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We all have been touched by the tragedy of someone taking their own life. That act leaves so many unanswerable questions that it often leaves confusion frustration and loss to the friends and families left behind. This is going to be a short series of different times suicide touched my life. Who knows I might even be able to get other people to share their stories of how suicide touched them.
The first experience I wanted to share is the most recent and in a way the most impactful for me. This is about a guy named Jake. Jake and I grew up together. From the time I repeated the 3rd grade Jake was in my life. He would come to stay over at my house and I would go over to his place. Jake lived out in the country and so when we stayed at his house rarely did we ever stay in the house. We would sleep in the horse barn many Friday nights. Our mutual friend John Harbison and I would show up at school loaded for bear. We would have sleeping bags and our Kodak Diskman camera at the ready. all packed up for whatever fun we had planned.
Those were great times. Jake and I were friends all the way through high school. Yeah, girls separated us a bit Yet Jake was a good friend he came by after a particularly brutal breakup with my first girlfriend and we went Bowling in a nearby town.
Jake was a very good friend to me, but not just me. You see our senior class was 42 students, and in a small town yeah you may have a dust-up from time to time but as a whole everyone was friends. The Jocks were friends with the band geeks, Heck the jocks were band geeks. If you were in athletics you played football basketball and ran track. Now Jake wasn’t a jock but he was friends with everyone. Jake was a good dude.
Jake with Class Mates Elda and Misty
Jake was always telling jokes and he loved to make everyone laugh. He was a light of positivity in our teenage years.
High school ended and we all went to college and our lives took off. I spend a semester and a half in college while Jake was close by with many of my classmates. He attended West Texas A&M in Canyon and I was living in Amarillo. Yet for being so close we just didn’t see each other that much. There were times that I would trip over him and one time he caught e out as his fraternity was having a toga party and I was asked to come along. Yet as the years grew so did our contact.
Eventually, I was in the Navy and Jake was living his Life. I would think of him but didn’t see him again till many years later thanks to Facebook. For all the complaints Facebook has it truly has helped keep our class together. We talk from time to time on the platform and that is where I was able to catch up with Jake and we started talking from time to time. I found out that he had a partner in his life which was a huge surprise for me because I never knew his alignment even in high school. Yet I got to meet his partner Roy and saw how much of an impact he had in the world. Jake was still as full of life and adventure as he always had been. When I was in the Brownwood area of Texas I would stop by and see what was going on.
Then my perception of the world changed. I woke up and saw this in my Facebook timeline
November 18th, 2019 How? Why? So many questions arose in such a short amount of time. Did He and Roy have a fight? Did they break up? Our minds want to find a solution to an unclosed loop and this often causes us to spin mentally and that is exactly what I was experiencing. My best friend from high school had killed himself.
I called up Roy and we talked a few times trying to find a why. Roy was as lost as I was. probably even more so. They were making plans just the night before. Then the following morning it happened. Roy left for work and about an hour later Roy got a call from Jake’s employer to see if Jake was alright. Roy not knowing what was going on said he would go check on him and see why he wasn’t working. He got home and found Jake dead from a self-inflicted gunshot. The morning was just as normal as any. There weren’t any visible bouts of depression. There weren’t any manic episodes that might point to this being something Jake could possibly do.
I still ask why though I know that the answers won’t appear. He was my best friend in high school. He was Roy’s best friend in his adulthood. This man who was friends to many with a wicked funnybone somehow could not find a reason to live life one more day. How do we find our reasons? How do we support those who have lost their why? What signs did Jake leave that we just simply missed?