I guess I'm kind of a morbid person. I'm not emo, I'm not goth, I'm not a pessimist or anything like that. But I think about death just about everyday. Every time that I'm in a car, I think about how I could die whilst in said vehicle. Whenever I'm someplace high, I think about falling. I think about drowning, suffocating, etc. I suppose thinking about death is pretty normal, I just wonder if I think about it too much. And it's not always me, I think about what would happen if some random person I saw on the street suddenly keeled over. It's not like I think about what it would be like to die, I mostly just think about what the reactions of other people would be like. For example, if I were to witness a car accident, would I be the first to dial 911? If I were to dial 911, would I be able to give an accurate street address? If one of my friends was thinking about committing suicide, who would I call? If I were to die, how would my parents deal with it? What would they do with my stuff? I think I think about death so much because I really want to be prepared for any situation.

I bring this up because today we had the second death in the family in a very short while. Bob Schmidt had been in failing health for quite a while, his death is actually a bit of a relief; his suffering is over, the family can stop worrying and everyone can rest easy.

I wasn't in any way close to Bob, so while his death is sad, it affects me very little. However, not that long ago, our family had another death, and it disturbs me profoundly.

John Malaney was my second cousin. My mom's cousin's son. I vaguely remember my cousin Lucy and I fighting with John and his brother Spencer when we were kids. Since I was only in St. Louis a few times growing up, I never got close to my second cousins. But my mom's cousin, Uncle Tim, has always been very close to my grandmother, so I actually remember his kids a little.

The Malaney family had its ups and downs... maybe a few more downs than ups. There were some serious family issues going unresolved in that house. I don't know too much about it, and I rarely saw Spencer or John. Although, John and his mother came to our house a few months ago to celebrate Mother's Day. John's mother is in poor health, so it seemed like he was often going out of his way to help her out.

Since I moved to St. Louis, I've been hearing little bits and pieces of information about the Malaney brothers. I could never keep the stories straight. It was always "Spencer did this" and "John did that" and I could never remember which one got fired and which one wanted to go back to school, etc.

Well, not that long ago, we got a phone call saying that John had killed himself. He had attempted suicide before, he just... succeeded this time. I know he had a relapsing drug problem, and his home life wasn't perfect, but still....

I guess on some level I can understand the desire to take your own life. If you live in overwhelming despair, if you don't have the mental fortitude to deal with your problems, if you can't find anything in life worth living for, then I guess not living is an option. But I just don't know how people can actually feel like that.

It's the same as people with depression or alcoholism or anorexia. People with these afflictions, their minds work differently. It's easy to call someone who commits suicide selfish because they're hurting other people by hurting themselves. If they cared about other people, they wouldn't do such things. It's easy to feel that way. It's easy to think that someone who's anorexic has an over-developed sense of vanity, that an alcoholic has no willpower. I've always thought of myself as an open-minded person, but I realized that there are some things even an open mind can't comprehend. The first time I experienced this was with a friend who had been diagnosed with depression. I had never been so close to someone with depression, so I had no idea how to deal with her behavior. How much of it was her depression? How much of it was side-effects of her medication? How much of it was her personality? I had no idea, and her irrational behavior was beyond what I could tolerate. I realized later that there are just some things that I will never understand. And that's okay; human beings weren't meant to wrap their brains around everything. If I can't draw the line between the way something thinks and the way someone acts, then I'm just gonna have to live with that.

And that's the really hard part. Living without being able to understand the people you want to help. In John's case, there were people who wanted to help him. Whether or not he wanted help, I don't know.

Truthfully, I didn't know John that well. I know Uncle Tim better than John. But as one of the people left behind, his death is still important to me. It had been a long time since I had seen my family deal with death. I gotta say, I love my family. We had a small memorial to John; casual clothes, potluck lunch, and pictures of John. We all gave Tim a hug, and gossiped with the family like it was any other potluck. People outside the family came dressed up, a few with flowers, one with a card. You could tell the family apart from the non-family, we were all in jeans xD

And then John's mother came. Being of poor health, she always looked a little run-down, but that day she looked miserable. And she hugged the family and cried and cried. And when I saw the tears she shed for her lost son, I thought about the line from The Two Towers movie; "No parent should have to bury their child." The strained faces of the parents, trying to smile away the crushing loss, the regret... that's why I'll never be able to understand why people kill themselves. I would rather live in hell than let others suffer it because of me. But minds just work differently.

It was a sad day to be sure. But I've never been so proud of my aunt Kathy as I was that day. Many of John's friends came to the memorial that day. Many of them were the people who pressured him to start using again when he was trying to get clean. They sat in a little circle away from the family, swapping stories and the like. And my aunt Kathy sat herself right down with them, and lectured them for half an hour (don't do drugs, don't pressure other people, think about other people, your future, etc). I fancy myself an extremely empathetic person (which is while I cry ALL the time), and much like the Japanese, I don't like to see people embarrassed or uncomfortable. But for once I thought, "Screw their embarrassment, those guys should hear this everyday for the rest of their lives." I try not to shove my moral agenda on other people; it's not my place to say if what someone does is right or wrong. But if, somehow, a life could be saved by making someone feel uncomfortable and guilty for half an hour, then it's worth it.

It was John's choice to end his life. Those of us left behind are left with the task of dealing with how his choice makes us feel. It's unsettling to me because I know people my and John's age who are in much shakier situations, and the idea that some people close to me might decide to end it all has crossed my mind often. And I'm not an expert, I wouldn't know the signs if I ran into them, and I wouldn't know how to address the issue if it happened to a close friend.

All I know is that suicide is something I can't fathom myself doing. I'm with Eddie Izzard: "I wanna live until I die. No more. No less."