Suicide Note

I didn't know you. I never will.

The closest I will come to knowing you will have been the distraught — distraught — woman who passed me several times a day all week through the entrance vestibule two floors below the Critical Care Unit to head outside for a smoke. Never was she far from tears — apparently having just shed them, barely hanging on the edge of them, or outright crying as she sped through. All. Week.

Or the parade of teenagers who came to the hospital today, wide-eyed, a little scared not knowing what to expect. And then, by ones and by twos, they stumbled out of the elevators, faces warped by sorrow, such young, fresh, pretty faces twisted in sad grimace.

A middle-aged woman stood in the the lobby, directing traffic, diverting and dividing the stream of adolescents, sending some to the elevators, some to the chairs to wait. I approached her. "Is it a teacher? A student?"

"Their friend," she said. "He was seventeen."

Was.

Until that moment I didn't know for whom your mother cried through the week. One assumes the loss of an elder, a parent or grandparent, withered by age or ravaged by some nefarious disease.

At that moment, I knew you were still alive. I had overheard it this morning; a man spoke about you in hushed tones into his mobile phone. "Yeah. It's over. They're gonna pull the plug today."

Still alive. Yet the middle-aged woman in the lobby said, "Was."

And so word had gone out that today is it: the technology amassed and arrayed around you in that room somewhere two floors above me, the hums and whirs and beeps that had prolonged your existence for much of the week, would be shut off. And the people who made up the stuff of your life, for whom you were the stuff of theirs, came to say good-bye.

A group of teens — your friends — later shuffled outside to the benches where they could talk, blow off some steam, and have a smoke. And cry.

I stepped outside and approached them. I broke a rule. "What happened to your friend?" I asked.

A young lady, perhaps more world-aware than most her age, said, "I really can't tell you that. I--"

"I can!" A young man spoke with a loud voice and a low threshold for a family's privacy. "He tried to hang himself."

"He did hang himself," said another young man, seated a couple of bodies away from the first. "That's why we're--" An aimless, formless gesture of one hand expressed everything he felt for you that his words couldn't.

I made what I hope looked like a sympathetic expression with my face, and I walked away.

Is this what you wanted? Are these the people upon whom you wished to inflict so much pain? Is their agony worth more than yours in trade? Is what any of them did to you — or didn't do for you — worth what you're putting them through, now?

Did you talk to any of them about it? Could you have talked to them? Were you not aware that so many people loved you? That many of them would have shared your burden? That one of them — just one — might have needed your help to get through?

Did you talk about it to an adult, someone who went through all of the same fear, sadness, anger, loneliness, despair, and pain as a teen, and who came out the other side understanding that you get through it! You get over it! It's not bigger than you! If it's not going to kill you on its own, it's not worth dying over.

But, clearly, you believed it was bigger than you. You made this day one that your friends will never forget. You've opened a hole in your mother that will never close.

I shed a brief tear as I bore silent witness to the heartache your final decision has wrought on everyone who loved you. My tear was for them — your friends, your teachers, your mother — because I know the pain of losing a loved one to suicide, and in that moment I knew your friends and your teachers and your mother.

But I didn't know you. I never will.



°