I was shocked, then saddened. Within a few hours of that harrowing suicide, the park had already moved on. The city, with the rest of the world, never stopped.

Image David S. Buckel argues in favor of gay marriage, in 2006 at the New Jersey Supreme Court in Trenton. Credit... Pool photo by Jose F. Moreno

At home I looked online to see how this man’s desperate act, taken with the express purpose of drawing attention, was being presented in our click-based media landscape. His tortured message was there, but it was already being drowned out by other news, particularly the deafening noise from the president’s porn star feud.

It occurred to me that Mr. Buckel didn’t have the banner headlines because what he did was so un-American. I don’t mean in the patriotic sense. I mean in style and form. The extraordinarily painful way he took his life reminded me more of the Tibetans who have sacrificed their lives protesting Chinese rule. And then I read that Mr. Buckel had himself alluded to Tibetan monks in his note.

How do Americans kill themselves when they want to get attention? Just look at gun-related massacre after massacre, in which legally armed monsters take the lives of innocents, ensuring they get every front page and top-of-the-hour story, before turning the guns on themselves. In Parkland, Fla., in Las Vegas, and on and on. And so their messages of nihilism, of pure evil, spread.

Whatever underlying depression or personal issues drove David Buckel to do what he did, he, too, had a message. He wrote in his suicide note: “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result — my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”