Sophie’s Google searches suggest that she was obsessed with autokabalesis, which means jumping off a high place. Autodefenestration, jumping out a window, is a subset of autokabalesis, I guess, but that’s not what she wanted to do. My daughter wanted a bridge, or a mountain.
Which is weird. She’d climbed Mount Kilimanjaro just months before as part of what she called a “micro-retirement” from her job as a public health policy analyst, her joy at reaching the summit absolutely palpable in the photos. There are crooked wooden signs at Uhuru Peak that say “Africa’s highest point” and “World’s highest free-standing mountain” and one underneath that says something about it being one of the world’s largest volcanoes, but I can’t read the whole sign because in every picture radiantly smiling faces in mirrored sunglasses obscure the words.
In her pack, she brought rubber baby hands to take to the summit for those photos. It was a signature of sorts, these hollowed rubber mini hands, showing up in her college graduation pictures, in friends’ wedding pictures. We bought boxes of them for her memorial service. Her stunned friends and family members halfheartedly worried them on and off the ends of their fingers as speakers struggled to speak.
They praised Sophie’s wit and her ability to be entirely herself. Humor is so often a zero-sum game. The truly funny, the people who make you rip-snort or squeeze your thighs together in near-incontinence, are often a little mean. Mining common insecurities, they win our hearts by saying things we fret over but don’t speak aloud.
Sophie was hilarious and it was almost never at someone else’s expense. She had the alchemical ability to make people laugh while building them up. It’s so difficult in this world to be an enthusiast, to be excited about cool stuff, to love things openly. The photographers in the family groused about her ruining pictures with Snidely Whiplash devilish eyebrows, theatrical googly eyes and an open-mouthed silent roar that meant something like “Beast mode!” Her openness was a universal theme for the dozen or so people who spoke at her funeral.
Her open book turned out to have a hidden compartment. In July, five months after her death, we discovered that Sophie Rottenberg, our only child, had confided for months in a ChatGPT A.I. therapist called Harry. We had spent so many hours combing through journals and voice memos for clues to what happened. It was her best friend who thought to check this one last thing, the A.I.’s chat logs. Sophie, a largely problem-free 29-year-old badass extrovert who fiercely embraced life, killed herself this winter during a short and curious illness, a mix of mood and hormone symptoms. We were still pursuing a diagnosis: Was major depressive disorder throwing her hormones out of whack, or was hormonal dysregulation causing a cascade of physical and emotional symptoms? She didn’t wait to find out.
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Told ChatGPT Before She
Took Her Life appeared first on New York Times.
