MINNEAPOLIS - On the day he’d bury his daughter, Mark Catlin stepped out of a chapel and into the fresh air.
“Nice day for a walk,” he said, looking up, and on this morning in late March, the weather was flawless: cloudless, crisp, a bright blue sky.
He took a breath and set off, heading down the cemetery’s path and falling behind the procession of cars ahead, talking as gravel crunched beneath his shoes. He asked if the memorial service, laboriously planned near the lakefront cycling trails Kelly Catlin had explored before becoming a silver medalist in the 2016 Olympics, had been good enough. He apologized if it had been too sad. The afternoon reception, he assured friends and visitors, should be more lively.
A few paces up the winding path, a longtime friend shook his head. Mark, the friend whispered, would do anything to distract himself – he always had – in this case to avoid facing “the darkness”: Kelly’s suicide two weeks earlier, her thoughts during those final days and weeks, the way she’d planned her death in the same meticulous, results-oriented way she’d lived her life.
Back on the walkway, Mark wore a blank expression as he accepted condolences and told people about his plans for the coming weeks. Eventually, he reached a gravesite surrounded by mourners, and he stopped at the rear of the group as if happening upon a stranger’s funeral.
Gradually, the faces turned, and after a moment, Mark noticed his wife Carolyn and two other children waiting near a charcoal-colored casket.
“I guess we’ll go lay her to rest now,” he said, stepping forward.
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Next to the computer in the basement of his home, Mark has a notebook labeled “To Do: Kelly” with seven projects listed: photos to organize by year, 60 hours of video to edit, a bio to write, calls to make and emails he’ll send after jolting awake most nights around 2. But now he’s working on No. 1: the enormous memorial he’s designing alongside a touch-screen information kiosk, like something at a museum, he imagines at Kelly’s graveside.
“So people can remember,” he says.
He wants people to know Kelly wasn’t just the daughter of Carolyn Emory and Mark Catlin, the triplet sister of Christine and Colin. She was more than an intelligent but socially awkward 23-year-old from the Twin Cities. Kelly built herself into an Olympian and a three-time world champion in the four-rider group race known as the team pursuit. She was fluent in Chinese and had been first-chair violinist in her high school orchestra, a competitive pit bull who folded origami and played badminton with the same joyless ferocity that she brought into a velodrome or classroom.
Mark is a retired medical pathologist, and he’s learned these past few months that young people in the United States – and, in particular, young women and girls – are killing themselves at a rate the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers a national health crisis. Between 2007 and 2015, according to a CDC study, the suicide rate doubled among females aged 15 to 19 and reached a 40-year high. Major depressive episodes and suicide attempts have skyrocketed among women under 35, according to a 12-year analysis by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, as a society fixated on collecting and comparing achievements seemingly has conditioned a promising generation of young people to ignore emotional alarms – insomnia, anxiety and depression – and work toward the next goal.
Sometimes that pressure comes from family or peer groups, and it can manifest itself in ways good and bad: pushing certain individuals to astonishing heights and others to alarming depths. Kelly, though, found herself at both extremes – climbing the Olympic medal stand three years before taking her own life in the bedroom of her Stanford apartment – and seemed determined from an early age to prove herself in increasingly intense arenas, only exacerbating her best and worst tendencies.
And even that, mental health experts say, is more and more common as suicide has been on a consistent rise among individuals born between 1982 and 1999. Kat Giordano, Kelly’s former roommate at Stanford who discovered her body, has experienced the highs and lows of existing in a culture that seems to have convinced its young people that being average is unacceptable – leading some to grow up believing they must be exceptional or die trying.
“I am someone who thrives under pressure, but ... you’re surrounded by it,” said Giordano, a Stanford Law School student who in 2018 graduated magna cum laude from Princeton. “It feels like the best motivation and something dangerous simultaneously.”
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On the day of Kelly’s funeral, Colin Catlin sat on a nearby tombstone and watched the gravediggers bury his sister. He already had taken photographs of her casket, crouching and experimenting with angles to find the perfect light. He’d picked up handfuls of dirt and let it slide through his fingers.
“With her to the very end,” he’d say later, going on to point out it was just his way of coping.
His sister Christine’s, though, was to bolt toward a car once the eulogies concluded. If her father and brother had somehow found ways to channel the emotions of the previous weeks, Christine felt engulfed by them: despair, anger, regret. None, though, was as prevalent as guilt, and considering the family she was born into, she knew lingering at the grave would lead to a breakdown – exposing her yet again as the black sheep of the Catlin flock.
