In the weeks after our friends died, we emailed our friends who were still alive. We offered picnics, drinks, dinners. We said: we must see you soon. RSVP for time with us while we are still here, it felt like we were saying.
In the weeks after our friends took their own lives, we thought about how to break the news to our friends who had lost loved ones through natural causes. We didn't want to tell them: someone intentionally died. Not so soon after they were thinking: the hardest thing is what we are feeling now; at least it's no one's fault; God or nature did this.
In the weeks after our friends committed suicide after being so in love with each other, one, 10 days after he found his lover on the floor of their apartment, we thought about: till death do us part. We thought about ultimate loyalty. What about the widows who jumped on their husbands' funeral pyres in Indian mythology and in the backward communities who still took that mythology literally? What is the noblest response when you lose a lover? We both told each other: don't do this if I ever kill myself. You don't need to kill yourself too. We thought about tragic and famous lovers who died together. We thought: in fiction it goes, it works, like a director might decide that this particular pairing of action and reaction might make for a cathartic ending, or an editor on the cutting floor, or a writer with writer's block might say: yes, that would explain why so and so felt the way he did. It was just not that justified or interesting in reality.
In the weeks after our friends died, who were artists and lovers, both, in every aspect of their lives exceeding the imaginations of their families of origin, we thought about whether art was as meaningful as we had made it out to be, in our open manifestos and secret hopes, in our cocktail party chit chat. We thought about Icarus and we drove along Northern Californian highways in silence, thinking: what do I do now? Will I too become mad if I give everything to art? Will the only way out be what our friends decided – is that the inevitable act once you get that close to they mystery of creation?
In the weeks after our friends took their own lives, lovers, who were artists and who were presumably getting more paranoid about the world around them, we thought about the luxury of being naïve and felt a mixture of relief and shame. We thought about the effort it takes to construct an elegant conspiracy theory and about whether we were mentally healthier or simply lazier in our analysis of world events than our brilliant, dead friends.
In the weeks after our friends killed themselves, I remember listening to everyone more patiently, and at the slightest moment of prickliness about what he or she was saying, the way one gets when someone makes a remark that you simply want to laugh at or scoff at or ignore or roll your eyes at, I thought to myself: let me listen to you, because all you want is to be heard and loved. I can give that to you in this moment, at no cost to myself, so I will. Underneath your coat of armor and your glamour and your beauty and your intelligence and your wealth and your worldliness and your power and your family's name you are just "n" (and maybe n is the number right before infinity) steps away from what our friends did. Let me be kind to you in this moment and let my kindness merge with the kindness of others into a blanket of kindness over the world.
