A Friend In Need

I lost you to suicide a couple of months ago but I only became aware of it yesterday. I knew you had your struggles with depression and I had been keeping you in my thoughts but somehow in the cacophony of my life, I missed your passing and your memorial.

I know you fought to keep the demons that haunted you at bay. The courage you displayed while you fought your battle kept the ferocity of the fight well hidden. You lived your life like it was an adventure. I always found it difficult to correlate your illness with the intensity and zeal in which I saw you live. Logically I understand the issues of mental health are complicated and deep rooted, but emotionally I feel the guilt that comes with such a loss. While you struggled, I lived my life. I worked. I played. My life went on, simple and so, so easy.  I am sorry you suffered so much for so long  in silence.

Goodbye my friend.

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”  - David Foster Wallace (1962 - 2008)