Today I was watching a documentary called the Life After Suicide. One of the ways I cope with my best friend’s suicide, is to know more about it. I can’t bear for it to ever catch me off guard again and the only way I can be prepared is by being more informed.
Towards the end of the documentary this little boy, whose dad passed away of suicide, said something that resonated very strongly with me. He said he doesn’t have anymore questions about it, because he had already asked them all. But he does repeat his questions because sometimes he forgets the answer.
I feel like I have asked my questions as well – the whys? The hows? The where did I go wrongs? And I have reached out to other people, talked about it, but somehow I always end up in the same place. The hollow inside of me can’t find any peace with the answers. I never got a letter from him, but I guess in the end it didn’t help those he left letters with either. Knowing his last thoughts, knowing he was thinking it through didn’t help. That brings me to other questions then. What does help, then? There has to be a way it makes sense. A way for the answers to stick.
Watching the documentary brought back so many memories for me, and not good ones. I still don’t understand how he could think we would be better off without him. Didn’t he know, he made all our lives whole?
A long time ago I read this Bangla fiction, Himur Haate Koyekti Neel Poddo (The Blue flowers in Himu’s Hand), where it described this fictional character who hypothesized that everyone was born with five Blue Flowers in their hand. And then as they moved through life, they gave the flowers away to the people they loved. But these flowers were nontransferable, nor could they be returned. So one of the other characters raised the question, what happens if you run out of flowers? Do you run out of love to give out?
Sometimes I feel my best friend’s death took away one of my blue flowers forever. I’ll never have it back. And I am left with this hollowness where that flower used to exist.
Amar Shobdo 