After the Candle

What Silence Hides

Content note / disclaimer: This post discusses suicide, grief, and warning signs surrounding the death of a friend. It is a personal reflection based on my own memories and understanding of events, not a clinical assessment of anyone involved and not an attempt to assign responsibility for another person’s death. Some details have intentionally been omitted because the method is not important to the point being made. If someone tells you they are considering suicide or you believe they may be in immediate danger, take it seriously and involve appropriate professional or emergency support rather than trying to handle it alone.

There is something I left out of today’s candle post. Not because I wanted to hide it, but because there are some things I have never really managed to work all the way through in my own head. This is one of them.

In 2018, around the time of Kaleidoscope Gathering, I stopped by the old schoolhouse to see Gypsy. At the time I was working for BCI and had some work that I could use another set of hands with. Nothing complicated. Digging a hole, moving some things, general physical work. I knew Gypsy was perfectly capable of doing it, and I knew there were some financial difficulties going on in his life, although I wasn’t privy to everything that was happening.

So I asked him if he wanted some work. He said he would think about it, and we sat around talking for a while.

During that visit, there were things I noticed. Things in the house. Things he said. At one point he showed me an area behind the schoolhouse where a vehicle could be parked without being visible from the road. There were other comments that struck me as a little odd at the time, but not alarming. I had no frame of reference for them. They were simply disconnected pieces of a conversation with a friend.

That is the important part: I didn’t know what I was looking at.

After Gypsy died on August 20, those disconnected pieces started fitting together. Things that had seemed meaningless suddenly had meaning. Conversations I had almost forgotten became horribly clear. With information I learned afterward, I realized that during that visit Gypsy had essentially shown me pieces of what he was contemplating, and I had been completely oblivious to it.

That realization hit me hard.

Because there had apparently been warnings before. Other people knew he had been struggling with thoughts of taking his own life. There had been reasons for people around him to be concerned. I didn’t know any of that. Nobody had told me there was something I needed to be watching for.

And hindsight is an absolute bastard.

Once you know how a story ends, everything that came before suddenly looks obvious. You replay conversations. You replay facial expressions. You replay strange comments. You ask yourself why you didn’t notice this, why you didn’t question that, why you didn’t connect two things that now seem impossible not to connect.

But hindsight has something that you did not have in the original moment.

Context.

You cannot recognize a warning sign when you don’t know there is a warning to look for. I had information, but I didn’t understand what that information meant. Those are not the same thing.

And that is where this stops being only a story about Gypsy and me.

There is a larger problem here, because people sometimes treat suicidal thoughts as something that must be kept quiet. Someone tells a friend what they are thinking and asks them not to tell anyone. People become afraid of betraying confidence. They don’t want to embarrass the person. They don’t want everyone talking. They convince themselves that keeping things contained is somehow protecting the person who is struggling.

But there are some secrets that are too dangerous to protect.

I am still angry that information was kept quiet. I am not saying that one person could necessarily have changed what happened. Suicide is far more complicated than finding someone to blame after the fact, and none of us gets to know how an alternate version of that day would have ended.

But silence created blind spots.

I was standing close enough to Gypsy to see pieces of something very serious happening, and because I didn’t have the missing information, I couldn’t recognize what those pieces meant.

That is the reframe I have eventually had to make for myself. I cannot go back to that conversation armed with what I know today. I cannot make 2018 happen differently. I can ask all the what ifs I want, but there will never be an answer to them.

What I can do is take something useful out of it.

If somebody tells you they are thinking about suicide, particularly if they are talking about a plan, preparations, a place or a time, do not agree to carry that information alone. You don’t need to announce somebody’s private struggles to the entire world, but tell the people who genuinely need to know. Bring in trusted family or friends where appropriate. Bring in professional help. If there is immediate danger, get emergency help involved.

They might get angry with you.

Let them be angry.

Anger can be worked through. Embarrassment passes. Trust can sometimes be repaired. An argument can be revisited tomorrow.

Death doesn’t give us tomorrow.

That is probably the smallest credible thing I can ask anyone reading this to carry away from Gypsy’s story: if somebody gives you reason to believe their life may be in danger, speak. Don’t assume somebody else knows. Don’t assume somebody else is dealing with it. Don’t allow yourself to become the sole keeper of information that other people may desperately need in order to recognize what is happening.

Earlier today I lit a candle for people who are gone. Part of remembering them is remembering the laughter, the stupidity, the arguments, the adventures and everything else that made them human.

But sometimes remembering somebody also means being willing to learn something painful from the way we lost them.

I cannot change what happened on August 20.

I can make sure that if I ever find myself standing beside those warning signs again, I understand what I am looking at.

And maybe, by telling this story, somebody else will too.

Edit—->>> I went back through some old messages the day I went over to G’s house was July sometime after July 12 but before July 30, as I was trying to wrap up a job before KG. <<<—-