Author and Columnist
I told you about Todd, right?
I don't love how literary and intimate you tried to write this, but that's not my main point of my reply.
Todd was not your best friend by any stretch, but he was your friend and you mourned him. His death was a sort of turning point for you, factoring into the plot of your first novel, We Shadows. It is also why you read the Sandman series, encountering Neil Gaiman, an author whose work would guide you closer to the contemporary fantasy you wished to write.
This makes it sound that Todd's suicide was a plot device to improve your life, a sacrifice so you could become a better author.
You did not believe to this point that your friends were mortal. Of course, the intellectual idea of death was present, but it wasn't something that happened to someone like Todd Bevington. He had been suicidal, had made attempts. The scars of failed suicides were fashionable accessories among your clique. You didn't believe that he could want to die.
I've never liked the phrase "lost his battle" when it comes to any sickness. I have a mental illness or two, things you just take for aspects of your personality. I cannot say it isn't a battle of attrition. Most days, my mental illess is so small it is all but a joke. On rare days, I am crippled with depression so intense I cannot force myself to get out of my bed without external coaxing.
I have wanted not to exist. I have called myself a failed organism. I have not wanted to kill myself.
I have tried to rationalize that Todd may not have wanted to kill himself, that this was just another attempt that accidentally became real when someone didn't step into his room as expected. His is not the only suicide where I have posed this possibility because I do not want to know how near people like me are to dying by their own hands.
You are months away from a mass tragedy that will shape the rest of your life, but Todd's suicide loomed large. They were similar levels of unsettling: That your angsty friends could succeed in ending their lives and that America could turn so actively malignant because of an unprecedented attack. (You also learn that America has since its inception been malignantand there have been attacks through its history, but this was a first in your life time. As I write, it is difficult to avoid the term "fascist theocracy," and its origin happens to you in a couple of months.)
I guess he hung himself. I don't really know what happened.
It has been two decades, but let me piece together what I remember. I will add the mental flourishes I know you had, though they have almost no foundations beyond how you pictured it at the time.
After a party that you skipped to go have dinner at Emily's parents' home -- and because you didn't know how to drive to Dover and the idea made you anxious -- Todd retreated to his bedroom. You always get distraught after (or during) parties because they are finite and ending more every minute. I can't ascribe the same to Todd. As you imagined it, he was more practical. He'd had his going away party and now it was time for him to go away.
He tied a powder blue bedsheet -- I have no idea why you decided that it was this color, but you thought it vividly -- around... you were hazy about this. You couldn't think what would be strong enough to support his weight. He was a skinny little thing, outright adorable with his squinty eyes, but hanging from a lighting fixture was only going to end on the floor in an areole of plaster dust. To your way of thinking, hanging was one of the strangest ways for him to die. The point of hanging in execution was to snap the neck by a quick fall. You'd never been in his room -- where I think he actually did kill himself, as least as far as you were told --- but you couldn't imagine how he did this. So, he just choked to death, a brutal and unforgivable end for your friend. He deserved more peace in death than he felt he had in life.
Were you told that he had done this because he was gay? (He may have been gay, but he was definitely bi, having been with more women than you had.) That doubled the tragedy for you, because he was a cute, queer boy in college. He was at the precipice of a better life.
That's not how mental illness works, though. You don't weigh your blessings and come out ahead every time, not when depression has its thumb on the scale. He did not kill himself because his mother didn't accept his sexuality -- something that may have been said about all this, but nothing I can verify as anything more than gossiping about the tritest plot possible. He died because he saw no other hope, the truth clouded behind his pain -- even if the pain had been amplified beyond tolerance by neurochemicals and trauma. (I do not know that Todd was particularly traumatized, but this is not meant to minimize what he felt. Some people can withstand a civil war over their heads, smiling the whole time. Others hear the wrong song at the wrong time and reach for the Draino.)
I wish I knew him better. I feel so guilty that I don't feel guilty.
I still feel lingering guilt over his death because that is natural for those who survive another person's suicide. I don't pretend as though I believe there is anything you could have done to stay his hand, but it would have done your conscience good to take a few more of his phone calls between your perseveration on finding a new girlfriend.
Because he had this party a couple Fridays ago. I didn't go because he lives... lived... kind of far away.
He lived around 47 minutes from where you do. I don't know why your mutual friends in that area didn't ask to carpool, but I can understand not wanting to drive to an unfamiliar place without a map. (When you get a GPS, you feel as though your life opens up.)
