Idiots

When my best friend killed himself and I went to his memorial, I looked down at his Pokémon Platinum manual—tattered, beaten, soft with use. Tucked between the pages were photos of him and everyone who loved him. Screenshots of texts from his students at a school for troubled young men—his kids—where he taught English and got them writing haikus and sending mass messages to their families about how they mattered, how they were saved, how they were seen.

It almost sounds made up.
But it isn’t.

And surrounded by all of that proof, all I could think was:
Idiot.
He was an idiot.

This wasn’t my first time at a table like that. I lost my older brother to suicide when I was sixteen. I was the second kid; he was the first. We had two younger siblings. Nothing could pull us apart—except time, and religion, and high school, and trauma, and the kinds of rooms where tenderness gets punished. Two kids who were too tolerant and too hard on themselves. A little bit tortured, and then actually tortured.

He killed himself, and I was left behind—holding broken pieces of a friend I had, and a friend I lost, and every new void those pieces introduced.

A few months later I met someone who didn’t fill every void, but he filled the artistic one, the philosophical one, the tortured one. He became one of my best friends. For ten years we kept our friendship.

And then he killed himself.

Both of them: idiots.
And I’m angry.
I think it’s okay to be angry.
When I’m angry, I think it’s okay to be crass.

There isn’t anything wrong with any emotion as long as you’re self-aware about it. And right now it still feels like they were idiots for not seeing what they were leaving behind.

I don’t say that lightly. I’ve stood on that brink myself more than once. I know the tunnel and the pressure and the cold, convincing logic. I wouldn’t have blamed myself if I’d taken the other road.

I’m glad I didn’t.
Because all I can hear now is the echo of what I would have been:
An idiot.

Here’s how I live with it.

After Max died, I spent a decade trying to find the right box for my grief. Not a box to hide him, not a box to tidy the mess. A box that could hold him without collapsing me. I kept building and breaking and rebuilding that box until it finally fit—sturdy enough to set on a shelf I could reach, soft enough not to cut my hands when I opened it.

When Truman died, it wasn’t that the box needed to double in size and drag me through another decade. I already had the box. Grief, it turns out, is cross-functional—crass as that sounds. The same container can hold more than one weight if you reinforce the corners and label it honestly.

And here’s the label: I can want to blame people. I can try to solve the unsolvable. I can feel everything—anger, sorrow, love, contempt, tenderness—and still not be in danger just because I feel them. I can answer, not to God, but to the best version of myself—Would he say I tried my best? If he would, then the box closes for the night. Not locked. Not forgotten. Just… placed.

That philosophy has kept me alive. It isn’t clean. Some of my coping mechanisms aren’t the healthiest. But they are mine, and they keep me living a normal, boring, beautiful life. They let me be angry without becoming ash. They let me be sad without becoming gone.

So I’ll say what I wish they could hear, what I wish anyone teetering could hear:

You are more loved than you think.
You are more cared for than you appreciate.
There are more good people in this world than you’ve been giving it credit for.

If you’re depressed, reach out to one of them. Hand them the box for a while. Let them hold it with you.

And don’t be an idiot.