Katie was a young college student who hanged herself in her dorm room after years of struggle with family, friendship, romance, body image, and failed aspirations. During her struggles she compiled a 200-page diary in five books.

We meet Katie by way of David Lester’s Katie’s Diary. Lester’s volume first presents Katie’s reading and writing of her own life in searing clarity and, it would seem, as tragic distortion.

The second part of the volume consists of a series of readings of the diary and of Katie by a team of experts:  professors of psychology, clinician, cognitive therapist, social worker, Jungian analyst, and thanologist.  

The “Forward” describes the aim of the volume.

It is the rare document that captures the conflict and complexity of an individual’s stream of consciousness, as it alternately flows, is impeded, and torrentially cascades onward toward an end that can be envisioned confidently only in retrospect.

Katie’s diary charts this dramatic inner course, and it is into this often-turbulent current that Lester and his eight contributors wade into in an effort to understand the forces that give it its tragic momentum.

In the course of their reflective and deep-going analysis, they draw on sociological, feminist, developmental, linguistic, cognitive, psychological, literary, psychiatric, archetypal, spiritual, and psychodynamic perspectives to reveal the dominant internal and external structures and processes with which Katie contends, and in doing so, reveal as much to the reader about the possible utility of these conceptual frameworks as they do about Katie’s ultimate suicide.

The volume — subtitled, Unlocking the Mystery of a Suicide — falls into the sub-genre of suicide literacy called the suicide autopsy. Katie’s Diary has a moral that Katie could not understand in her own life and toward her death. Understanding is made possible by a team of experts engaged in “reflective and deep-going analysis.”

Through analysis, Katie’s life and death are unearthed according to “structures and processes” and “tragic momentum.” Katie was a victim of design and inertia within and all around her. Katie is the moral of the story that she never learned in life.

True clarity requires retrospection as post-mortem and evaluation by way of autopsia, as self-optics (auto optos) as being seen by others since Katie could not truly see herself. Katie is what loomed unto herself, a life we may now read in full view in the light of day.

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David Lester, ed., Katie’s Diary: Unlocking the Mystery of a Suicide (New York: Routledge, 2004).

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In the final clash between Khan and Kirk laser beams spray back and forth and torpedoes fly everywhichway. Both starships are struck and damaged, but the Reliant is smashed and disabled and rendered powerless. Defeated once again Khan plays his final card. He activates the Genesis Project to blow himself up to take the Enterprise and Kirk and Spock and everyone aboard with him. There is figurative spitting and stabbing but the absolutely outrageous strength is decisively the Genesis Project.

Just before the explosion Mr. Spock dies the noble death of self-sacrifice when he repairs the core reactor so the Enterprise can reach warp speed to escape the explosion. He floods himself with radiation in the process and does not make it out of the reactor chamber alive.

The massive explosion of the Genesis bomb aboard the Reliant catalyzes all the lifeless dust in the Mutara Nebula to give birth to a new planet of lush green teeming to survive and to thrive and to propagate.

And in the closing moments of this story of war and self-sacrifice Kirk discovers that he has a son. They embrace and he is now excited to be a father. In the end, Kirk stands on the bridge of the Enterprise and looks out on the bright new planet Genesis where his friend Mr. Spock has been laid to rest.

You okay, Jim?, asks Bones. How do you feel?

Young, Doctor. I feel young.