Maybe no one came to his party and that drove him over the edge. No, that's ridiculous, right?
It is. As reported later, his party was well attended and Todd did not seem other than as jubiliant as a wannabe club kid would at a summer party.
People don't kill themselves because they have bad parties. I guess that makes as much sense as anything to a suicidal person, though.
Yes, people kill themselves for all sorts of reasons and we cannot, in the end, know what his were. To my knowledge, he left no note. I don't know that it would have done him much good to get his thoughts out on paper. I suspect it would not have been his first suicide note, but he never managed to go all the way before. Correlation isn't causation, but I still have the urge to sift through what you've put down to find one sparkling grain that meant he could have survived.
I feel like I am objectifying him. He is not a "suicidal person," he's Todd.
When someone is no longer present to contradict, it is an understandable urge to turn them into an object and symbol. An adjective and noun surrounded by quotation marks is easier than fully acknowledging that Todd killed himself.
Todd who adored Neil Gaiman comics. Todd who dyed his hair every color of the rainbow. Todd who reminded me of a gecko.
I do not think you could summon a full, typed page about Todd. You knew him often given your overlapping social spheres and shared college, but you never knew him well. I cannot suppose that this would have changed much when you went to New Paltz. Had he survived into the reign of social media, you might have liked each other's statuses, but never spoken outside updates composed primarily of memes. (I say this because my relationship with most people you knew boils down to this.)
It seems so foreign that he is dead. Like when you try to imagine the universe is infinite and you nearly swoon at the vastness of the thought.
That doesn't get less heady. Just for a fraction of a second every month or so, I forget that my dead friends are no longer in my reach. I do not have it in me to delete their numbers from my phone, so I see them when I am scrolling.
Todd and your having a cellphone never existed at the same time. You may have had his AOL Instant Messenger name, and I am confident you never deleted it, either, though it was not as though he were going to log-in again and remind you. What would the point of deleting this remnant be?
Melissa dies -- kills herself, if you want my opinion, but dead all the same. For a while, I kept writing to her on Facebook, until I saw someone had access to her account and was reading my messages. I informed them I noticed and would not be writing to her any longer. (I don't know who was reading them, though I have suspicions and none are ghosts.)
I dream of the dead sometimes and remember it after, though it might be that some waking malaise comes from the emotions behind ones that otherwise evaporated at dawn. They are never dead then, though sometimes they are something worse, living corpses crying of their pain. And sometimes, they are fine. They call and say that they have been in rehab or the hospital and should be home soon. Or we are spending time together as though nothing happened to them and no time has passed. For my heart, I almost prefer the awful dreams.
I will never hear his voice ever, ever again. He will never scream my full name at the top of his lungs and give me constricting hugs that nearly knock me down.
These are good details, things I want to remember still. There was always a lyrical scratchiness to his saying your name, one he rightly found ridiculous and thus charming. I cannot recall the last time someone tried to physically assault you with a hug, but he was small and light; it was no substatial bother to hug him back.
I never had time for him when he would call me. Not even once did I have a decent conversation with him on the phone.
I barely speak to people on the phone now. Few people do if they can help it, surely not friends. But, no, I cannot recall a single conversation you had, only once being irritated in your parents' kitchen as he was talking some nonsense or other. I couldn't now tell you what it was, but the point of the call was likely not this (gossip?) but just because he wanted to speak to someone.
I feel selfish. Was there not one time that I could have given him a friendly hello when he called or gotten off the line with whomever else I was talking to? But I didn't know.
It may be an overdue lesson in compassion, that you never know what people are going through and so should treat everyone with what kindness you can.
You are twenty and, like many your age, an egocentric narcissist. Even in writing this entry about his suicide, you are making it more about you, your guilt, than his pain and the aching he left behind. You want people to tell you it is okay, that Todd wouldn't have minded your keeping your distance from him.
He never called me crying. I think that is a stupid thing to say. Why should he if I didn't take normal calls from him? Like I just wanted to be a foul weather friend to him.
I do not know exactly who he held in his confidence, but it wasn't you. I struggle to think who among your friends would call you in crisis. Melissa, maybe, because she has mental illnesses she badly treats with whatever illicit drugs she can. It is strong to reach for help, though you might think differently.
