When Hope Fails.

Speaking about the unspeakable.

I often find myself dwelling over the things I don’t know, the things I’ll never know, or the things I just don’t know yet. Brad Pitt thinking Gweneth Paltrow was at home waiting for him at the end of Se7en. After deciding to actually let her in emotionally after keeping her at arm’s length (or maybe because of that decision), Dexter finding Rita in the tub at the end of season four of Dexter. Romeo drinking the poison before learning Juliet had faked her death. What does the audience know that I just don’t know yet? (And, yes, I am the star of my own Truman Show. And we get killer ratings.)  I know there are people who I care about and are dear to me who have passed away and I just haven’t heard about it yet. And I know it may seem like a friendship couldn’t be that deep or that affecting if you haven’t interacted with the person in years. Many people don’t understand that…but they aren’t me.

For the first seventeen years of my life, except for one instance, the longest I had ever stayed in one place was three years. Then you hit the reset button and started the whole thing all over again. The concept of “The House I grew up in” was a thing on TV. Even with my best friends, I knew our time together was temporary. That didn’t mean that our connections weren’t deep or real. If anything, it meant the opposite.  While we had each other, we really went all in because we knew that time was fleeting.

So I grew up searing the connections I managed to make across my heart, and even if we were only in each other’s lives for a season, it was OUR season and if we ever managed to see each other again, that real connection would still be there, ready to pick up right where we left off. (Towards the end of my tour, this became the most excruciating part because I just couldn’t continue letting people in just to say goodbye four weeks later again and again. But to not let people in would turn me into a person I was not.)

All this is to say that I just learned of another friend’s suicide. And it happened when the world shut down, back in March of 2020. We had been starting to make music together when I got the tour so we put that on hold until I returned to LA, if I did return. And since I’ve been back, it has been one thing or another that would come up and require my immediate attention. Like so many, I assumed that that element would always be there when I was ready. That he’d always be there when it was our music’s time to finally be heard.

But that wasn’t the case. Our music will never be heard.

Too much horrible happened too quickly for him to gain the perspective needed to realize that everything changes, even pandemics. Nope. His demons got the best of him and he bounced. And I’m left thinking about his last Facebook post and our last interaction, not knowing that it was actually our final interaction.

I don’t know where I’m going with this other than to try to convey how this can be as devastating as it is. When someone kills himself, it’s a tragedy. Raised by the television, I often find myself filtering my experience through the entertainment medium. (Have you noticed?) Life has always been like a movie or a Star Trek episode where one tiny change occurring early on has a cascading effect on everything that follows. Change is that powerful and that available at all times.

How you’re feeling in any one moment isn’t forever. It can’t be..even if sometimes we desperately wish that it could be. But to live is to change, which turns out to be the only thing you can actually depend on in life. Change. You can wake up one day and be abandoned by your friends, discover your health is fleeting, your true love loves another, you’re not actually related to your family, the things you thought you knew about the world have been lies you took as doctrine your whole life, you could lose or finally discover your faith, or blink and literally stop recognizing yourself in the mirror. The only sure thing in this world and in this life is change. And just like everything, that fact can fill your heart with hope or dread, depending on your perspective.

But when the specter of hope becomes too distant to be real, that’s when I’m supposed to be there to remind you. As your friend, I have one job: To keep you connected to hope when you can’t see it for yourself in your life anymore. And so if you decide to off yourself, I’ve failed you. And more than just you because, for lack of a better word, there is infinite potential within each and every one of us. Suicide becomes the loss of that infinite potential. If there are nations within all of us, suicide becomes genocide. I failed him and I failed all the worlds within him, too.

So many of us are carrying the bitter blend of frustration and guilt and incredulity and anger and sorrow and exasperation. And regret. Of course there are the unfortunate souls saddled with mental illness who decide to take their own lives and leave behind heartbreak and grief in their wake. But it’s those individuals who don’t have that added battle to manage yet decide to bow out anyway that really claw their way into the back of my psyche and never let go. Ever.

You made a decision that is as final as it gets during a moment that was anything but final. Who knows what waiting a few moments more might have yielded you? We’ll never ever know. We’re going to be dead so much longer than we’ll be alive. And I wasn’t there to remind you of that when you needed me the most.

It doesn’t matter that I know it wasn’t my fault and that I can’t blame myself for the actions of others, it doesn’t change the fact that, if I had been there then, if I had reached out at that moment, my friend wouldn’t have killed himself. Maybe it would have only delayed the act a day or a few hours...but what if that would have been all it took for him to see that change was coming for him, too? When my friend gave up on hope, he seared all of this unrest across my heart, denying me the peace of resolution until the day it stops beating.