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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.
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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