The fall of my junior year, my roommate/best friend committed suicide. They say that oftentimes, we push troubling memories into the back of our minds into they become a repressed blur. That is not the case for me. In fact I remember every single pinpoint detail from the moment I realized I hadn't seen her in two days, to months later when I held another friend who decided that suicide might be the best route for her to take.
Being the best friend and the roommate for the past three years, it was natural that I was the one people turned to with questions. It would be much too disrespectful to ask the family - they were suffering too much, and unfortunately they had as many questions about the past three years of their daughter's life as anyone else, seeing as she had been away at university for the past three years.
I remember, a few weeks after her death, her family drove up three hours from their small, suburban town to our small, college town. I sat across from them at a table, holding a turkey-and-cranberry-sauce sandwich while they sipped on water (they had gotten brunch with another group of friends only an hour previously, but I had been working my slave labor front desk job at a local urgent care at the time). As much as I liked to pretend we were just catching up as old friends, seeing how the past few weeks had gone and checking in on one another, that wasn't why we were together. They wanted answers.
The thing is, so did I.
I spent almost every waking second of my college career with this girl, excluding a semester abroad and the occasional school vacation when we both got time off of work and could go home. We visited each other's hometowns, took trips to the city together, went to stupid fraternity parties together, volunteered together. I remember early-morning hungover bike rides, making one another dinner, waiting for each other after classes so we could chat and eat candy on the ten-minute breaks we would both always happen to have. Almost every single friend I had in our small college town, every restaurant I ate at, every place I went to, had connections with her. She was the Wayne to my Garth in our own Wayne's World (we dressed appropriately as Wayne and Garth on Halloween and greeted each other goodbye/goodnight by saying "Party on!").
Here is what I can tell you about the few months prior to her committing suicide: that summer, we did a lot. We made a huge checklist with our friends of what we had to do over the summer, and made a calendar, which we attempted to stick to (although we did not succeed in the slightest). We went swimming a lot, ate a lot of ice cream, went hiking, went to the city (multiple times), went to concerts, smoked, drank, kissed boys, kissed each other, worked out, cooked together, tried new restaurants, stayed up late. When university courses started up, we were busy. She had just declared her new major and was now interning with the department, as well as working a new job at a frozen yogurt shop. All of our friends were equally as busy, and we lived for the weekends when we could all recuperate and catch up and pretend it was still summer (that didn't last long once midterms came around). I visited her on my lunch breaks at work, because she worked down the street, and she would get mad at me for taking too many frozen yogurt samples.
Here is what I can tell you about the last few weeks: We celebrated our friend's twentieth birthday with a surprise sushi dinner and a birthday party. She went home to go dress shopping for her sister's wedding, and played a lot with her dog. She sent me hundreds of pictures of her bridesmaid dress. We were all very stressed about midterms. She had a weekend to herself when all three of us other roommates left for various reasons - a wedding, a work trip, and visiting friends. During that weekend, she went hiking, biking, volunteered at the animal shelter, cleaned, cooked - she said she had an awesome weekend to herself.
Here is what I can tell you about her last weekend: After midterms, about halfway through the semester, it had been a while since we had all been together as friends. We all met up at a friend's house and went out together, running through the streets of our college town and causing whatever ruckus we could. We were all incredibly happy and kept talking about how glad we were to all be together again. That morning, three of us roommates all went and got coffee - we argued if we should get Dutch Bros or Java Detour, and settled on doing both, and I shoved my Java Detour in her facing saying "I TOLD YOU!" when she admitted my coffee was pretty good. We got Pita Pit after, and laid in her bed watching stupid movies until we both had to go to work. After work, we decided to go to the haunted corn maze. It was just 3 of us roommates, plus a neighbor. We screamed and ran through it together, getting lost for almost a good two hours. We went and got hot chocolate at a local cafe, and went to bed relatively early. The next morning I worked, and left her my truck because she said she wanted to go get a hamburger later that day. We made plans to go out to dinner together as a roommate dinner. When I got home from work later that day, she didn't want to go because she had already eaten out once that day. So, just my other roommate and I went. I went to the gym. I drove my car and watched the sunset out by the river, at our normal sunset spot. I didn't bring her because I wanted some alone time. I came home and laid on the couch. She had been tucked up in her room all day watching Gilmore Girls. She came down for a brief moment, and then disappeared into her room, as we exchanged "good nights". In the group text with all of our friends, I proposed we should all plan a backpacking trip throughout southeast Asia. "I'm down," she responded.
That was the last thing I heard from her.
The next day I texted her letting her know how much the PG&E bill would cost. No response. Irritating. I was at school and work pretty much all day, and didn't get home until much later. Went to bed. Woke up the next morning and went to the health center, to get some medications refilled. Went to class. Typical. We always met after my "introduction-to-political-science-research-techniques" class. For some reason or another there was a bag of candy being passed around in class today, so I grabbed an extra handful for her. Didn't see her. Sometimes she got caught up talking to a professor. I went to my next class. I went home. I texted her and asked her if she was at work.
