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“He lost his battle with mental health.”
I guess that’s the contemporary Facebook suitable euphemism for “committed suicide”.
Some of you may remember the roommate that I kicked out last year. He took his own life on Saturday morning after a 10/10 argument and crashout with his daughter. Things had been rough lately but I’d seen him earlier the night before at the bar and he seemed more or less himself, just buried in his phone reconnecting with a woman from his past after her breakup such that we didn’t really talk much. The last thing I told him was that we should get together on Sunday.
What do you even say? This story was never going to have a happy ending, but those of us close to him figured that his health would take him first, or a plausibly-accidental overdose. It’s never good news when you get called to the hospital, an escort is waiting to take you back, and a police officer walks in with the doctor. “Was he depressed or did he seem like he would hurt himself?” “I’ve heard the suicide talk so many times either as his former roommate or working at the bar that I would just say that I’d see him tomorrow.” “Was he diagnosed with a mental health condition and did he take any medication?” “What wasn’t he diagnosed with?” “Did he own a firearm?” “Yes, and now that you mention it I don’t think I’ll soon forget what it looked like. I’m guessing this is why I saw a bunch of cops and crime scene tape a few blocks from where he’d been staying when I went to pick her up?” “Yes sir.”
“I wish he’d called/said something. I didn’t know things were so bad.” Perhaps I’m overly grim by disposition (most likely true) or people really are insanely naive and think that things will just magically get better (true of that person I was delivering the news to; nice guy, though) but, really? This shouldn’t exactly have been a surprise, save coming from those who figured he lacked the guts to actually do it. His problems weren’t solvable by a pep talk, nor were they in any sense temporary.
“It’s my fault!” No, it isn’t. The last person he’d been crashing with had been the latest to reach the end of her rope (pun not intended) and told him that he had to go, but that doesn’t make it her fault so much as it made her the loser of the game of musical chairs (This is how I described it to her.). The fact is that everyone close to him at some point or another had done and tolerated what they could in attempting to help him. Some had more patience and resources than others but it invariably ended the same way: frustration and defeat before reaching some form of “I can’t do this anymore.” None of us who were in that hospital room have any reason to blame ourselves. Even in some fairytale alternate scenario where the right person in the right place got him through this bad night there was always going to be another one, and another one, and…you get the idea.
I don’t know at precisely what point our friendship became an exercise in palliative care, and I don’t know if most people think in such terms (I guess not, judging by the surprised reactions from so many.), but that’s what it was. Maybe this is going to sound weird but I find myself having grieved in advance of the event to some extent. I’m sad, but not shocked. I’ll do my part for those of us left behind and at some point the grief will subside and we’ll remember the end less and the better times we had together more. Goodbye, my friend, and damn it I’m sorry I couldn’t fix you. God knows I gave it my best shot.
Selfishly, I’m afraid the contenders for the next call are running a rapid race, and those are my father and sister. Those are going to hurt.
Oh yeah, bonus material: "Is his dog okay?" "Yes, and in fact it's been staying with a different friend for some time now." I'm pretty sure that's called foreshadowing.
Very sorry for your loss.
My father committed suicide a couple of years ago and shortly thereafter I lost my older sibling to a drug overdose, and then a close family friend and as well as my cat. Not everybody copes the same way. There was much I miss 'about' them and the capabilities they had, but I didn't miss the kind of people they were and my memory wasn't punctuated with too many good experiences of them. Losing my cat of the 4 of them put me at a low point as I've always loved animals. When I think about it though, what I wish more than anything was that I could've had a different relationship with my father and sibling. Maybe things would've turned out different if we had that opportunity.
Thank you.
The hardest part of this is watching my sister go down the same road with different details (and some invariably shitty boyfriends, one of whom shot himself dead in front of her). She's been spiraling downhill pretty badly lately (mostly because she refuses to give up on the latest shitty boyfriend, and I know it sucks to realize that you need to move out and start over from scratch again, but she was also between jobs for a few months so throw in "broke and the cards are maxed out" into the mix). I offered her a place to stay if she could find somewhere else for her dog, and she retorted that the dog is the only thing she lives for now (Guess how many times I heard that from my now dead friend about his dog.). Same story with mom (who she refuses to live with anyway) and our father (He'd probably give in she pushed hard enough, to our stepmother's fury, but she stuck them with the last dog she had the last time she stayed with them.). Her current plan is allegedly to continue staying with the shitbag boyfriend who was about to kick her out and commute 5 hours a day multiple days a week to her new job. I told her she should plan on moving there as soon as she can swing it but she says she doesn't want to live in the same city as our mother (I get not wanting to live with her but that metro area is big enough for the two of them and I'm pretty sure she's just stalling for time because she refuses to give up on the boyfriend.).
