The Dark Bubble

A good friend of mine committed suicide in 1976. Brent Bosley. That guy had the best Cheshire grin I’ve ever seen. Within the last few years, my son and I each lost a good friend, both suicides—Ike’s was quick & unexpected, Dave’s stretched out over years. I recently heard about another suicide, a young veteran, and maybe the unshakable trauma of war had a hand in his decision to leave this incarnation. But I’m starting to wonder if the suicides, the epidemic of depression, even the planetary energy of fear might be an unexpected result of this culture of immediate gratification we’ve created over the past couple of decades. We want everything now, we mostly get everything now, and just maybe, we’re losing our ability to see beyond NOW.

I started wondering about this when Ike killed himself. He was 20, a gorgeous, smart, talented, funny young man we’d known since the boys were 6th-graders. He was so good-natured, the kid practically glowed. We’ll never know if Ike chose his exit because of a bad breakup with his long-time girlfriend, because of struggles with drugs & alcohol, or because of unresolved childhood/identity/self-esteem issues no one knew about (maybe not even Ike).

I know I’m again oversimplifying. I know suicide doesn’t have just one reason, cause or explanation. And I know that back in the day, people killed themselves. Like Brent, who decided it was easier to gas himself in his grandma’s garage than to face his own shame/guilt and his mom’s daily ridicule over Brent’s beautiful sashay, his love of silk kimonos, and his longing to study ballet. I wish I could have convinced him that the very next weekend, we’d be arm-in-arm at the Barrymore in our kimonos, laughing it up until expensive red wine spurted out our noses.

I wonder, back even further when folks expected to weather hard stuff, expected to do without things and to have to plan long-term because nothing was instant, if people had better time/distance vision, if fewer of us got caught in the dark bubble that won’t let us see past the pain of NOW.

I believe that if Ike had been able to look BACK over time, he would have seen a thousand people who adored him and needed him to be around. He would have seen joy in his life, like the time the boys boarded off the garage roof into piles of leaves, laughing so hard they peed. Or the roadtrips to the Omaha skatepark. Or the delicate thread that connected his heart to his mom’s. And if Ike had been able to look AHEAD, he would have known that however lost or tired he felt in that one moment, or the next, or even the next, he could push through to find more joy, more days of feeling found, helped, rested, loved, of being absolutely irreplaceable in the years to come.

You can’t tell people that. You can’t say: This is the darkest moment, but it won’t be dark forever, and you’ll have more dark moments, but they’ll pass too, and all the moments that aren’t dark, the ones you don’t believe are coming, they’re why you need to stick around. Don’t think NOW. Think back. Think forward. You can’t say that to someone in the bubble; they can’t hear you in there. It’s the ultimate Catch 22, I guess—all you can see is NOW and you need to see past NOW—you have to live to know that living is worth it.