(Content Warning: Suicide, recent real world suicides my own thoughts on my own mental health, don’t read if you’re not in the right place)
Today I heard a man I barely knew but had had some intense online conversations with over the pandemic had killed himself.
He was a LARP photographer so he had touched a lot of people’s lives and there’s a lot of discussion on various social media spaces about him. Better believe I’m not linked these songs over on Facebook right now.
I was very sad already and the insidious little pattern finder in me thought about the last photos of his I’d seen (before today because everyone is putting up the photos of them that he’d taken) were of Helicon. I had the beginnings of a thought I didn’t finish until much later today. Helicon takes at least some of its premise from Gaiman’s Calliope.
Then from a different section of LARP another man I had had interesting LARP theory conversations with turned up dead and within minutes I heard that that was suicide as well.
He was older than the first but there was more of an outpouring of disbelief than the other guy, maybe because they were very different people and it was very different people grieving. Maybe not. And there’s that halfway coil of a thought because this guy is a little older than me, and I know two things about him and they’re because we talked about books.
There’s a rawness to the grief when I hear about a suicide, and a well telegraphed alarm system in the back of my head. It’s weirdly catching is death by your own hand, you don’t even have to want it that much. I’m glad I haven’t heard how they did it, I think when I heard about the second guy I wrote on a friends Discord server my sobbing scream into the sky. Because never mind the half thoughts I wasn’t quite having there are going to be people who can’t cope with having admired someone so terrible. I don’t quite know who I cried for today, people who don’t quite exist or aspects of people I only knew through specific conversations.
It was after the second one I started messaging people, making sure I was having conversations, even a phonecall, because suicide is weird that way. Heathers was right about it being so strangely tempting after a while, like a contagion. I don’t know, it isn’t always, but there’s that thought that you just have to not notice for long enough and then you’re in a lay-by trying a method you’ve never even wanted to use because you took your eye off the ball somehow.
The thought; These Things Come In Threes popped into my head at around the point I was wondering if people would mention on Facebook if I topped myself or if it might hit Lancaster Discord and stay there.
I hate my reactions to people’s suicides or attempts sometimes. When I heard about the third man, in a different hemisphere and not, as far as I know a LARPer (though definitely LARP adjacent) I felt relieved because now there was nothing suggesting I needed to step up and finish the sequence.
That coil of a thought was fully formed though, his last posts had been about struggling to reconcile Gaiman’s actions with his reverence for the man’s works.
I don’t know that’s why he did it though, only that on his wall there’s that immediately before the notification about what happened.
It is so easy to stop concentrating or rationalise not doing it and end up downing the pills/wrapping the bag around your head/filling your pockets with rocks. The defence mechanism of not being real even came back around to become a contributing factor.
It’s all ripples and echoes when you come down to it though, our conversations making up a nothing until all the nothings become something of a person. They make a person tangible, echoes of voices that were only ever typed in the first place but gradually becoming the overlapping circles of a soul.
Three men I liked killed themselves this week and there’s the Ice Moon they did it under already beginning to wane. I wish I had known them better.