I am a Survivor of Suicide Loss
I lost a close friend to suicide ten years ago. This is his story.
Saturday, November 23, 2019, is International Survivors of Suicide Loss Day. According to Wikipedia, it is
a day when the friends and family of those who have died by suicide can join together for healing and support. This day always falls on the Saturday before American Thanksgiving.
I didn’t know this day existed until today, but it resonates with me. Not only have I lived with suicidal urges since my teens, but I’ve lost a few people to suicide as well.
One, in particular, hurt a lot. He was a sagely twenty-something who took me under his wing when I first got to college. He taught me a lot about life, people, and myself, and is in no small part responsible for much of the person I am today. This is his story.
His name was Michael, but everyone knew him as Xast. He had cultivated that personality for himself over many years, and it had grown to be a larger-than-life kind of thing. He literally had a semi-serious kinda-joking cult.
Michael was a quirky guy. He had long blonde hair and a cherubic face, and constantly wore a lab coat that had been customized with some illustrations in purple. I first met him when I was standing on a platform above him, and his first words to me were
You have excellent nasal hygiene.
His personality was that of an energetic people-pleaser. He went around doing whatever he could to make people happy. “When others are happy, I’m happy,” he’d say.
For whatever reason, he decided that I was worth his time, so he took me on as sort of an apprentice. He would open up to me about his life and experiences, and I began to see the man behind the curtain.
He was autistic and bipolar. The bipolar was unsurprising — he seemed to be constantly manic. The autistic made more sense as I started piecing it together.
In high school, he discovered Dungeons and Dragons, and from there other role-playing games. Unsatisfied with his awkward personality, he built himself a character, stepped into is, and became Xast. Every day, he would inhabit his character and play in the role-playing game that was his life.
The people-pleasing aspect was half-act. True, he did gain immense satisfaction when people around him were happy. However, he fancied himself a puppet-master. Through his cult of personality, he would subtly manipulate people to do what he wanted.
His goals were largely that of furthering the ambitions of people that he liked, including himself, but a secondary goal was for everyone to have fun. When people were happy, they were more likely to do the things you wanted. If those things further the happiness of those around them, even better.
By playing this game, he built up immense cache among the people around him, such that he could get them to do whatever he wanted most of the time. Needless to say, he fooled around with quite a few of his followers.
I enjoyed seeing both sides of the act and gladly played my part. Everything I did was either to help him keep people happy or help him accomplish his goals. I knew enough about how the sausage was made that I could play people fairly well. Not as well as he could, but he had more practice.
Slowly, however, he was losing his battle to his bipolar side.
He became more and more erratic, eventually moving to Texas to pursue a relationship with a couple he was infatuated with. He stopped taking his medication and convinced me to do the same for a time.
After I recovered from my unmedicated months and started new meds, our relationship deteriorated quickly. By this point, he was trying harder drugs and experiencing more psychotic breaks and paranoia. Our friendship did not survive much beyond that point.
About a year later, I found out he had jumped off a building. I went to his funeral with my roommates. We didn’t feel very welcome — I had been excommunicated, and one of my roommates had an ill-fated relationship with him and had been, more or less, marked for death by the cult.
We mostly found solace with his family, who were suffering the most out of all of this. His funeral was swamped with people who had no idea what his real name was, and everyone was talking about a man that they didn’t know. My roommates and I were the primary anchors to reality among the mourners.
I’m not sure why we weren’t attacked, aside from the fact that violence at a funeral is tacky even for cultists.
To this day, most of the people who suffered the loss of Xast have no idea the depths of his soul. To them, he was a larger-than-life caricature of a demigod. To me, he was a mentor, a friend, and a man.
Ten years later I still talk about him with my then-roommate-now-wife. We both got to see a side of him that few people saw, and were ultimately blacklisted from certain groups for it. To this day, people still reminisce about how great Xast was. The remnants of the cult still show up from time to time as well.
Michael’s death had a big impact on me, and I hadn’t talked to him for about a year by the time he died. I can’t imagine what it would feel like if I had still known and followed him.
Suicide leaves marks on the people around you after you’re gone. It’s one of the primary drivers that keeps me alive — I don’t want to be responsible for that awful feeling of loss I felt ten years ago. Sometimes, Michael’s memory keeps me alive.
For that, I’m thankful to him. In death, he taught me one last lesson: our impact on the world is bigger than we can comprehend in life.