“I was,” she’d say later, “the weak one.”
Triplet siblings are often measured against one another from birth – Kelly won her first race by being the first to enter the world, a minute ahead of Christine – and the competitions and labeling never stop. Kelly was the cyborg, ruthless and analytical by third grade, and Colin was the bohemian: a beekeeper, Eagle Scout and gardener. Christine, though, was the crier. She’d fly upstairs after a cross word or remark about her weight, sobbing and reading alone. She’d disappear from conversations and ruminate on what had been said, channeling her feelings into short stories and plays.
During those early years, Kelly would act out the roles in Christine’s imagination – she took home theater as seriously as everything else – but as time passed, the competitions became more intense. Mark, for reasons the triplets wouldn’t understand until much later, seemed fixated on his children growing into highly successful adults. His own father had been a heavy drinker, and Mark and his seven siblings had grown up in poverty and fear. His dad died young, and Mark beat his family’s odds by putting himself through medical school and entering the most emotionless of specialties: looking through a microscope. And for decades his charge was finding answers that, to others, were invisible – but, if he zoomed in enough, were there somewhere.
Along the way, he decided that when the time came, he’d raise his own kids by surrounding them with activities, reminding them of traps, exposing them to sports and the arts and travel and culture – everything, it would seem, but the possibility of failure.
Still, the triplets learned the art of strategy and the way to properly build things: Mark’s 70-foot retaining wall, a modest field of hop plants, a sprawling tomato garden. Mark coached their soccer teams and introduced them to culture during trips to Italy, South Africa and England. Watching television was forbidden, and the siblings were allowed to watch movies only while using an exercise machine. When they were 8, Christine says, their $20 monthly allowance depended on whether they exercised 30 minutes a day, five days a week. They had to log their totals on a chart that required a parent to initial it.
Time passed, and at least on the surface the plan was working: Colin carefully tracked his workouts at age 14, and his grape jelly recipe won third place in the Minnesota State Fair. Christine was 13 when she published her first book, a kids’ guide to raising monarch butterflies, and was a distance runner with a resting heart rate of 45 beats per minute. Kelly, to her siblings’ constant discouragement, excelled at most everything she took on – skiing, fencing, competitive shooting – and the kids learned that their parents were supportive, though earning their approval was sometimes a different matter.
“A pet peeve of mine: So many parents just automatically say: ‘Good job,’” Carolyn says even now. “Their kids are successful getting a fork to their mouth: ‘Good job!’”
Kelly, pursuing whatever it was she was pursuing, simply amplified her intensity and determination, seeming to never break. But Colin looked forward to his classical guitar lessons because the instructor allowed him to cry. Christine increasingly felt like an outsider, once writing a story about a family of opera-singing mice from the perspective of the one mouse who couldn’t sing.
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The years passed, Kelly’s intensity grew, and Mark felt equally fascinated with and alarmed by his daughter.
“She has created this lofty image of herself that she is forced to maintain and live up to,” he wrote to a friend in 2010, when Kelly was 14. “We have talked to her about starting over in high school – not sure if she can.”
She was spending an increasing amount of time alone, staying home on weekends to study or put in extra hours on an indoor training bike. She recoiled if anyone touched her and locked herself in her room for violin practice, vowing to become first chair, and after her death, relatives would struggle to reconcile a certain dichotomy: These were the extremes that made Kelly Kelly, but they were also the things that would cost them Kelly. Should they have stopped her? Could they have? She’d refuse to admit defeat or even to feeling stress, preferring to write in one of her three diaries and add to “The Code,” a list of personal guidelines she’d begun honing in third grade.
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Kelly stepped off the medal stand in Rio de Janeiro, and soon after her smile was gone. It wasn’t just the end of a long and grueling journey; she hadn’t felt this connected to something since the triplets began drifting apart in middle school.
Kelly returned to Minnesota and her solitary discipline, back to the things that made her, and looked toward an uncertain future. Following her graduation from the University of Minnesota, where she completed degrees in biomedical engineering and Chinese, she applied to Harvard and Stanford for graduate school. Kelly wrote essays, recommitted herself to the violin and writing, made her lists – “loaf of bread (28 pieces for breakfast and lunch)” – and sometimes planned her outfits weeks in advance.
