In the year since Jonathan killed himself/a failure I must atone for with every breath
November is a month deeply saturated in grief. A year since Jonathan killed himself on Wednesday. Writing about grief is weird, I can never capture it. I write pages and pages in my notebook trying to describe my exact flavor of regret and pain and guilt and nausea and despair, but I cannot for the life of me put it on the page in the right order.
I went to mass today, and an OCIA class before it. Class on the four last things; death, judgement, heaven, and hell, with a focus on purgatory (a difficult concept to comprehend for a bunch of adult converts.) On praying for the souls in purgatory. On the suffering of souls in purgatory. I want to hope he's not in hell. I think he's probably just spending a whole lot of time in purgatory. Am I causing my friend to suffer more because I'm not praying enough? Am I letting him down in death as I did in life? Is any of this shit real?
Mass about prayer. Mass about the souls of the dead. Mass I sobbed through next to a girl I'm growing closer to. Mass I spent feeling the visceral suffering of a friend I abandoned in life and in death. I hope God allowed me to carry his suffering in that moment and share in it with him. I hope his load was lighter because I asked to partake in it. I swear I felt him next to me in the pew. I swear I saw him, kneeling side by side, suffering in death as he did in life. If I can no longer be a good friend to a man on earth, I hope to God I can feel his suffering if only for a single mass-time. I hope to God it makes it easier for him. Nothing I do can ever be enough.
Knowing I failed. Knowing I knew it was coming and I didn't try hard enough to reach out, to make sure he knew he had someone to call. Why didn't he call anyone? I'm not sure he knew he had anyone on the other end of the wire.
In the past year, we've all gotten really good at showing up for each other. In the past year we've all gotten really good at calling someone when it gets rough. A loss like Jonathan brings a community together in the ugliest, worst way. The night someone was finally in the room for the way R has been for the past 6 years, both of the people I called picked up first ring. I kept my ringer on all weekend for one of us who had a trip to where it all happened. We've never gone a year without a tragedy before. I'm not holding my breath, but I am checking in on my friends more this week. I'm sorry, Jonathan, that it took your loss for us to get better.
His suicide permanently changed the trajectory of my life. After the waves of grief let up for long enough for me to see the wreckage I had caused, I started to care more. I jumped into life with less fear, less apprehension. I don't want to regret like this again. I want the people around me to know that I care. I want strangers to see me bleeding from my chest with how much I love the world. I want to be someone that people can turn to. I want to be better, a better friend, a better person, a better citizen of the world. I cannot prevent every suicide, but I can treat each interaction with each person as if I have the opportunity to be a reason for someone to choose another day.
I cannot allow despair to win. I cannot allow this world to be entirely cruel. I don't want my friends to keep killing themselves. I don't want to live in a world of ghosts. I want to keep fighting myself if only to preserve my kindness. Sobbing at injustice against a stranger is a strength, I know that now. Caring deeply breathes life into everything around me. I will bleed myself almost dry if I need to. I will stay up and chain smoke with you and talk about nothing to help you through the night.
My life now, is an apology and a promise to do better. And on judgement day, when I stand before the Lord in all that I am, I hope to have made up for a quarter of the cost of not being there. I hope the guilt never leaves me. I hope it crushes me as I try to fall asleep until I close my eyes for the last time. I hope I whisper out an apology with my final breath.
some good words from readers can be found here, on the guestbooks. I invite you to leave your own.