note:  this is not a happy story. if you’ve read and liked other things I’ve written, let me just say this is unlike the other items I’ve written and posted here before.

One of my best friends took his own life almost eighteen months ago, and I don’t know why. After all this time, one of the hardest things is the certainty that I will never know all the reasons why.

I miss him.  So much.

It happened again yesterday. I was sifting through some old stuff in a forgotten outback of my computer hard drive, looking for a lost document, and I found something he’d scanned and sent to me. It was an “over-the-top” mail appeal from an organization in the disability community in which he and I were both active. At the moment he sent it, he was in a mild outrage at the arrogance and misrepresentation of the truth that he perceived in the mail piece.   And seeing it again yesterday, I had to chuckle inside, imagining the reaction he must have had to the piece, and I can just see him thinking, “I’ll scan it and send it to John. It’s sure to get him ticked-off too.”  (For the record, back then it did exactly that).   But yesterday, at the reminder of seeing it with his handwriting on it, the old familiar pangs of my pain at his death … and his absence … ran through my heart and my mind again.   I’ve come to realize that there are ten thousand reminders out there, some tangible like that scanned document or an old email, some only existing as hidden memories. All of them lying barely concealed beneath the surface, as in a minefield ready to snap me violently and unexpectedly back to the reality of his absence.  And like a hidden landmine, the experience of one of those reminders always leaves me feeling a little maimed.

I need to say right here at the outset that what follows is not his story. It is mine. Or rather, it is a story about how I have come to understand his death. Or maybe more accurately, how I have failed to come to understand his death. I don’t know all the reasons why he made the decision to end his life, and even if I did, I would surely make a very deliberate choice to NOT share those reasons publicly here.

There has hardly been a day gone by since his death that I haven’t thought about him, either spontaneously, or due to some triggering factor as mentioned above. It is for that reason, that I do*think* I want to write about the difficulties I had in processing it all. Difficulties that time has made less constant, but no less real.  I’ll admit that I wrote the initial version of this some time ago. Then I set it aside.  I’ve waffled on whether to post it or not. Like I said, I think of him nearly every day, and I miss him terribly. It may seem odd to write about this after this much time has passed, and it may seem even odder to post it here. But at this moment, right now, writing about it feels like a true step. That’s important to me.

I need that sense of having the feeling that any piece I write and post here is in some way “a true step”. In fact, as I’ve written here before, that is sort of my main test for whether to post anything here to my blog or not.  It means that a lot of what I write doesn’t “pass the test” for being made public here in this place. But sometimes it does. In this case, I’m less certain … but deciding to post anyway.

Many of my friends who read this will know immediately who I am writing about. But I have chosen not to use his name, or to give any directly identifying information.   Again, that may seem odd… but that is also a deliberate choice I have made for the writing, and it feels right. I don’t want to dredge up awful memories for those of us who loved him. Yet, I do wonder if others in what was our mutual friend group think of him as much as I do?   I wonder if they also have their little reminders, and if they also share the same ongoing ….. grief …. that I do.   Grief.   Yeah, I guess even after a year-and-a-half, that’s still the right word.   It may always be the right word.

My friend lived in another state, and though we only saw each other face to face a few times per year, at conferences and meetings, we spoke on the phone regularly… at least every other week or so, (sometimes a lot more often than that), and we had done so for a number of years. I’d call him, and seeing my name on his Caller ID, he always answered the phone the same way. “Hello, John! How are things with you?” I can hear his voice now. Writing those words, his voice is in my head. It’s kind of chilling actually. I’d say, “Well, you know. All good. I can’t complain.” Then I’d proceed to vent and complain about the problems du jour.

Through the years, he’d worked for or with me on a few committees and work-initiatives. We had presented together at conferences several times. Together we were part of a small group of “usual suspects” working to bring empowerment, knowledge, support, and a sense of community to the broader grass-roots community of advocates that we all loved to serve.

After my friend’s death, as the horrible news spread, many mutual friends reached out first to me for answers … and also to comfort me… as they knew and were aware of our ongoing and very close friendship.

I had no answers for them.

Over the next few weeks, I was often amused and found myself smiling very frequently at the number of pictures, some of which were quite silly, that surfaced online of the two of us together at events. People would post them on social media, or email them to me.   And then I’d look at each picture, look at his face, and realize in sadness that I’d never again be able to pick up the phone and give him a call, laugh together, bounce ideas around together, or bitch and moan together about something frustrating both of us. I’d realize we would never again be at one of those conferences where we would be the first to get up and meet with another mutual friends for breakfast, AND the last two to tell everyone else goodnight at the bar and wearily head off to our own hotel rooms.

