Some of you may have heard that a friend of mine from college committed suicide earlier this month. This wasn’t a guy I was particularly close to, but we were friends, and I’m very sad about this, and I’m trying to think up what the best way to offer my condolences to his family is.
But there is a part of this event that concerns me in an oddly significant way. He died sometime around the 11th, or at least that is what his obituary says. His funeral was the 16th. I found out about this on the 24th, and it was totally random how I found out. An acquaintance of his was googling some old college friends who were officers in a club with him, and found my friends obituary. This guy also knew another mutual friend of mine and she posted it on her blog. Then some of his closer college friends did some digging with some old high-school friends to find out he had committed suicide.
If he hadn’t been randomly bored at work, it would have been months before any of us (by “us” I mean his friends and floormates) found out. It would have been Jason Tice’s wedding and we’d be standing around asking “where is ‘so and so'” and someone would have tried to call or email him only to find out we can’t get ahold of him.
This whole situation of events really bugs me. It bugs me this guy killed himself, suicide really bugs me in general. And it bugs me almost as much that I found out by someone I don’t even know randomly googling the guys name. And it also bugs me that I, and my friends, have no way of obtaining closure in any traditional ways because the funeral is here and gone.
There has to be a better way to keep old friends in touch. Alex, Greg, and I were breifly tossing around some message-board ideas, I thought maybe a password protected database, with a cron job (a scheduled computer event) to email everyone on the database on a regular basis, asking them to update their information if they moved.
I hate feeling ignorant and powerless, and I wish life were happier for everyone. I wish less people would even think about suicide. I thought about it once, but I’m of the persuasion that Catlin’s can’t commit suicide because of the pre-meditated guilt associated with the pain you would cause your friends and family…guilt is very powerful in my family.
Anyway, enough of this, I just needed to write a little about it. Also, any ideas about how to handle keeping in touch with a fairly large group of old friends would be welcome.
Eleanor says
Yeah, I found your points very disturbing as well, even if I probably knew him even less well than you did. It’s disturbing he committed suicide and it was depressing to know we found out too late for the funeral. 🙁
Your database idea is not bad, but even that has its flaws. How do you tell if someone is just being lazy and not updating info or if something bad has really happened to them? And even if there was a way, unless you were required to update weekly or family members were given instructions to contact the database/forum in such a situation the notification would still probably be too late to attend the funeral. 🙁
Matt says
Agreed with Eleanor. Even with a database, our family members wouldn’t know who to contact and the same issue would happen. Even if we keep a DB, it won’t help unless other people know what to do also since we wouldn’t be able to tell them.
wu says
Hi Ben,
I made a post for people to put down some of their fond memories of Kyle, as a kind of tribute.
Would you post something?
http://awu.livejournal.com/
Hope you are doing well otherwise.
I have been disconnected somehow for a while but would like to hear how you are doing.