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He is nameless, faceless, thoroughly anonymous. Just a simple bar on a graph in a government report.

Yet he seems lonely even in that representation. On a bar chart of child suicides in Virginia in 2007, his bar stands off to the left, alone, above the number 10, denoting his age.

A statistical outlier.

Scan to the right, and you pass a series of zeroes over ages 11, 12, 13. Then a clump of teen suicides – all of them tragic, yet not so much as that solitary bar off to the left.

Was he an outlier in life, too, as alone with whatever sadness or circumstance lead him to this as his remote spot on the chart suggests?

I had pulled up annual report of Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia looking for data on alcohol related deaths. I paged through dozens of charts, graphs, maps before coming to “Suicide Deaths of Children” on page 84.

And there he was.

The questions rushed up to me: Who was he? Whose child was he? What could make a 10-year-old so unhappy as to think, at that tender age, that there was no need to go on? What about the poor parents, or whoever cared for him? Somewhere, there’s a mother, a father, a grandparent, a brother, a sister, a teacher, a neighbor, a friend, wondering what they missed. Could they have done more?

There’s only my wondering, and not much else to know in the report. He was one of 19 child suicides that year. I could guess at how he died. Most likely it was by gunshot or hanging. Those methods account for all but three of the child suicides that year. One inhaled a toxic agent, one jumped from a high place, one drowned.

I have a 10-year-old. My wife teaches 10-year-olds. Ten-year-olds don’t do these things.

Well, they do. Remember Aquan Lewis? A little more than a month ago, he was found hanging by his shirt collar on a hook in a bathroom at Oakton Elementary School in Evanston, Ill. Investigators found his footprint on a toilet. A coroner ruled the death a suicide.

He was in the fifth grade.

I have a fifth grader.

He did not float.

Harry succumbed yesterday, but not to that cliche of fish death. Hadley, my 10-year-old, found him lying on his side on the dayglow gravel at the bottom of his little tank when she went to feed him.  One vacant eye was cast upward at the water's surface. We tapped the tank, and only the disturbance in the current moved him.

There were tears. Harper, my 4-year-old, looked into the tank and bawled. Today there will be a small fish funeral.

Harry will be remembered by this data editor as a living example of the outlier -- that freak record in a database that doesn't match with the others.  Your typical betta, or Siamese Fighting Fish, lives two or three years.

Harry was six.

We inherited Harry from Hadley's best friend, Tara, when her family moved from Roanoke to Atlanta not quite a year ago. On the way out of town, they stopped by our house and dropped off Harry, a can of food, a gallon of water already treated for use in his tank, and some instructions.

Even then, Harry was past five and already a marvel for it.  Hadley fed him dutifully. Harper fought to help out and take a turn feeding him. I changed his water and kept his tank clean. The rest of the time, he circled his little world on the buffet in the dining room.

Lately, though, he circled less, his vivid color began to fade, and he seemed more interested in drifting down to the gravel than looking up expectantly for another food pellet. We knew his time was near.

So here's to the fish named for the Boy who Lived. He was fittingly named, it turned out. Like the young wizard, he defied the odds and just kept going and going.

Farewell to the Fish who Lived.

Ok, so maybe I'm not that smart. I should have occured to me that a sandwich with chicken and bacon and cheese wouldn't be healthy. But it was from Panera Bread. That's no fast food joint dishin' out triple Whoppers and supersizin' french fries and selling soda pop in cups the size of gallon paint cans.

It's Panera, it's hip, it's clean, it's modern. It bespeaks a lifestyle, doesn't it? Somewhere in all that, doesn't the Panera brand at least imply "healthy?"

But sometimes you have to see the cold hard facts. That chicken-bacon-dijon sandwich is packin' 36 grams of fat, friends. And that puts it squarely in the same league as the super-fat sins on fast food menus. A Big Mac? Try 29 grams of fat. A Wendy's double, 40 grams. Burger King's Whopper, 40 grams. A large popcorn chicken from KFC, 40 grams.

The point here is not to whack Panera for selling me something I decided I wanted. That was clearly my choice. It just wasn't an informed choice. Here I am making my living as a data guy and talking up how you need the data to make smart decision in your life, and I'm clogging my arteries because I didn't have the data.

But the data is out there. All of these fat gram totals came from the websites of the restaurants that serve up these sandwiches.
Panera
McDonald's
Wendy's
Burger King
KFC

Before you order that Triple Whopper with cheese, you might want to know it has 66 grams of fat. You could save a few grams by swinging by Panera instead and ordering the Chipotle Chicken on French Bread with it's slimming 56 grams of fat.

There are healthier choices on all these menus, but until you check out the data, you may not know which ones they are.