When you are at your lowest points -- and they will not be few -- you call crisis and suicide hotlines (though you are careful to tell the volunteers that you are not suicidal, as Sarah assured you that they will send the police if you say you are). You do not trust your friends enough to reach out to you because you believe they will think less of you. They honestly might, so I cannot say you are wrong, but it does bespeak a lack of intimacy in your friendships. I don't think that this is some front of machismo -- you never trucked with that -- but just your fear of being ostracized. If you reached out, maybe you would have gotten the help you needed.
I want to imagine that Todd reached out. Not the night he killed himself -- that would be a horrifying thought, knowing you were the one Todd called who failed to help him --- but in general. He was open about his suicide attempts -- that he had him, if not the feelings behind them. It may not be prudent to call someone who committed suicide strong, but he let people know he was hurting. He didn't act like a cat, hiding under a porch to lick a fatal wound rather than yowling for care.
I wondered, still wonder, if he meant for this to be it, or if this was another attempt to alleviate the pain in his life that was not meant to extinguish his mortality.
There was a rumor afterward that this was a failed act of autoerotic asphixiation. It seemed like defamation to you, but it was just people's fear. They wanted his death to be anything other than suicide. They wanted it to be something stupid -- his fault, but not his intention.
If it was only meant to be an attempt, some cry for attention, wouldn't he have cut his wrists again? Why hanging unless he meant it?
His wrists were checkerboard testaments to his previous attempts by more violent means. Maybe that this way was more... peaceful signaled that he meant to finish it. Maybe it was really more violent.
I assure you, hanging oneself is not the way to a peaceful death. Drugs seem the most peaceful, not that I have given it much thought, but they can also backfire by not killing you.
I weep to think of his final moments. They hurt, because I can see my friend dangling, writhing and regretting this decision. Is it arrogant of me to think he regretted this as he was dying?
I don't know about arrogance, though I wish you wouldn't spent too much imaginative energy conjuring this scene.
You want him to regret it because it would mean he was on your side when it came to his suicide. In his last moments, you want him to know how much of a mistake this was. If he didn't feel that way, if he felt at last he had made the right choice, it instills a worry in your chest. How could a physically healthy college student do this? It must be wrong and you need him to know this, or you have to reevaluate too much about life.
Maybe it was so quick his didn't even realize. He didn't have time to regret it or wish he could go back in time five seconds.
I suspect that it was not quick, but I don't want you imagining any more than that. Keep your memories of him in the forfront of your mind. Do not waste yourself contemplating a brutal few minutes at the end, ones to which you are not and should not be privy. Those do not belong to you, but you own a sunny spring morning on the campus lawn. You have his overwhelming hugs. Let that be enough.
I'm going to his wake, I think.
You don't. You are terrified to see him dead. Again, if someone had wanted to carpool you, you might have found the courage. If Emily had said, "Thomm, I think it is crucially important that you have the experience of this wake because closure is a necessary part of mourning," you would have been persuaded. You just did not want to face it alone, even if you knew you would not have been alone when you arrived.
You are a socially anxious little bug.
You should have gone, though I do not think you avoid any of the subsequent funerals.
He liked me a lot, I think. That's why he invited me to his party.
He invited everyone he could to his party.
My father was trying to talk to me about it. I think he was very frustrated that he could say or do more for me. He got very angry and began yelling about how late he was.
What can one say in these moments? What could you have wanted to hear?
I found out days ago that someone you knew in college, who is still on my roster of social media friends, died over two years ago. Though we supposedly share associates, his death -- somehow of a heart attack and not directly suicide -- slipped under my radar. After finding this out, I was peeved. Within a few hours, after I finished making dinner, I had to lay down for ten minutes, destroyed but unable to articulate what was bothering me until my wife asked if it was this dead man. Grief is never straightforward. I did not notice his death, but he was a good man and I liked him. I'm not sure the balance there, but I spent a while trying to pull myself out of a depressive spiral.
I just needed to write. To see the words on the screen because that is something real and palpable to me. Hearing the words, even when I say them, has this mist of fantasy around them.
Our writing is always one degree removed from reality. Writing takes a little of it out of you, relieves the pressure and keeps something concrete, but it isn't more real.
Speaking means that you are directly interacting with another person. You would connecting and be made vulnerable. That is much harder for you.
That isn't real, seeing some fleshy mannequin in a box that looks like my friend Todd. Todd is very far away and very near now.
