THE WIND PHONE

The Fragile Thread of Being

The ripples of suicide

cw: suicide

The first time suicide entered into my life, it was only as an echo. He was the loose friend of a friend and a young man I’d never before met. I’m not sure our paths ever once crossed. He and I shared little more than a couple of mutual Facebook connections in common.

His name was Dalton and he killed himself at only fourteen years old. I use his real name because I reason that — if his loved ones should ever find my words — they might take some solace in knowing the echoes reached this far… that the ripples of his loss are still felt all these years later.

I can’t remember how I first heard the news of his passing. It might have been a whisper down the hall of my middle school. Maybe it was only conveyed in a text. But I remember what I did when I sat down again at a computer screen.

Unsure what could ever drive a person to take their own life, I visited his Facebook page. And there, draped across his digital wall were the agonized words of a hundred different mourners. Most seemed unsure of what could have driven this jovial teen to bring a swift end to his own existence. Some of the commenters were only his age; they speculated as children do. At young ages, we don’t have the diplomacy to handle this sort of news.

As we grow older, suicide hardly grows easier to accept. We skirt around abrasive realities with unbecoming euphemisms. We struggle with the difficult conversations.

I didn’t know how to feel reading the words of the hundreds touched by his warm presence. I don’t know his warmth from memory, but through the distant words of these grieving strangers, I could tell that he was kind and lively and funny and unique. So many of the things I so rarely expect from those who take their own life.

Before leaving his page, I sent Dalton a friend request. Not because I thought it would be his finger clicking accept — but just in the loose hope that some loved one on the other side of that binary barrier might see it and click that button. Even if it was too late.

Thirteen years later, I still check Dalton’s page from time to time. People still wish him happy birthdays and tell him how much they miss him — how much they wish they could have one final talk. They lament the life he’s missed. And thirteen years later, my friend request still sits there — unattended in a virtual void.

I’m not sure I knew why I friended him — if I understood my morose desire to learn more. Part of me just wanted to learn every detail I could; what exactly was it that could make life so painful that it was worth leaving the world behind forever?

I think I knew subconsciously even then that these thoughts of suicide were ones I harbored deep down as well. Each time throughout my life I heard of a person dying in that most terrible way, my macabre curiosity returned.

When Robin Williams died, I cried at the airport on my way home from Colorado with my parents seated at my side. I wondered what could make that smiling, caring, witty presence want to evaporate. I watched video after video of the kindest man to ever grace my TV screen in search of the torment that turned him so horribly inward. And in those undespairing eyes, I realized something about suicide.

I realized that these haunted thoughts aren’t always something that can be plainly seen — that suicidal ideation hides in smiling faces.

Anthony Bourdain was a more brooding figure and not one I knew well before his death. But hearing that terrible “S” word slither into my world again, my gnawing curiosity returned once more. He was a prolific writer, and in his words, I read a man eager to breathe in life and culture from every nook, corner, and cranny the planet had to offer.

When my friend Jacob killed himself, I felt a new feeling. I felt angry. Not just at the circumstances that drove him to that point, but at the rash decision he made to let an entire world go on in his absence. I felt angry that he had deprived the world of… him.

He was a prodigious mind, and there’s likely no person I’ve met in my life who was more poised to shift paradigms. He inhaled life and literature like no one I’d ever met. Even at five years old I saw the seeds of his powerful potential.

He was a voracious absorber of knowledge and reveled in the opportunity to expel each arcane tidbit he’d acquired at the drop of a dime. He had a wonderful way of forging the knowledge of forgotten empires into witty, comprehensible quips. He dispensed them effortlessly in classrooms and debates and theater improv groups.

When Joel killed himself, I experienced another new sensation. I saw the faces of those who knew him most in their most affected hour. I saw a vicarious fear and dejection in my parent’s eyes as I walked up the stairs one day to be told the news. The son of our long-time family friend had passed away at his own hands.

Though Joel and I had never been close, I saw the sprawling impact crater his absence created. I watched his family move from the house in which they’d raised him — because it was too painful to continue watching the ghosts of happy memories parade between forsaken walls. I watched his father try to gain a closure I’m not sure that victims of suicide can ever fully find. I watched his sister continue life as an only child.

I watched his mother try to revivify her most joyous moments of their time together in a newfound passion for painting. I saw her on the patio of her new porch, gently nursing an easel with a brush and palette of water color. On the canvas was the young and jubilant Joel she remembered. An ethereal light streamed into the bright and liminal room.

When Natalie killed herself, I saw a vivacious, laughing child on a playground — wandering in and out of my life from afar. I thought about the last time I’d seen her and the loaded conversation we’d had on that New Year’s night. I thought about the room that vibrated from a bass blaring a few floors beneath us and our heartfelt reminiscence on a decade’s worth of lost time. And I saw new things in her words and expressions. I saw a woman subtly preparing to be forgotten.

In each new loss, I’ve found an eerie sort of empathy. Not just for the ones grieving, but for the ones causing grief. I see that mercurial part of myself that loves life but can hardly bear its horrid lows. I see how I would consider the unspeakable if circumstances ever grew dark enough.

So often it feels that it’s the most passionate people who seem the most vulnerable to the abyss. And in that vulnerability, I can’t help but see myself. I see the me that dances on rooftops and sings in showers and loves writing with a virulent intensity. But I also see the me that spirals into tormented thoughts at late and sober hours. I see the part of me that fears the future, the world. I feel the weight of all the people in it I’ll one day have to lose.

But it’s also the desperate thought of those losses that makes me want to remain among the ranks of the living. In parents who’ve lost children to rash decisions and lows of depression, I see what I could never put my own parents through. Because harder still than the thought of this gaping world around me and all that it has in store is allowing those loving people who raised me to continue on alone. Allowing my friends to wonder what sort of words might have saved me from the edge.

Life scares me, but it’s that primal unpredictability that loiters around every bend of it that makes it so very beautiful. Even though I see something familiar in the faces of those who’ve ended their lives, I’ve spent time in the craters left by those losses. And no matter how terrible I feel, I know that I could never create a new one for loved ones to crawl into.