, there is an accident and someone dies. 

This brings up a couple of issues.  First, Sherri had been drinking, but assumed that since she could do a cartwheel she could drive.  Second, she was more concerned with her cell phone than she was the road.  Even I have almost wrecked when my phone went off while I was driving.  Once, my boys were in the car with me.  Sherri wasn’t as lucky as I was, if you believe in luck.  Sherri spends many afternoons with the couple that hit Jeff in that accident.  She tried to make up for it, but she still held on to her secret.  She claimed that it was her own, but the truth belonged to so many others.

Jeff was a good friend to Clay.  After Clay tutored him and helped him pass a class, Jeff decided he wanted to help Clay with girls.  He continuously encouraged Clay to work on his relationship with Hannah.  Jeff seemed like a good guy.  His car was full of empty beer bottles so everyone assumed he was drunk.  Even if Jeff wasn’t drunk, he had been drinking that night.  I don’t know how many kids died in car crashes when I went to high school.  Each year, at least four kids died.  We had fender benders constantly from Patrick Henry High School to the middle of Ashland, VA.  That stretch would be packed with cars after school every day.  Many of us were already getting high as we left the parking lot.  This story is so typical, a kid leaving a party insisting they are sober, but they die anyway.

Justin Foley Part 2: 13 Reasons...Episode 9

                This episode is hard to watch.  It makes your stomach turn and leaves a lump in your throat the size of a mountain.  What could happen that would make Hannah give two tapes to Justin Foley?  Bryce Walker happened.  Justin and Bryce are close.  With Justin’s terrible home life, Bryce has been a solid ground to stand on. 

                When summer break is over, Clay gets to the tape of Jessica’s party, the one they have been talking about, the one they have tried to keep him from hearing.  What Justin told Jessica is that he and Jessica hooked up and then passed out.  No big deal, right?  That is not the story Hannah tells.  According to Hannah, Jess and Justin start to hook up, but Jess is so wasted that she passes out, so Justin leaves her to sleep instead.  That is the right thing to do.  Unfortunately, Bryce is in the hallway, also wasted.  Justin tries to shut the door and get Bryce to walk away, but Bryce has other plans.  He wants Jessica.  This is where your stomach turns.  Jessica is so drunk that she is passed out.  She is completely non-functional.  Justin understands that this is a good time to walk away, but Bryce?  Bryce decides this is a good time to take advantage of the situation and how he has been there for Justin for so long.  He flings Justin out of his way and on to the ground, and then he walks through the door.  Little did he know, Hannah was in the room hiding because Jessica and Justin busted in while she was on the floor crying.  Bryce rapes Jessica.  Bryce rapes Jessica.  Yes, Bryce rapes Jessica.  I guess this scene hurts me so deeply because I identify with her.  I, too, have been raped while unconscious.  At 11 years old, 12 years old, 13 years old, until my dad finally showed up and whisked me away to safety.  In the show, on this night, no one showed up for Jessica.  They are graphic about the scene.  I had to turn away.  I am sure most people do when it comes up.  This is all I can say about this episode.

Ryan Shaver: 13 Reasons...Episode 8

               As Clay struggles with the loss of Hannah and everything that goes along with the tapes, Tony tries to encourage him by climbing a small mountain with him.  When they accomplish the feat, Tony finally explains how he knows what Hannah wanted with the tapes and why he has been close to her parents.  The night Hannah died, she reached out to Tony.  Since Hannah was very emotional, Tony hadn’t wanted to deal with her drama that night.  He waited for her to leave and then went to get the tapes she left on the porch.  As Tony listened to the first tape, he realized what she was doing but, by the time he got to her house, she was already gone.  He explains in detail how the rescue workers handled her body with such disgrace.  They didn’t even realize how insensitive they were being.  This scene gripped me.  Listening to the horror of what transpired the moments before and after Hannah’s death is beyond sad, it is pitiful.  The one person that Hannah had to turn to ignored her because he couldn’t handle how dramatic she was.  I identify with that because many females that have experienced that much trauma tend to be dramatic about it.  For many of us, drama is in our nature anyway.  We can be high strung, emotional, and overly sensitive.  This is not news.  Most of us already know this.  That night, Tony just couldn’t handle it.

                Ryan Shaver is the school magazine editor.  When he meets Hannah at the library’s poem reading, they hit it off and he begins helping her write her feelings.  This would have been a great outlet for Hannah and would have strengthened her resilience greatly, had Ryan not betrayed her and posted it in the school magazine.  Even though Ryan posted the poem anonymously, most the school knew that Hannah was the author.  Since the same people that had done all those terrible things to her had no sense of what she was saying, they assumed the racy poem was just about intimacy.  However, Hannah was really calling them on their ignorance.  I am posting the poem below because I think it reveals the truth that Hannah tried so desperately to get people to understand…her innocence that was butchered by the lack of everyone else’s.

"Today I am wearing lacy black underwear for the sole purpose of knowing I am wearing them, and underneath that, I am absolutely naked. And I’ve got skin. Miles and miles of skin; I’ve got skin to cover all my thoughts like saran wrap that you can see through to what leftovers are inside from the night before. And despite what you might think, my skin is not rough; nor is it bullet proof. My skin is soft, and smooth, and easily scarred. But that doesn’t matter, right? You don’t care about how soft my skin is. You just want to hear about what my fingers do in the dark. But what if all they do is crack open windows so I can see lightening through the clouds?  What if all they crave is a jungle gym to climb for a taste of fresher air? What if all they reach for is a notebook or a hand to hold? But that’s not the story you want. You are licking your lips and baring your teeth. Just once I would like to be the direction someone else is going. I don’t need to be the water in the well. I don’t need to be the well. But I’d like to not be the ground anymore. I’d like to not be the thing people dig their hands in anymore. Some girls know all the lyrics to each other’s songs. They find harmonies in their laughter. Their linked elbows echo in tune. What if I can’t hum on key? What if my melodies are the ones nobody hears? Some people can recognize a tree, a front yard, and know they’ve made it home. How many circles can I walk in before I give up looking? How long before I’m lost for good. It must be possible to swim in the ocean of the one you love without drowning. It must be possible to swim without becoming water yourself. But I keep swallowing what I thought was air. I keep finding stones tied to my feet." - Hannah Baker, 13 Reasons Why