Submission 128

Dear C,

There’s so many things that’ve been left unsaid, it’s hard to know where to start. The clarity with which suicide focuses the mind onto what I most want you to know is only balanced out by the amount of things I want to share with you - the list of which will continue to grow for as long as there’s breath in my body. The only word I can think of that can describe you is "magical". You made people’s souls feel lighter just by being who you were, and you made their hearts bounce with joy. You are foundational to who I am as a human being, and the fact that you’ll never know that utterly destroys me. You were sunshine - which is why it now feels as though the sun has left the sky.

I didn’t know what it meant to miss someone until you died. In my pre-grief mind, you were a constant fixture of the world. When I look back, the regret I feel for not realising just how much you were suffering is immeasurable. I’ll never forget where I was or what I felt when I first heard that you’d died. It was this instant feeling of the world grinding to a halt and shattering on its axis. We can try to collect all of the little shards and reassemble them somehow, but the truth of the matter is you weren’t just a piece of the Earth - you were the glue that held all the pieces together. I can’t believe it took the most unfixable of catastrophes to happen for me to realise this. It’s as though, when you died, that I realised the only reason anything on this Earth ever shone at all was because it was merely reflecting the light that radiated so effortlessly out of you.

Had the scale of your suffering been known, there would’ve been an army of us lining up to carry you for as long as you needed - until your feet could bear the weight of your soul once again. I’m sorry you didn’t know that. I’m sorry I didn’t make it known to you when I should’ve. It’s these people who’re now irrevocably broken, forever tormenting themselves wondering what they could’ve done differently. How can we not feel that way when we’re here now speaking about you in past tense when there’s a life still on this Earth that you should be living?

From my perspective, you appeared to have mastered the art of living. The contrast between the light you lived with and the limitless darkness of your ending will forever feel as though it confounds reality itself. Part of me is still in denial. I still expect you to pop up and say "what have I missed?". Everything - that’s what you’ve missed. That’s what you’re missing. That’s why we grieve - not just for what we miss about you, but for all you’re missing about the life you had in front of you. And if the life you’d lived up until your departure was anything to go by - with all the adventure, love, and laughter - then we can be certain your remaining years would’ve been equally spectacular. They would’ve proved to you that it was worth staying. After all, if 40 years had enough room to accommodate the first and last steps of a life so remarkable, imagine what you could’ve done with another 40 years. Imagine how many more lives you could’ve touched. "Imagine" - that’s all we have now: an endless number of what-could’ve-beens.

I’m under no delusions as to the true nature of death. I know this thing we experience as "consciousness" is merely a brief interlude between nothingness. I know there is no "better place" that you can be in, I know you’re not "looking down", I know you’ll never know just how much you mean to so many of us. That is the essence of the tragedy. Knowing that there will be no second chance, knowing that the final farewell was premature. That knowledge brings with it a deep-rooted sense of guilt attached even to the action of breathing itself - because when we’re all wondering what you should be doing, we all know that "breathing" is the answer.

Death focuses the mind so entirely onto the finitude of existence, and for many, that’s what inspires them to live. For me however, your death has made me a prisoner of my own mortality. Each thing I do with the objective of experiencing joy ends up being overpowered by an all-encompassing and soul-wrenching feeling of despair, knowing that joy is exactly what you don’t but should have the opportunity to experience. Hence, seeking joy defeats its own purpose. Even if I were capable of emulating the passion with which you lived, the absence of your heartbeat from this world turns even joy into intolerable agony.

Two years and eight months down, forever to go. But if nothing else, I understand now that it is an act of love in itself to carry your pain so you don’t have to anymore.

I love you,
A.