Filed by Trevor at 5:05 am under Love

Ten years ago today was the my first encounter — the first of several subsequent encounters — with suicide. In fact, by this time he was already dead, long since scooped up from the drainage canal behind his house where he’d taken his life with his father’s automatic. But I didn’t know it yet. That phone call would come later on the next day, a Friday, after I had driven my battered car fresh from an uninsured accident six days prior up to my best friend’s house to get the weekend started right.

Once a year I call his parents. It’s also the only way I can remember my sister’s birthday. He would be 23 today.

I understand the suicidal mentality much more clearly now than I did then, although I’ll never understand what possesses a 13-year-old mind with depression so opaque that death seems the only answer. I’ll also never understand why it has claimed the lives of three of my students. I really do need to pick a different profession, so the universe seems to be telling me.

I did a Google search for his name the other day and I was rewarded with a comment he had left on a message board a few days before his death. I was surprised, both because the internet was still so foreign to me at that time, but also because I would never have expected such esoteric data to have remained on the web for so long. But it was something real to hold on to, strangely enough; most of my memories have been swallowed up, replaced by the piecemeal accounts I’ve given over the past decade.

I hope he has forgiven me for playing Titanic at his funeral. What can I say? The song was popular at the time. If I had to do it today I don’t think I could do it with a straight face.

They ran the story front page in the local paper that Sunday. My parents hid it from me before church — out of protection? I don’t know. They misspelled his name, made startling innuendo in the way of pinning the blame on his father, printed his will. Although, with regards to the latter I’m selfishly glad they did so: I never would have seen it otherwise. I still haven’t.

I’ll never understand what would have possessed his parents to entrust his education to a 15-year-old sophomore.

After the ceremony his father handed me his flute, the same one that sits on the shelf in my bedroom, with his name and phone number (still current) written in white-out pen (do the kids still do that?) I cut out every article and put them in the case; they’re still there. The homily from his funeral is in a box somewhere. It was a rainy Tuesday, the day we found out I was uninsured at the time of the accident, and there weren’t any doves, so they used white balloons instead. They never should have let his sister speak (I wonder when they told her the truth?). At lunch later on my mother commented on how the rest of the world was going about their business like any other day. Every so often I wonder what crushing tragedy is befalling someone I don’t know. When I sit down to dinner, when I make my bed, when I feed my cat.

I wonder if he would even like the person I’ve become, although if he liked the sexually-repressed biblethumper he had for a teacher, I suppose the odds are good. He was the first in the recurring theme of my history being erased little by little, like covering tracks in sand. He was the first in the recurring theme of my students tiring of life and exiting from it by their own hand. The other two — I can wrap my brain around it, just enough. Just enough to get some measure of understanding. But understanding has eluded me for ten years, such a massive portion of my life.

You were the first person I ever mourned privately, and I still am.