Exactly a year ago, my best friend killed himself.
I am not trying to explain how he reached there and explain where I have reached through looking at him. Or rather, at his absence.
We first met a few days after his thirteenth birthday. He was unusually mature for a fresh adolescent, and our friendship continued through his teens. I heard the news the next evening, a few days before what would’ve been his twentieth.
What followed was the familiar Kübler-Ross pattern of Denial-Anger-Bargaining-Depression-Acceptance, with some oscillation between stages. I was informed after his cremation had already taken place, and for the first three days I remained convinced this was an elaborate April Fools’ gimmick by him. It was at the condolence ceremony on the fourth day (as per his community’s funeral rites) when it finally dawned upon me. The couple of months that followed are as much of a blur now as they were then, and I was waiting out the final stage of the K-R model. If only.
He was an extraordinary person, an absolute prodigy. Between his charms and gifts, he became popular among his peers, and acquired a small measure of fame. As sociable as he portrayed himself, I was his only friend, and at times he mine. This became painfully apparent when I couldn’t find anyone to unite with in that pain. No one seemed to know much about him. I only ever brought up the matter with a couple of friends over the months, and waited-out the acceptance stage to hit.
He had been an important figure in my life, one I cared about deeply, so maybe there was no getting over it. But now that nothing remained unresolved, what was my grief all about? His passing was an event tied irreversibly to a point in time. So what was it that worried me? To be blunt, what was the point of it?
There was a dread of living in a future where he does not exist. And I mean besides in flesh and blood.
He died at age 19. I knew him for 7 years, all of his teenage years.
And that’s what he’ll always be, a teenager.
In the three months after, I made strides in my professional and personal life, and made some important decisions regarding my future. They too were influenced by some lessons learnt from his suicide, which induced a much needed sense of urgency. So much changed in the little time that had passed.
I was in my 20s, and I’ll become 30, 40, 50, perhaps more. Most of my friends will age similarly. If I find a partner, so will they.
All of us will engage ourselves with the world in interesting and uninteresting ways, create new things, raise families, and share experiences good and bad. My own life events, and these people and their experiences, will become the centre of my being.
He, meanwhile, will remain 19. His life and legacy will also be that of a teenager. He will keep becoming a smaller and smaller part of my life, diminishing with every turn.
I’ll never know how he’d have reacted to a particular book, or what chess moves he’d have played. I’ll lose an epsilon of him with every new film I’ll watch.
And someday, I’ll lose him.
That’s what I really feared, that’s what bothered me.
He didn’t stop existing that evening in March. He’ll just disappear into non-existence one memory at a time. Someday, without anyone noticing, he will die his final death. And I’d be the one to have killed him.
Or so I thought.
Now that a year has passed, and I am again at the confluence of World Bipolar Day and the anniversaries of his birth and death, it’s time to look back at how my assumptions fared against reality.
It didn’t quite leave me, and I haven’t fully moved on. Perhaps I never will. Perhaps I am not supposed to.
In all this time, every time I hold a Rubik’s cube or see a kid playing Bach on the piano, a microscopic packet of despair bursts somewhere inside me. Every line of poetry I pen marks the absence of his cursory eyes and dismissive smirk. People and ideas go in an out this mind, circumstances and geographies change, and he remains, his lanky self slumped in an oversized armchair.
That microcosm of misery is an acknowledgement of his continued existence, one that immediately brings about a smile on my face.
And that’s what grief is for. It keeps me happy in the knowledge that he’s still there, retained in me. Grief is what keeps him from dying. And that keeps a sliver of me alive too.
