Jamie is dead: that is the news that I received yesterday from Anne as I was driving to work. To be honest, it wasn’t a huge surprise: as soon as I heard her message the night before, I new what had happened. But I didn’t call her that night, because I knew that once I called her, it would be real. I hoped that, if I could just postpone calling her back, that maybe he would still be alive, that somewhere out there he would be reading Gore Vidal, or hitting on the cute librarian, or something. I debated even calling Anne back at all. But in the end, she had gone to the effort of trying to contact me, so the least I could do would be to call her back. And it was as I feared.
Jamie killed himself. I’m not sure of the particulars, the “how” of the matter, because, frankly, I don’t want to know. But I know the “why”. He had been suffering from depression since well before I met him, back in university, in the glorious year of 1991. He had already made two attempts on his life at that point. He was fairly open about it, but he was also an occasionally nice guy. He said that he noticed me once after a Gay and Lesbian Alliance meeting, when in response to somebody making the excuse that they were “only human”, I said with a withering sigh, “Oh. One of those.” He said he knew he wanted to get to know me at that point.
I developed a crush on him, not because he was particularly attractive – I always teased him that he looked a little like a leprechaun had mated with David Hyde Pierce – but because he was my first gay male friend. He was also intelligent, urbane, and worldly. He handled it with relative grace, and didn’t break my heart. He was 26 at that point, I was 18. I think he enjoyed hanging out with someone younger, who was given to teenage theatrics, and who was still very naïve. I think it also stoked his ego that I tried (so clumsily) to flirt with him, to try to get him to sleep with me.
He transferred to Chicago after my freshman year, and our friendship cooled. This was a pattern that was to repeat several times, where we would lose contact and then reconnect. And he would usually be the one to reconnect.
After graduating, he became the superintendent of an apartment building. Through it all, he struggled with his depression, trying whichever new drugs or treatments were newly available.
Three years ago, Jamie ended our friendship. He wrote me a letter to say that I was not thoughtful enough, and that I was too negative for him to continue to interact with. The event that triggered this was that he called one morning to ask if I wanted to go with Anne and him to see the new “Harry Potter” movie across the state. I was annoyed that he had woken me up, and I must have been nasty to him. If I had known that that would mark the end of our friendship, I wouldn’t have been so thoughtless. But at the same time, his cutting me out of his life seems like a symptom of his sickness; Anne told me that she had been terrified of saying the wrong thing, that he would cut himself off from her, as well. But she spoke to him on Saturday, and on Monday, he was dead.
After he sent me his letter, I did send him a reply. I apologized for whatever I did, and acknowledged that if he thought he couldn’t be my friend, I had to respect that. But I also made it clear that I would always care for him, and always love him, no matter what he decided. This is still the case.
Jamie was a good man, and it pains me to know that most people never knew him. It pains me to know that I never got to apologize to him in person. And it pains me that I’ll never hear his laugh again. All I have as consolation is the fact that he isn’t in pain anymore. They say that suicide is selfish, but maybe wishing somebody was still alive can be just as selfish.
