Zoo

A guy I know killed himself earlier this week. We hadn't been on good terms for the past year so I didn't realize his blog, his Facebook and his email address had all been deleted, but others in my circle did. A gaggle of my concerned lady friends put their noses to the grindstone today and it was confirmed that yes, Adam is gone.

It is very sad that a person I sorta knew felt hopeless enough to kill himself. The thing that makes me the saddest though is how sad our mutual friends are, which reminds me of the girl I worked with who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge a few years ago.

It's a sad and unfortunate story but whenever I think about it, the thing that sticks out to me is the moment I told one of our colleagues that Cynthia had killed herself.

I remember it coming out of my mouth as sort of somber and sort of OMG GOSSIP and feeling bad about that as soon as the words left my lips, but the part that kills me is that the moment the words registered in Mary's brain, she let out what I can only describe as a sob. It was more than a sob though, it was like an explosion of emotion that burst out of her and down the front of her shirt.

It took her a minute to compose herself but when she did, she told me that her brother had killed himself too and I felt horrible for her because she wasn't just hearing that a 24-year-old girl we worked with was dead, but a big chunk of her pain from the loss of her brother twisted itself around in her too.

So the thing that makes me saddest when I think about Adam is that it might make other people, possibly people I care about, make that sound too.