When death feels like information

Content warning: This post discusses suicide, grief, and depression.

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A friend of mine recently died by suicide.

Even typing that first sentence feels strange. I keep expecting it to become something more than a sentence, something grand that knocks me over every time I say it. But right now, it still feels like a piece of information.

A mutual friend called me and said he had news. He told me what happened, and suddenly this was a thing I had been told. A new nugget of information that I knew: my friend had died. I immediately ran over to another friend’s place because he had been much closer to him, and I knew he was not doing well. I went over and held him while he grieved. Then I sat with the same information myself, and even now my brain is still holding it like a fact.

That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about. I had this idea of what death was supposed to feel like. It breaks you. You break down, you’re debilitated for months, you can’t think straight, and the entire world shifts around the fact that this person is gone. I am sad, and it is terrifying and incredibly weird to suddenly speak about someone in the past tense, but I don’t feel broken in the way I thought I was supposed to. He was a good friend. He invited me to things and consistently tried to make me feel included, and I don’t want my reaction now to discount any of that. I also don’t know what my reaction means. Maybe the shock hasn’t fully landed. Maybe it means nothing. I genuinely don’t know.

My mind keeps trying to solve what happened anyway. I think that’s where a lot of the spiraling has come from. It starts collecting the facts I know and trying to turn them into an explanation. Was it the instability? Was it not having one thing that gave every day some structure? Did he keep trying different things and feel like none of them ever quite clicked? Did being surrounded by friends and a huge community still not reach whatever was happening inside his head?

Those are guesses. I know that. Everyone is looking at the life we could see from the outside and asking the same version of the question: why didn’t he talk to anyone? But humans are so complex. There are things happening so deep inside another person that I don’t think we can actually fathom them. We can look at everything someone had around them and try to make it logical, but this is not something I can make logical. I don’t know what was happening inside his head, and I never will.

One of the places my brain keeps going is work, and I almost don’t want to write that because it sounds like I’m trying to turn something incredibly dark into a lesson about our jobs. I’m not trying to do that. There is no clean takeaway here, and “your silly little job gives you purpose” would be an especially horrible one. I don’t know that a job, or any one thing, would have changed anything.

I think my mind is going there because of what I learned when I was doing entrepreneurship. A job obviously gives you money, but it also gives you a routine, somewhere to be, something to do, and a reason to wake up in the morning. When nobody else is giving you that structure, you have to create all of it yourself. You have to decide what matters today and find your own reason to get up and do it again tomorrow, and that can be really hard. Needing someone else to give you some of that structure doesn’t have to be shameful. It can actually be a very beautiful thing.

That is as far as this thought goes. I am not saying a job saves you, and I am not looking at my friend’s life and declaring that I found the missing piece. This is one of the things his death made me reflect on. It is not an explanation for why he died.

I’m just as confused about where other people fit into all of this. He had so many friends and such a large community. That is the thing everyone keeps saying, and I keep thinking that sometimes it still isn’t enough. Not because friendship doesn’t matter. It obviously matters. But having people around you and having a purpose might not be the same thing, or maybe they are connected and I just can’t see how. Maybe neither one is something another person can measure from the outside.

I keep coming back to this idea that life isn’t that deep, which feels like a terrible thing to say in a post about death. I don’t mean that life doesn’t matter. I mean I don’t think meaning is automatically built into any of this. We give things meaning. Think about something being illegal. The fact that it is illegal doesn’t make it inherently bad. As a society, we decided it was bad. Something that is illegal in one country can be completely accepted or even praised in another country. The thing itself just is, and then humans build meaning around it.

Life feels full of those walking contradictions. People can think they’re happy and not be happy. People can have done a lot and still be depressed. Someone can have friends, community, freedom, and things they care about, and none of that allows the rest of us to know what their life feels like inside their own head. It just doesn’t make sense.

I don’t know if purpose is the answer. I don’t know if a job, a community, a routine, or any other one thing can ever be enough. I don’t think any of this explains what happened, and I don’t want to pretend it does. I only know that since I got that phone call, I’ve been thinking about the things that make a person get up in the morning and how impossible it is to know what is happening inside another person’s head.

Right now, the only thing I know for sure is that he is gone. Even that still feels like a piece of information.