For some reason or another, sometimes you just know when something is wrong. I don't think this is a phenomenon exclusive to me.
I texted her co-worker (who admittedly I may have had a small crush on and saw as a stupid excuse to text him).
"Hey do you know if my roommate works today? and do you work today? and if so when and if so can you tell me if she's at work?"
"She was supposed to work today, she no show/no called for swing shift. I was gonna ask you because it seemed uncharacteristic of her."
I can tell you every single moment after that text message. I can tell you the phone calls, the police, hunting through the room, running back and forth throughout the city, driving around trying to find her. I can tell you every haunting detail until it makes me sick, but that's not the point.
The point is, this isn't how suicide it supposed to happen. When I read stories about suicide in the newspaper, I read about failed antidepressants, about drug addicts, about being estranged from your family. Bullying, broken homes, financial situations. When I think of suicide, I don't think of a girl who loved elephants, who wanted to work in the school district, who loved hiking and camping, who sang every day, who read like a fanatic, who wanted to travel and was adventurous and adored her family and friends and said over and over again how much she loved the world and how she felt at one with nature and referred to herself as a modern-day flower child (which I constantly made fun of her for).
Learning to cope with her death was not easy. I found myself constantly comforting others. I turned myself into the counselor as a sort of defense mechanism - it was easier that way, to remove myself from the situation and pretend it was not my pain. I was constantly being told how strong I was, how well I kept it together for everyone else.
Of course, that's not what I wanted to hear. I didn't want people to thank me for being strong. I was tired of being called at three in the morning with a friend sobbing on the other end and then saying "I'm don't know how you're doing this, you should be the one calling me crying". I didn't want people to continuously ask me what happened. I wanted to lock myself up in a room and forget the world.
I stopped seeing my friends. I worked, all the time, and when I wasn't working, I was sleeping. I would be on campus and choose to skip class. I wouldn't get out of bed. I would ignore phone calls and text messages, until I needed to come up with an excuse to keep avoiding people, so I asked for more work hours. I didn't eat. I was angry at everyone, and I was tired. I avoided our friend group all together, and built up some weird counter-life with different friends and different experiences that I chose to keep my other friends out of.
I didn't want to face the fact that, despite everything I have written and said about her, the signs were right in front of me. The way, towards the end, she was constantly cranky, always in her room, always stressed out, complaining about how bad she was doing in school. How she told me she wanted to get counseling, and then reeling back into a little hole of happiness and giggles right after I tried to pry further. I carried - and still carry - immeasurable amounts of guilt that somehow I could have stopped this.
I struggled to find answers. She had an amazing family, who she loved infinitely. She was the youngest of four, and looked up to all of her siblings with equal admiration. Her parents were happily married and she pined for a relationship just like theirs. She was smart, had a solid group of friends, a good job, and by all means, a wonderful life.
Maybe something had happened to her. Maybe that stupid stoner boy broke her heart more than she admitted. Maybe she took ecstasy one too many times. Maybe she smoked weed just a bit too much. Maybe she had seen something she didn't want to. Or maybe something inside of her just snapped.
In all honesty, there will never be a clear cut answer. I could read her suicide note a hundred times and just think about how stupid those reasons are, how petty they all seem. Honestly, if I could see her right now, I would probably slap her in the face. I could analyze her life over and over again and analyze her personality and look through her books and nothing will ever really tell me what happened.
Truth is, when you're depressed, you're depressed. You don't necessarily have a reason, you just are. She didn't want help and she didn't want to get better. She didn't even want people to know she was hurting. She just wanted the world to go away, and she decided she was going to do just that. That was the thing about her - if she decided to do something, she was going to do it. She was always that way.
I will never have an answer, and I'm not sure if I'm okay with that or not. I don't know if I ever will be. I know an answer won't change the fact that she's gone, but I can't help feeling sometimes that I still need one. It's like a breakup without closure, except a million times worse -- because I've had a breakup without closure and honestly it's not nearly as bad as people say.
I'm learning to be okay. Facing her death meant facing a lot of other problems that I had pushed back for years, and it meant facing myself: that was almost as hard. I'm working on rebuilding a lot of the relationships I cut myself off from. I'm doing things I enjoy and I'm learning to take care of myself again. I'm going to class and doing well in school. I have a new job that I love, and for the most part I have been able to leave behind all of the self-destructive habits I adapted both before and after her death.
While life in college won't be the same without her, I know that is okay. I have had break down everything I attached to her and rebuild it without her. I love where I live, and I love my friends. I might miss her every single day, but that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. I am lucky to have had her bless my life with her weird hippie-flowerchild-elephantloving-basicwhitegirl tendencies for the years that she did, and I will never let go of that. Party on, Wayne.
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