She joined a professional road cycling team, Rally UCH, and planned for the international cycling schedule: races in Canada, Chile, Belarus, the United Kingdom. She traveled with teammates but often remained disconnected, and if the talk turned to gossip or relationships, Kelly would leave the table. If she said anything, it was to point out that these discussions are pointless and that dating was, a teammate would recall, a “waste of resources.” When a new cyclist introduced herself with hugs, the veterans said nothing as the rookie approached Kelly, who recoiled with such disgust that the teammates wondered if she might throw a punch. If there were team-building exercises or games, Kelly could usually be found in her room.
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In the fall of 2018, Kelly had come to Stanford, posted a welcome note from Giordano next to an Olympic flag on her dresser and leaned into a future she was unsure she wanted. But she was here, another box checked, and she tried to overpower her doubts as she always had. She made her lists, chopped away at her violin, repeatedly cleaned her bicycles.
And that was part of the problem: Cycling was a chore now, not an escape. In October, she crashed and broke her arm. Another crash led to a concussion. She had opened herself to new friendships, sure, but what about the politics of being an Olympian? She had begun to dread the grind, 40 days at a track camp between November and December 2018, and when she returned to school there waited a mountain of work. It felt overwhelming, and one day last year she at last allowed herself to cry.
Late last January, with a chocolate chip cookie at her side, Kelly stood at her desk and began typing, “Well hello, one and all!”
In what eventually became an eight-page letter to six people – Mark and Carolyn, Christine and Colin, a cycling coach and a former high school classmate – Kelly included a confession: Yes, she cried. More and more often she’d wake in the night, feeling no guilt, and just let it rip.
On this evening, she typed that she felt “somehow unequal” to Stanford and that she’d sent a collectible dagger out for sharpening, intending to stab herself in the heart. She was curious about the sensation of bleeding out, she wrote, going on to explain a fantasy of becoming a serial killer with an elaborate and meticulous ritual. “Oh, the drama I could create,” she wrote.
Instead, she had rented two cylinders of compressed helium and waited for the halls to clear before dragging them to her room. She ordered supplies to construct an “exit hood,” and on the evening of Jan. 25, she began writing her email. She was planning to end her life in six days because, on Jan. 31, she was scheduled to meet the queen of Spain. Instead, she’d be dead, and even Kelly Catlin’s suicide note had to be perfect. “I really did want a nice hook opener,” she wrote.
Kelly finished her documents and waited her six days. On Jan. 31, she gave herself the morning off from training, and before sliding in her ear buds and twisting the helium valve, she had one last thing to say.
“I was dancing before the end. Just so you know,” she typed before hitting send. “I woke up, danced a dance, played my fiddle, and died.”
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But then, hours later, she woke up.
In the moments and hours after Kelly’s suicide attempt, those who’d received her email tried to make sense of it. Was this, as Colin initially suspected, a dark and elaborate prank? Her parents, panicked after having been alerted by the high school classmate, called Stanford police. Kelly had never been evaluated for anxiety or depression, her father would say, and none of her family members would recall Kelly ever mentioning suicide.
Kelly, according to relatives, was perhaps as confused by her survival as anyone. She had done as her research suggested, and indeed the helium had caused her to drift off. But after a while, she’d write in her journal later, she simply regained consciousness; the first thing she remembered was standing fully clothed in the shower. Colin would say authorities had arrived, discovering Kelly’s materials and rushing her to Stanford Hospital, where she’d spend seven days on an involuntary hold. Kelly either couldn’t remember, or wouldn’t reveal, much else.
“What I can say with certainty,” she’d write later, “is that I have indeed been given a second chance and I do not intend to waste it.”
Later, Kelly wrote out the pros and cons of living and dying. She distracted herself with chores, cleaning her bike so long that the day’s perfect moment had passed. One day she was reminding herself of her strength – “I can fight through this,” she wrote. “I can live for tomorrow” – and the next she was chastising herself for delaying the inevitable.
She texted Christine, kept reminding her that she she was still there. She sent an article about the Italian town where Stradivarius violins are made, shipped her a Chinese string instrument called an erhu, began planning a road trip to northern California. Though Kelly had mentioned a second possible suicide attempt as an aside, Christine believed her sister had given her a deadline. Christine would, before the month was out, drive west with Scottie, her chihuahua mix, and surprise Kelly at Stanford. Christine would listen as long as it took.
Then, on March 8, Christine’s phone rang again. This time, Kelly had done what she’d set out to. She always did.