It just sucks. It's the guilt trip that never ends. Our mother was a cartoon villain of a parent and I wasn't older enough to have any chance of defending her, just older enough that I was the first to figure out to run and hide when I heard that tone in her footsteps. It wasn't my fault that I was mom's favorite and she wasn't. No amount of analyzing it to death will completely silence the part of me that feels like the sibling equivalent of a war criminal. I can't rescue her now any more than I could when we were kids. There's plenty of nice stuff you can read about "breaking the cycle", but the fact is that a lot of people don't and the odds for my sister aren't looking good.
Our stepmother is a far better wife than our father deserves and is ordinarily understanding, but she'll never totally get it. Dad will never forgive himself. It doesn't matter how outmatched in court he was. It doesn't matter how hard he did fight or how much he did spend when he could've walked away. It doesn't matter that weekend's at dad's were that much better. All that matters is that he sees his daughter in pain, doesn't know how to make it stop, and feels like it's his fault. So yeah, he'll give whatever she asks as long as he has the money. Mercifully, he made enough in crypto after Trump got elected that he can swing it.
You're welcome.
I know how that can feel. It's difficult to move in that kind of world but you always need to do your best to retain good judgment while navigating through somber circumstances and having to make hard decisions. There's no other way to make progress. The boyfriend simply sounds like a deadbeat and is a dead end. Better to cut your losses early now than come to the same conclusion after you've pissed away too much time and end up right back with the same problem.
I had a very difficult life myself growing up. I had a lot of people around me when I was young. A lot of positive and negative influences on both sides, but the latter always weighs on the mind much more than the former which we quickly subsume and take for granted. When I was in school I had a very difficult time connecting with other kids. I was usually that kid that sat all the way in the back corner of the class and stayed quiet the whole day but always did his homework, stayed in an isolated corner on the playground during recess playing with sticks in the dirt, performed well and wasn't generally a nuisance to anyone. But there wasn't a lot of opportunity there either. The other kids couldn't keep up with me and the adults didn't want to have anything to do with me, so I was usually on an island to myself most of the time. I was just there to do my jail time and leave. Outside of that, I was very active in the neighborhood, but things weren't great there either.
I spent most of my time raising myself and learned to be skeptical of the thoughts others try to impart with you. A lot of the time others aren't independent actors looking out for your self-interest. They're motivated to have you think a certain way which benefits themselves. As I always told other neighborhood kids I'd mentor as I was getting older, "Always listen with your eyes, not with your ears." Don't ever do things that go against your own best judgment.
Whether it was school, the neighborhood or the home, one was almost never a reprieve from the other; and it was like a permanent nightmare that would never end. I still have thoughts about it every day and have for 20+ years that I've never been able to shake and probably never will. But experience is only what you take from it and I've learned a considerable amount from the things I've been though. Some lessons I think I would've never learned had I not gone through difficult things. There's little sense in moping or complaining about things as I see it. I was dealt a bad hand and played it as best as I could. You do your best. It's all that can be expected. And I'll continue to do the same. All you can do is have fun and smile as life takes you for a ride. And where that’s not always enough, I sometimes like to read some of my favorite religious scriptures:
“And recite to them the news of Noah, when he said to his people, "O my people, if my residence and my reminding of the signs of God has become burdensome upon you, then know that I have relied upon God. So resolve upon your plan and call upon your associates. Then let not your plan be obscure to you. Then carry it out upon me and do not let up on your attack.”
I hope things pick up for you and your family.
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I have a friend who is a Ketamine addict that I feel pretty sorry for but also can't let myself get too close to because he can say pretty hurtful stuff he doesn't even remember from the depths of his ketamine stupors and I can't always tell when he's in what state.
