Sad, But Also...

Tonight I'm grieving a young man I never met. But he was someone special to someone who is special to me. So I grieve for both of them, the one who is gone too soon and the one who is left behind. Because there is, unfortunately, more than enough grief to go around when someone takes his own life.

I feel sad, but I also feel dumb. I ask myself inane questions: Did this happen despite all the holiday spirit whirling about, or because of it? Was it an act of passion or dispassion? Was there a moment when he changed his mind, but it was too late to choose survival over capitulation? The questions get increasingly desperate the longer I think about them, because the only person who could have answered them has gone silent forever.

I feel sad, but I also feel angry. Because suicide is an act of supreme selfishness, of self-indulgence, of arrogance. Goddammit, what gives you the right to decide that ending your pain in the moment is worth the pain that will be endured forever in your memory? I don't want to be angry, but anger is a stage of grief, and the only way past it is through it.

I feel sad, but I also feel solidarity. Because I've sat in a dark room in the middle of the night, crying because I couldn't find a reason to choose life. I've felt the sharp, quick fear that I could only see one choice before me, and I knew it was terrible and permanent but felt helpless to resist it. In the end I, many years ago, found just enough strength to turn away and make a different choice, as difficult as that was. Why didn't this young man find just enough strength? What if I had been just like him?

I feel sad. The life that was taken had promise, had potential. This was a person who was loved, not the way a celebrity or a statesman is loved, ostentatiously and ultimately impersonally. He was loved by real people, in the small ways that can easily be missed if you're too focused on the voids in your life. The ways that don't seem like enough when you don't feel you're enough.

We're enough. Every last one of us. And I wish it wasn't too late for this young man, and I wish I could say it to everyone who needs to hear it and believe it in their bones. Maybe everyone reading this can help spread the word.

Please call the Suicide & Crisis Hotline by calling or texting 988 if you don't believe you can choose life. You're not alone.