Twenty Years

cw: suicide

All week, tears have been right there, just under the surface, waiting. It hasn’t taken much to bring them forth. The smallest things have gotten to me. Even just talking to a friend about 84, Charing Cross Rd — which if you haven’t read you must immediately. You’ll finish it in less than hour — made my voice wobble when we were talking about a small kindness one of the characters did for another.

It’s been kind of a hard week, though, for me and my tender heart. My year with J, my mentee, ended not with a bang but a whimper. I was supposed to have ended my visits with him a week earlier, though I swear there was nothing about that in any of the emails the mentor program sent, and so the celebratory McDonalds and donuts we had planned had to be tossed aside and instead of a last visit I got a hurried hug and a “I don’t like those kinds of donuts” before he raced back to the fun year-end activities from which he had been pulled to come say goodbye to me. Our last couple of visits were fraught for all kinds of reasons and I had been looking forward to a fun, lighthearted visit. I cried when I got back to my car because I felt like I had messed up by getting the dates wrong and it was all just not how I wanted it to be. I cried, too, because this whole year with him has been not how I wanted it to be, but I’ve been thinking that I need to adjust my expectations. The important thing is that I show up.

All of this came on the heels of Sunday, which was the twentieth anniversary of the death of a good friend of mine by suicide. I wanted to write about him, to honor that day and him and our friendships, but I have written about him before and I was unsure that there was anything left to say. But I have spent my mornings this week filling page after page in a notebook about the whole harrowing saga, all the terrible, stressful things that had been going on in my own life, trying to make sense of everything that I did or didn’t do, trying to absolve my own guilt, and dealing with a surprising new emotion after all these years: anger.

Why do I feel guilty, you might be wondering. Should I have spotted the signs and warned someone? No. It’s worse than that, in my opinion. About a week before he completed suicide, my friend Fred admitted to me that he’d been thinking about it. I reacted with anger, which I now see was really panic in disguise. I got angry and told him that I would haunt him forever, which I understand makes absolutely no sense. But my brain short circuited. The rational brain can’t fully comprehend a brain that no longer wants to exist. It’s so anathema and frankly so terrifying that I simply didn’t know how to react. He immediately backtracked and laughed and said he was too much of a wuss to ever go through with it. But I told no one. And though people have told me over the years that I shouldn’t blame myself, deep down inside I think there will always be a little nagging voice telling me that they’re wrong. And this year on the anniversary, for the first time, I got angry. Angry that he did that to me, placed that burden on me. I know my anger isn’t rational because he wasn’t rational at the time and maybe my anger doesn’t make me look too good but I’ve learned that trying to squash down anger is never a good idea. It’s like trying to stick your finger in a leaking dam, cracks will only appear in other places and anger will come shooting out there instead. I realize, too, that my anger at him is just an offshoot of the anger at myself.

So, I’ve spent this week writing it all out, trying to figure out why I didn’t tell anyone, trying to rationalize it for myself. Fred was a lifeline to me in myriad ways. He was my boss but he had also somehow become my friend. My life had been falling apart in a pretty spectacular way that I may write about at some point, and he was the only person I confided in.¹ I had no women friends at that time because we had just moved back to the area and what was happening was, to me, so shameful that I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, but I could talk to Fred. I also relied on him financially. My salary, which was practically a pittance, included the possibility of getting extra money each month from each of the three brokers I worked for, but he was the only one who was giving me a any. I knew that he would see my telling anyone as a kind of betrayal, and I didn’t consciously think about this at the time, but this week I have realized that there was fear involved, too, fear that I would lose the money he was giving me, which we could not live without, or that I might lose my job entirely, and that we would lose our house (which ended up happening anyway not long after).

Life went back to “normal,” though I changed jobs not long after. But for anyone who has been touched by suicide, there is no more normal. You are changed.

For the entire time I worked for him, Fred wore a crisp white dress shirt every day and for a few weeks after he died I would feel like I was seeing something out of the corner of my eye, a flash of white, a presence, but when I would turn my head there would, of course, be nothing there. In October of that year, I had my first dream about Fred. In my dream, he came to me and said he was sorry. He said he was sorry, and that he would take it back if he could. When I woke up, I didn’t feel sad. I felt like I had had a visit with him. But later that day I realized that it was Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. Fred was Jewish. I’ve never known quite how to feel about that dream.

I’ve been wrestling with these thoughts, these memories all week. I can’t undo what I did, or to be more accurate what I didn’t do. Several people have told me that Fred must have trusted me immensely to admit to me that he was feeling suicidal, but that just makes me more sad, frankly. I’m working through it, but I’m still a little angry, at myself and at Fred. I guess I do forgive myself, but I haven’t forgotten. I guess I feel sorry for both of us.

1. My husband knew all about it because it was happening to him, too.