He didn't start out this way. He was selling weed for a bit on the darkweb in the early days and picked up some Bitcoin but then forgot about selling. Several years later his Bitcoin blew up into hundreds of thousands of dollars. He met a girl, bought a house, settled down and they tried to have kids. He would be house husband and she'd work in healthcare.
She miscarried four times in a row. They gave up trying. He started drinking and doing drugs because and couldn't find a job. She eventually divorced him. He just lives alone now and picks up odd jobs but gets fired because he keeps relapsing. A few months ago he ended up in the ER because he was doing Ketamine and cocaine and he stopped breathing and his junkie friend called 911.
I don't really know what to tell this guy in his 40s with no career prospects and rapidly depleting Bitcoin and a Ketamine addiction. To make matters worse he went on this Facebook tirade where he said he is actually kind of happy Trump won and 95% of his friends in this blue town disowned him.
I check on him once in awhile and offer a bit of advice and try to act like a sane voice of reason but I'm expecting to hear that he OD'd any month now.
It wasn't exactly the same situation, but my friend had also blown through a few hundred thousand in the form of an inheritance from his parents. He'd been a musician, worked various jobs (mostly in auto parts), etc. but couldn't really hold down a job after he started going down with heart failure and other health problems. Irritatingly, it's my understanding that some combination of having had a low on-paper income and having waited too long to apply for disability after he quit working (while subsisting on the inheritance) meant that he didn't have enough work credits to qualify. I don't know the exact details (Maybe he got denied initially and then ran out of work credits by the time his health was sufficiently bad.) but it was maddening to me because he was clearly unable to physically cope with any sort of labor or consistently show up because he'd have days he just couldn't do anything. You could get mad that he didn't do anything to help himself in terms of managing his health problems or maybe argue that he could've tried harder to get a work from home job but he didn't have a work history conducive to that and wasn't self-motivated enough to make it as a gig driver (Anyone can drive a car in circles, but doing so without crashing it and keeping it in good condition to use it for work actually takes some skill, and in my experience from that business a lot of people can't make themselves work enough to pay the bills without the fear of being fired.).
He'd lived hard in the small-time rock and roll scene, wound up with old people problems before his time, and most of his social circle from the good times had either died or aged out and moved on from that life. It really was sad and I felt bad because his life objectively sucked in a way that would've been hard for the best of us to cope with. It was just beyond his means.
There isn't really anything you can tell your friend that he doesn't already know. He has to love and respect himself enough to do stop with the drugs and put up with most likely being broke working a shitty job and having a mundane life because he wants more for himself than to be a statistic. You can't make somebody care about and for themselves. He's probably looking at what feels like an overwhelming amount of effort/self-improvement for what doesn't feel like a lot of return on investment. I'm sorry about your friend, because it sucks to watch.
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I'm sorry for your loss. I know what you mean about mourning someone in advance; my wife (and to a lesser extent I) did that with her brother who died last year. He was obviously circling the drain (he had really bad alcoholism), but that didn't necessarily make it easier when he finally did push his body too far. I hope that you are able to not blame yourself too much, and that you will be able to remember him as he was during the better times.
Thank you, and I'll get there.
I don't really blame myself at this point. I made my peace with that last year when I kicked him out. Could I have postponed the inevitable by letting him live with me until the bitter end? Probably, but by how long who knows and the cost to my sanity was going to exceed my ability to deal with it. I just couldn't do it, and I was far from the only one. We all did what we could and none of it was going to fix the unfixable. The only thing I had control over in that situation was how much I was willing to be collateral damage. I reached my end and that was that. We were still friends, exchanged dumb memes or whatever pretty much daily, and saw each other every week or so. I'm gonna miss him.
Sorry about the brother. Alcoholism blows and there isn't a damned thing those who care can do if the person holding the bottle can't find it in himself to quit or at least tone it down to a level that's compatible with the life you want to live. Take it from someone who's more acquainted with it than most.
Edit: I forgot to mention. We did get ahold of one of his cousins (He didn't have much family left and they lived a few hours away but I'm pretty sure that I met her once.) and she was very gracious. She mentioned having offered to let him move in with her. That brought me some peace to hear that he'd had somewhere to go.
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