(A note from me)
Hey there,
I hope you’re having a fantastic week so far. I was very much looking forward to doing another fun audio recording and offering a favorite post from an older Medium story for you, but something pulled at me.
I received a note on one of my stories about love, loss, and suicide. I don’t know about you, but even the word, suicide, gives my entire body a strange feeling. One I can’t explain.
I felt something in common with the person who sent me that note, and I wanted to share my own experience with it, because I know others will have a similar experience. And that’s really what this entire newsletter is about. Connecting through our worldly experiences (good and bad).
If you’re sensitive to the topic it’s okay to pass over this one. I’ll have more upbeat topics coming soon.
Just know that I greatly appreciate you,
Greyson
Suicide, Friendship, and the Space Between
The wooden pew moaned under my weight.
Under the weight of the room.
Under the weight of the silent people in it, afraid to speak. Not sure what to say, or how to say it.
The moan lingered in the air, trapped under the roof of the funeral home. Or maybe I held onto it longer than it ever existed. The idea it had once filled the room and yet no longer existed.
Like the idea of the man in the closed casket. The persona and the friendship and the laughter and the love of the man in the closed casket. It once existed. Now everyone else in the funeral home clung to it, minds not wanting to let it go.
A few friends sat in rows ahead of me. Others in attendance I recognized but did not know by name. I saw his parents. I met them once. I saw his younger brother. I coached his baseball team for a year.
Still, nobody talked. Only a few breathed. A room of love bottled and trapped. Not sure where the love should go.
I looked over the small folded program in my hands. A simple, penned portrait of my friend on the cover. The date of his death underneath.
A few weeks earlier I hadn’t planned on sitting in such a room, surrounded by silence, and clinging to what no longer was there.
It didn’t fully make sense.
But suicide rarely does.
Hardening Clay Is Harder To Mold
We met in middle school.
Adolescent jokes have a way of bonding people together.
We were different people, from different families and different backgrounds. Little of that matters when someone makes you laugh. He had a larger-than-life personality. It stood out in a crowd. It matches the broad shoulders and larger frame of his body. Outspoken in so many ways.
As middle school went and high school came we often worked on projects together. I have a library of films we made, some for school, others for fun.
Before high school graduation, before we were let loose into the world, our minds were soft. They could be molded and forged and smoothed into anything. Everything.
We all went our own ways, before the days of Facebook. Before social media. Back when you would stay in contact with a small ring of friends. Anyone else fell out of orbit. He wasn’t in the ring, yet a friend through a friend would keep me updated. As he went off into the world to study. As he lived in other countries and continents.
Minds continued to be shaped and formed. Yet the clay of a mind becomes more difficult to shift, to change, as the world and time hardens it. Often there comes a time when it’s nearly impossible to change the mind’s shape. Change how it appears to the world and how the world appears to it.
Following graduation, following a short marriage, following the loss of my father, and a number of twists, turns, and bends, life spat me back out into the town of my youth. At the very least, it made it easier to connect with others washing back up on the shores of a familiar neighborhood.
It allowed an unexpected encounter with my friend. Enjoying an outdoor patio with some of those in my closest friendship circle, one of the group broke off the conversation to wave at the larger-than-life individual.
But this time he wasn’t larger than life.
He looked the same, yet different. When he talked a once warm tone had left. The laughter accompaniment with most former sentences now gone. He sat for a time and talked. We made plans to meet up.
When he left, one of us commented on the different demeanor.
Another shrugged. “Time changes people,” he said.
A week later he was dead.
The Thought Of Doing More
A man stood and began the service. It felt awkward from the start. He wouldn’t come out and say the man committed suicide. Instead, he said there was a neurological problem in his brain that made him do it.
The line burned a fire through the canals of blood pulsing in my body. How it could be trivialized down to that infuriated me. The man explaining it away with a wave of the hand.
Everyone in the audience knew what happened. They didn’t need to be talked down to. And yet it was the knowing what happened but not knowing how to talk about it that fed into the strange feeling. The contained tears. The people in the crowd thinking if they could have just done something.
But such a decision, such a final decision, doesn’t come from thin air. It takes time to swirl into a possible course of action. It’s maybe a lifetime of thoughts and a metamorphosis of the once soft-as-clay brain.
I don’t think a single conversation going differently would have changed anything. Maybe. But maybe not. I know I would have done something differently if I knew it would have helped. Talked longer when we saw him the week prior. Stayed in better touch over the years. But there’s something egotistical about assuming one little alteration in my life would fully change how his ended. And yet it’s impossible not to consider it. I’m sure everyone else in the room thought something similar. A few hundred outstretched hands offering help. Perhaps none are grabbed. Perhaps one was.
The man’s long-time off-again-on-again girlfriend cried out loud in the corner. Wailed. She cried for all those who couldn’t. Who didn’t know how.
My brain offered its own eulogy after it checked out from the man running the real thing. It’s obvious when someone heading a eulogy never met the person they were talking about. I knew the parents had to pull some strings in order for their son to be buried in the Jewish cemetery alongside relatives. The cemetery didn’t usually accept suicides.
Even in death, it was stigmatized.
Unexpectedly Saying Goodbye
My father was a pastor. Due to his job, I found myself helping or around more weddings than the average person. It also meant when someone in the family died my father would give the eulogy.
One Christmas, an elderly uncle, a man with the spitting image of Abbott from Abbott and Costello, asked my father if he would give the eulogy. Asked like it was an everyday topic. Regular conversation. It hit my dad hard. He simply nodded, as talking would break any emotional barrier from the unexpected question.
It was the last Christmas the two would share together.
My dad was the one who died first.
My uncle had to unexpectedly say goodbye.
It’s the unexpected goodbyes that are the hardest. Where we don’t know what to say.
In the cemetery of my friend, each person had the opportunity to drop in a shovel’s worth of dirt, then pass it to the next person. I’d never been part of the burial process before. The standing above the grave, casket in the earth, knowing he was down there. The wanting to say more. The desire to have done more. The hollowness of the dirt striking the wooden coffin.
None of it felt real. It all felt too real.
The ceremony, the burial, the lunch at a greasy restaurant afterward, sitting there in suit and tie, knocking on the bottom of a glass ketchup bottle.
More strange feelings would come. Nothing of anger, at least not at anger toward him. Anger was reserved for those who called it selfish. The other emotions were for my friend
A friend I don’t know if I could have done anything for. Other than offer an outstretched hand.
If I’d Only Known
Anyone of use who has experienced a suicide has heard this before. Has said it. Has thought it.
If I’d only known.
But if that’s always the thought, perhaps that’s not the solution. Friends should know there’s an offered hand, no matter what. I want my friends to know I’ll always have an offered hand if they need help or want to talk. Because the hand needs to be extended before they jump. Once they jump it’s too late.
People are good at hiding their thoughts. Their true emotions. It’s not always possible to see through it. We’ve all gotten pretty good at putting on a happy face. At pretending. We’ve all been pretending since we were children.
The best thing any of us can do is to always let people know your hand is there. Most will never need it.
But there might be one that does.
I’m sorry for the loss of your friend. Thank you so much for sharing that with us.