Written on August 10, 2022
One of my good friends from high school died by suicide in
May. It feels like I just got the call yesterday.
I was in the middle of cleaning my room. I still
haven’t finished sweeping.
Greg was a terrific friend. He was brave and kind and
he knew how to quack like a duck. We would be
in the middle of some serious conversation about girls or college or
life and he would quack. Sometimes he would interrupt himself with
a quack, start giggling, then turn serious, apologize,
and then quack and giggle all over again.
I was shocked when I got the call, but, sadly,
not entirely surprised. Greg suffered from treatment-resistant depression for
many years. One night after a party in high school,
he attempted suicide. I don’t remember very well what
happened after that. I don’t think we talked about it enough.
I don’t think I have talked about his death enough
either. I told my boss because I needed a few days
off of work, but none of my other co-workers.
I told a few of my friends from college, but not
all of them. So, here I am, on the
internet, talking about the death of my friend from suicide.
In elementary school, Greg and I played on the same soccer
team. I liked him. He was one of the only
kids from a different school that I invited to my birthday parties.
One year, the whole team signed up for a 5K race.
It was the longest I had ever run. I finished in
just over 27 minutes. Greg smoked us all with a sub-22 finish.
As a J.V. goalie, Greg saved dozens of
goals. He would throw himself at the ball without any care
onto the rocky field. He would end the games bruised and
scraped and grinning. As an organ donor, Greg saved five lives.
If it were a non-mental illness that got him,
one we understand better, like cancer, then it might have
been easier. There might have been less guilt. There might
have been some goodbyes. It’s hard, though,
to tell someone that you have terminal depression. With cancer,
it’s easy to prove that you’ve exhausted your
options. You can do chemo and surgery and all the other
drugs and treatments and then you die and then they say that
the cancer got you. With depression, it seems like there’s
always one last treatment you could try that would make it not
so terminal. When depression gets you, they say you did it yourself.