Where were you when you first heard about a friend or a loved one’s suicide?
Suicide is something that has been on my mind quite a bit recently. Not because I am considering it myself, but because it is a real problem here in Japan where I live. I work in public schools, and in the past two months, two junior high school students and one high school student in the city where I live have killed themselves. Their deaths have led to a lot of talk about bullying, depression, societal pressure, and, of course, suicide.
The first time I lost a loved one to suicide, I was only three or four years old—too young to remember many of the details, and too young to be told the truth; which was that my great-grandfather had hung himself in the attic of his house.
I don’t have many memories of my great-grandfather outside of a few vague and distant images of the train tracks we often walked along when I was little, but I clearly remember the reaction I had to the news of his death and, based on that reaction, I know that we had a very close relationship.
When my mother told me about my great-grandfather’s death, I don’t remember what she said, but I have a sense that there was a soft light spreading out across the walls of the room where we sat, the type of muted light that table lamps give off from beneath their shades in the corners of rooms. I assume this means that my mother told me about this in the early evening or at night.
I can somewhat remember the room I was in. It was in the front of a house that we moved from a year or so after my great-grandfather’s death. In this room, my mother and I were sitting in a chair. Maybe she sat me down on her lap so she could hold me as she broke the news. Maybe she was crying herself when she told me. I’m not sure. These details elude me.
What I do remember clearly, though, is the surge of emotion I felt when I heard the news. It was bigger and stronger than anything I had ever known. It’s possible that, even to this day, it is the strongest emotion I have ever known. I cried and screamed, and screamed and cried. I called out over and over again,
I hate God! I hate him! I hate him! I hate him!
After this day, I didn’t have any close encounters with suicide for a long time, not until two days after my thirty-second birthday.
At that time, I had recently moved into a new apartment and the room where I was sitting still had an empty, not-yet-settled feel to it. The sun was shining strongly through a sliding glass door. Its glare reflected sharply off the recently polished hardwood floors and threw angles of light on the white, papered walls of the room.
I was organizing teaching materials and getting ready for my first day of a new job. My head ached slightly and I was groggy. My wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, was sitting between the sliding glass door and I when her phone rang. After she answered it, it didn’t take long to realize that something was wrong. I looked up, but I couldn’t see her clearly. The light behind her was too bright. She said the name of one of our mutual friends to me, a friend we had said goodnight and goodbye to in the early hours of the morning after my birthday party two days earlier.
That our friend was struggling with depression and a recent breakup was no secret to many of us, but the degree to which she was struggling was only known by a few. When my wife said Mayumi’s name, I remember asking something to the effect of, Did she do something? Where is she? She’s all right, right?
That she might attempt suicide wasn’t surprising, but that she could actually kill herself was something that I couldn’t believe. In that moment, I thought for sure that she was in a hospital somewhere, safe.
I’ve felt guilty ever since that moment. I don’t know how I could have been so foolish as to have thought something like that. I don’t know how I could have not taken things more seriously, not been more aware of what Mayumi was going through on the night that she killed herself. So many of our friends were there that night and we all let her go home from the party alone. The last time I hugged her, I remember, she was trembling. I thought this was odd at the time, but I didn’t know what to attribute it to, and I was in the middle of opening presents and drinking too much, so it didn’t raise any red flags.
Maybe she was just excited, I thought. Or cold.
When my wife told me Mayumi was dead, it didn’t register at all. That I would never see her alive again just didn’t seem real. I was at a loss for how and what to feel. There was nothing but a void.
And the sharp glare of the sun.
And my body, going through the motions.
Image Credits: Pixabay
Note: To any of you who have lost someone to suicide, please, either contribute in the comments below by saying where you were and how you felt when you first found out about the suicide, or write your own post like this and link to it here. I will make a collection of your posts so that we can have all of our experiences shared in one place.
In addition: I will be writing and posting about where I was and how I felt when I first heard about the World Trade Center attacks of 2001. If you would like to join me in posting about the same topic, I am planning to post about this on December 20. Please join me and do the same.
A Message to Everyone
Suicide is very real, and I don’t know what to think of it. I hope that the people I know who have taken their lives are in a better place now and that they are no longer suffering, but more than anything, I wish that they were still here to share their lives with me.
To any of you who may be thinking about taking your lives, know that if you do, you will be dearly missed by many people. This may or may not be a consolation to you, but believe me when I say that it is true.