I am switching topics for this post.

Last night, a friend passed away. He had tried to kill himself through self-immolation in January, and in the past few months had amazed even the doctors in his recovery. Sadly, an infection set in. After months of eating through a feeding tube, his body lacked the ability to fight off the infection, and he slipped out of consciousness a few days ago and his life ended.

If you haven’t known anyone that tried to take their life, it gives those that knew him an odd way of evaluating their past encounters and conversations. What if I’d known he was that low? Should I have figured out how bad he was feeling? Why didn’t he call to talk if he was at such a low point? What if……? The questions can be haunting.

It saddens me that someone so young, so smart, so strong was lost in such an unsettling manner. The fact that he at one point was so saddled with his problems and emotions without reaching out to anyone is horrifying. The method of his suicide is even more baffling. You hear of things like that, but you never expect to KNOW someone who chooses to set themselves aflame.

My husband is halfway around the world, and he has to deal with his loss on his own. He can’t attend the funeral and say his final goodbyes. The only positive thing if that we were able to go to the hospital (out of state) a couple of times while his friend was alert and knew he was there.

I feel for his family. To lose a son, a brother, a grandson….. I don’t know how someone makes it through such a thing.

My heart breaks for many reasons today.

This passage, though well known, is what keeps going through my head:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover’d country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

I don’t know what, if anything, comes after this life. I just hope that he found the peace (or nothingness) he wanted. I wish he had never felt that way.