In the last few days before he took his life, I believe that I may have been one of the last people to have a conversation with him about his depression and the things that were bothering him. Maybe the very last. One of the last to try to bolster his spirits about coping with a number of difficulties. Possibly the very last one with whom he confided his growing despairs.

Since his death, part of my ongoing grief has been the idea that my words, my expressions of love and support, my “advice” to him … that NONE of that was sufficient to stay his hand at the critical moment as he contemplated his options.

It’s a hard realization.

Intellectually, I know his decision was his alone… and that absolutely no one saw it coming. And yet, in private moments, I sometimes still weep at what I see, in the “perfect light of retrospect”, as my failure to reach him. And then I feel guilty in the knowledge that my tears are less for the tragedy of his death, and the idea of his family’s loss of a father, his wife’s loss of a spouse … than they are selfish tears for me. Selfish tears, for the loss of a friend and confidant. And they are tears of guilt as I second guess myself …. should I have seen this coming, even when nobody else did? Were there clues he may have revealed to me in his words that he was nearing the point of taking his own life? Were there clues that what was going on with him was anything more than what we all go through from time-to-time as we try to cope with the difficulties “life” throws at us?

I confess I just don’t know.

When I spoke with him on a Friday early last year, we talked about some significant difficulties that he was dealing with in several arenas in his life… both personal and professional. I offered him support and love and some practical and concrete suggestions about how to handle some of his personal decisions … big decisions … he was facing.  And some ideas on things he could do to “get out of his own head” and gain some big-picture perspective and focus on all the good things he had going on. A suggestion to approach some of his looming big choices in the optimism of the certainty of better days to come.

We also had talked about plans we had to get together with another dear friend in a couple of months for a “guys weekend”, as we’d done before. We talked about how that would be good for all three of us.   As my friend and I were getting off the phone that afternoon, I told him how much he meant to me (he already knew this, we had talked about the depth of our friendship through the years from time-to-time).

I asked him to please check in with me “sometime next week” so he could let me know how a difficult personal conversation he was anticipating over the weekend had gone.   The last thing I told him was to remember that he could call on me any time of the day or night, don’t worry about the hour. I told him, “I’m serious. Any time at all.” And I told him that while I may not have any particular answers, “I will always be here for you.”    I believe those may have been our last words.

“I will always be here for you.”     Only now I can’t make good on that promise.

I can’t make good on it because the awful news came early the next week.

So, within the next few days I drove from Franklin to his town a couple of states away.  A solo road trip that gave me a lot of time to think about things, including as I lay awake in the hotel the night before his service the next morning.

I went to his memorial service in a daze, and barely spoke to anyone. When I got back in my car I drove a few blocks and suddenly pulled over to the curb. I sat there in my car and started to cry.  Cry hard.  I pounded the steering wheel and I screamed and cursed. Then I wiped my tears and drove back to Tennessee.

I was surprised in the ensuing days and weeks to occasionally find myself angry at him for robbing me of the ability to “Be here for you”. Angry at him for not calling me when he was really in deep despair and pain. Angry for his cheating me out of what I expected to be our life-long friendship. I know enough about what have been called “the stages of grief” to recognize that the anger is merely one of the phases.

As a parent of a child with a disability, I have lived many of those stages in another context, and even spoken numerous times to parent groups about those stages… about how they are “normal” and how we “must” let ourselves go through them and process them before we can see light on the other side. And yet, when I could feel myself going through those stages of grief with regard to the death of my friend, they truly surprised me and completely caught me off guard.

I felt almost like an outside observer of my own state of mind as I worked to come to terms with his death. And in that process, I’ve seen every single one of those stages wash over and through me. In no particular order: Shock & Disbelief. Denial. Profound Sadness. Guilt, Bargaining. Anger. Etc.

“I will always be here for you.”

And in the aftermath of my friend’s death, all I could feel was a giant hole in my soul and in my heart.   Not only could I not “be here” for him, but he would never ever be here for me. “What the HELL were you thinking??”   I caught myself actually saying that out loud a few weeks after I got home from his memorial service. “How DARE you write yourself so completely out of my life?”   And the thoughts born of that selfish anger led to guilt all over again. As I write and think about those words I’ve just written, it seems incredibly petty and selfish of me to have felt that way.

