Alexis Geneva Knox was “exceptional, from the minute she was born,” her mom says. Alexis was a talented oboist. A budding humanitarian. A teenager whose adventurous spirit led her to an internship in the Oklahoma state capitol and an exchange program in Belgium while she was in high school, and whose compassion compelled her to befriend nursing home residents and English language learners closer to home. A brilliant student, Alexis received early admission to Barnard College in New York City, where she kept her grades high while racking up a jaw-dropping résumé of extracurricular experiences—including internships with then-US Sen. Hillary Clinton (D–NY) and feminist icon Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Foundation for Women. There seemed to be no limit to how bright Knox’s light would shine.
In an instant, however, that light was put out. In the spring of 2006, just weeks away from graduation, Alexis was in a head-on collision with a semi-trailer truck on a North Carolina back road, which killed her immediately. Susan Knox Kopta, struggling to come to terms with her daughter’s death, immediately thought of Alexis’ diagnosis with bipolar disorder months earlier. Alexis never fully accepted it— perhaps a result of growing up with a father who lived with unmanaged bipolar disorder. Kopta remembered the multiple emergency hospitalizations, the barrage of prescriptions, including an antipsychotic, and the day Alexis told her she’d quit her meds, cold turkey. “Mom, I’m not psychotic, and I’m not taking these,” she told Kopta, before spiraling into suicidal depression. Kopta thought about one of her last conversations with Alexis, on the way to her third inpatient stay: “She said, ‘I’m done, mom.’ We talked about suicide, and I said, ‘That’s not an option.’ Her words stuck in my head.”
Despite assurances from local police that Alexis’ death was a tragic accident and not intentional, Kopta—who’d built a career as a successful research attorney in the Oklahoma appellate court system—was overwhelmed by self-blame and grief. She left her job, moved, remarried, and for more than a decade believed Alexis, laden under the weight of her mental illness, had purposely driven into that semi.
“As a parent, you feel like it’s your responsibility because they’re your child, and you’ve got to keep them alive. I think I was ready to absorb the blame. It was kind of a natural reaction of a parent, when you lose your child, to feel you failed. And that’s not fair.”
— Susan Kopta
“As a parent, you feel like it’s your responsibility because they’re your child, and you’ve got to keep them alive,” Kopta says. “I think I was ready to absorb the blame. It was kind of a natural reaction of a parent, when you lose your child, to feel you failed. And that’s not fair.”
Two actions helped pull Kopta out of her despair, she says. The first was reading The Book of Joy, by Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, who admonish readers who are ruminating on something negative to detach from it and look at it from afar. The second action, a direct result of the first, was that Kopta began to write. For two years, she detached from the events of 2006 and soberly wrote down everything she remembered about Alexis, from her birth to her untimely death. Through this process, Kopta started to shift her focus, from blaming herself to instead supporting families of young people with bipolar disorder and becoming an advocate for the services and systems that evaded her own daughter during a time of crucial need. What Alexis needed, she realized, was psychiatric rehabilitation, “where you’re told how to take care of your new condition, what it is, what to expect, and how to avoid triggers.” Kopta built a resource website for families, bipolarlinks. com, with plans to attend college health fairs—the book she eventually published, Ballasted Wings: Why That Day? (Lulu Publishing Services, 2019), in hand—with the hope that she could help both universities and families recognize and respond to mental health crises in students. In 2021, Kopta gave Sargent’s Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation (CPR) a substantial financial gift to launch Flourishing Families, a six-week support group for the loved ones of young adults living with a mental health challenge. She became a supporter of CPR’s NITEO program—an intensive, semester-long cohort helping college students living with a mental health condition (which affects one in three first-year students, according to U.S. News & World Report) “to develop wellness tools, academic skills, resilience, and work-readiness.” Kopta believes Alexis would have benefited from such a program, had she lived long enough to find it.
“I heard a really nice quote the other day: ‘Don’t just leave the world a better place, leave the world how you wish you would have found it,’” Kopta says. “If I get to help the world to be a place where resources are provided as standard of care for students immediately after diagnosis—and through NITEO they’re back in college and back on track, back on their feet—if I can even play a little part in helping the momentum of that, that’s what I want to do.”