I have never seen a body and mistook it for the person. They are always doll-like. My grandmother (the one not cremated and turned into a brick before the funeral) had such crisp lines on her lipstick one could not pretend that she was an elderly woman in repose. I went to another funeral where the deceased's head was full of stitches, possibly as part of an autopsy.
You still should have gone, but you are right. Todd wouldn't have been in that box, just a physical target for grief made up of parts he had left behind.
Tina told me that he had three siblings, all who died. She didn't know how.
I need more corroboration of this tragedy than Tina's gossip.
Brief research has shown me that his mother only had Todd. She died a little more than two years after his suicide. She had been battling cancer and heart disease for years. A dead son doesn't help one's fighting spirit, but she didn't lose other children.
I was frightened of the wake before that. I am still frightened, but I want his mother to know how many people cared about her son.
I assume she must have known, but I don't know what it would matter to her then, a gaggle of weird looking college kids fidgiting through solemnity at her.
My mother got a little Japanese maple tree to commemorate Todd. Like the Ellen tree, I guess. I really appreciate that and almost burst out crying again when she put it in front of me.
That's sweet, though the Todd Tree was sacrificed in some landscaping years later, along with the Ellen Tree. Monuments, especially living ones, do not last forever.
My father once told me that when someone commits suicide, they don't really want to kill themselves, they want to kill everyone else...
Honestly -- not that you are ever sincerely suicidal, just hurting -- but this has rung in my ears a few times. Even when I was in agony, I didn't want to kill anyone else. My death would have done that. Maybe not like Todd's did to his mother, but something greater would be lost than just me.
Even when it is dreadful -- and this is the case these days -- I've always loved the world.
Remember that time that we sat on the bench outside the lounge and just talked for an hour about your life and how you were confused? How other boys were making it more confusing for you and hard to live? And I just listened and tried to give you as little advice as I could? Because I knew that you didn't want a lecture, you just wanted someone to care about you. And I did. I worried about you and thought about you all day.
You are trying, I know, but this reads as juvenile and performative.
I don't remember this day, but I can fabricate it well enough. Life is a chain of these shining hours like a strand of pearls. They weren't enough for Todd. I don't know that they could have been.
To you, it seemed his sexuality was no big deal. He was queer and in college in upstate New York. This could have been his romantic and sexual prime. But you did not have to live his days. You did not have to feel (much of) the cloud of homophobia under which he labored. Your mental illness didn't magnify your confusion as his did. (It will and does, but not to his degree.)
I have had to talk to Kei today, and she seems lost that you did this. I know you didn't really think how this would affect those you left behind, or if you did you didn't think of this, but you really meant a lot to that girl.
I don't know what death Kei might have seen in her life to this point, but Todd's suicide did gut her. Keilaina was one of the sweetest and most loving people I have ever found and, even though I rarely see or speak to her, my love for her remains constant.
Some of it might simply be the hollow fear of someone in your peer group dying, especially by their own hands. Much of what you feel in the wake of Todd's suicide falls into this camp.
Keilaina's grief was open and unembarrassed. You did not love Todd. You could not love most of his friends. But you loved Keilaina, so her agony became yours as you wanted to soothe her and were unable. You had no pretty words for her. When you cried because of his death, more than half those tears were to try to sate the vacancy left in Keilaina.
And I know for damned sure that I told you to talk to me before you did anything this rash.
Why on earth would he? What good would you have been to him?
How am I supposed to handle always having a Todd-shaped hole in my life empty?
I feel my response might be underestimating Todd. There is this hole, and it is not only because you now have been introduced to an unjust, sudden death. As I have aged, I have wanted to clutch to me kids who reminded me of Todd. I want to save them because I couldn't save Todd. I do miss him, imagining the man he might have been with a few more years under his belt. He wouldn't have become some boring adult, of that I am sure. He wouldn't have stopped greeting you by your full name.
I have struggled against clinging to friends because it is their nature to leave -- most friendships do not last two years, to say nothing of two decades. Todd left us all at once with no reprieve. We cannot run into him at the grocery store and make vague plans on which we have no intention of following through.
I don't miss him as a symbol. I miss him as a boy I knew and should have known better. I can only hope to heal others in his memory.
I'd be very happy to know that Death was beautiful for you in your last moments, though you loved Delirium far more.
Death is not beautiful in almost all circumstances. It is the extinguishing of a universe what we can ever visit again. Todd's death in particular was not beautiful. It is actively harmful to romanticize it.