Back then, I could not conceive of a depression so utterly gripping that it would drive someone to end their life. I still can’t. And yet, I have struggled at various times through the years with depression myself, and I know that it is insidious. And I know that it is a liar. I know how through the lens of depression, it can seem like “things” will NEVER get better. I have written frankly about my own depression before, and spoken about it in public as I’ve led workshops. It’s not something to be taken lightly. I have had my share of “dark nights of the soul”, and sought help.   I have allowed myself to be vulnerable enough with others ( I hope), and honest enough with myself (I think) to get to the root of the things that were creating the cognitive impairments I was suffering. I know first-hand that depression can undermine your ability to function normally. Your ability to even to get out of bed in the morning. I know it can make you wonder if the world would be better off without you. In my own case, I was lucky enough and diligently self-aware enough to find the way through.

But despite my own experience, in my friend’s greatest hour of need, is it possible that I did I not see or feel the clues to his despair powerfully enough to intervene?  Was that his failure or mine?   Was it even a failure at all? I don’t know.

At the risk of over-generalizing and simplifying something that is really in all likelihood very complicated, when someone contemplates and then carries through with suicide, I just do not want to believe that in most cases it is a totally impulsive act. Surely one builds to that decision over time, right? So in the case of my friend, the question I have asked myself is, when I talked to him a few days before he did this, was he already coming to the conclusion that he was going to take his own life? Had he already made plans?   If so, how did I not hear this in his voice?   Was I too smug in assuming that our talk that night, and my promise that “I will always be here for you” would help him put things in proper perspective? Were those just empty words? Or is all of that questioning on my part merely an attempt at rationalizing something which can NEVER be rationalized?   Maybe there WAS nothing to hear in his voice.

I don’t know. No matter how much I attempt to replay that last conversation my head, I just don’t know.

Or, alternately, maybe sometimes really bad shit happens and it’s nobody’s fault and there is absolutely nothing that would have changed it.

However, that’s not an explanation. And almost a year and a half later, there is nothing about his death that has worked in my own mind and heart to invite any true clarity. Not really. He lived, he was one of the most honorable and ethical men I’ve ever known, we made each other laugh, we trusted each other with our honesty, and he was as good a friend as I’ve ever had. And he died tragically by his own hand.

In “The Sun Also Rises”, one of Hemingway’s characters is asked how he went bankrupt. He replies, “Gradually, and then suddenly.”   I think for my friend, he must have concluded “gradually and then suddenly” that he could not go on living.   And there is no more to say about it. In my own attempt to understand it, I’ve lived with the “gradual” part for over a year.   I’m still waiting on the “suddenly” to happen.

As I have said, I will never and can never know the depths of despair he must have been in to have done this.   But I DO know that each of us at times has low points.  Even VERY low points when the world seems to be caving in on us. That’s just part of living life head-on, as so many of us do.

The work that I and so many of my friends do in the disability arena, whether for the greater good of the community, or only for the health and well-being of our own families and loved ones, is something that can take a toll.   It takes a toll when we see our efforts for change hitting a brick wall. Sometimes, hitting the same brick wall again and again and again.  It takes a toll when we see dear friends, other parents or siblings struggling and knowing there is little we can do.

Those efforts often take huge amounts of passion, energy, and time. It’s not that “The work” isn’t rewarding.

It is.

But it can also be depleting in so many ways. Staying healthy physically, mentally, and emotionally isn’t always easy.

So, regarding my friend, I still have no answers.

But I do know that there is this one thing I can say, and I can say it sincerely from the depths of my soul with every ounce of authenticity I can manage.

If you found your way here to this blog post, and have hung in there and read this far, the chances are pretty good that you are someone I care about. Maybe someone I care very, very deeply about.

I want you to know that “I am always here for you.”

If you will let me, “I am always here for you”.

If you need to get another person’s perspective on something, if you need to decompress, to cry, to vent, to curse the bastards, or just to howl at the moon, never EVER hesitate to reach out. Reach out. If not to me, find someone else who you love and trust, and reach out for help.

As for me, I can only promise that to the best of my ability, I will always hold you dear, and never forsake or abandon your friendship, even if we haven’t been in touch or close in some time.   And even if there are no immediate solutions to whatever problem or problems you are facing or think you are facing, you need to know that there are people who love you and need you and are willing to get down in the mud with you and stay there until it gets better.

And it can and will get better.

I only wish my friend had believed it.  I wish I could have made him believe it.

I miss him.

Love,
John.
“We are not here to see through each other.  We’re here to see each other through.”