If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.

I’ve had several friends commit suicide,
Shotguns mostly.
And I know they didn’t intend what came after,
You know the story:
Family members and intimates carry the death with them,
A necrosis stretched across their skin.
While we friends at the edges
Lodge a thorn,
A tiny itch below the surface forever;
Such a small, sad return for a life.

It takes twenty pounds of plutonium to level a city,
One element.
A 150 pound human body has scores of elements
In trillions of cells.
If you intend to commit suicide,
Make it big.
In 1994 the comet, Shoemaker-Levy 9,
Fragmented and crashed into the clouds of Jupiter.
The largest impact was 600 times the world’s nuclear arsenal.
It created a maelstrom the size of the Earth.
Make it bigger than that.

You should only commit suicide,
If it would permanently mar the sun
Freeze its shafts of light,
Cause them to rain down like icicles.
You should only do it,
If it would tear apart the weave of space,
Set ocean above mountain,
Turn air into dust.
But only do it if these things
Will happen to more than just your family and friends.
The cries should echo across the Mongolian steppes,
The Sahara Desert, the Arctic.
Every train on the planet
Should hold silent at station.
Every soul on the planet
Should greet morning with despair.

Only then.
 

We lost him about two months before he died. He just disappeared.
I remember how much hope he had, how outspoken he was.
Because he was so attractive and so articulate, his hope was infectious.

Like the violence of flame and fume inside each cylinder of a gas engine
People in their 20s use a series of tiny disasters to power their lives
Heartbreaks and pink slips, closed roads and lost letters
So when it entered our community, it was like a volcano consumed our island
And it did give some people the power to run, to stay ahead of the sliding rock
But others died quietly sitting stunned on their little patch of sand
Edges closing in by inches, eroded away by the surrounding lava
Families exploded and left their wreckage in piles on the sidewalk

He seemed, though, miles away from it all, casually walking
He must have advised a hundred doctors on the efficacy of combination therapy
He must have assured a thousand mothers that they could still hug their sons.

It was his parents that came for him in the end and they didn’t talk to any of us.
They feared us for the eternal flame we used to boil water for our coffee
For the tiny grains of brimstone we rubbed from our eyes each morning
They feared us because sometimes, in a certain light, our smiles seemed to smolder

In the 1990s, there was a fight amongst activists about the strength of the drugs
Back then, the dosage of azidothymidine was extremely high
Four hundred milligrams every four hours, even throughout the night
At those levels, it caused severe anemia, stressed the liver, turned muscles into shoestrings
And we argued about how the treatment was as bad as the disease

His parents came for him when he had trouble moving between his bed and his bathroom
And that was it; we heard nothing more about him… save for one time
At the memorial service, his parents wanted us to know that, in the end, broken and crying
That he had renounced his “previous lifestyle” and had sought forgiveness from God.
They wanted us to know that, in the end, he had found salvation from Hell.
 

There is a reoccurring theme in our lives where, just as we grow to understand how the world works and our place in it, it changes. Our collective creativity bubbles to influence our environment and emergent social rituals result with each new day. This helps us survive as a species, but drives us mad as individuals. It is the 21st Century and it feels like our cities are wrapped in smoke and anomie, a loose pack of hillside that pulls us downward by small shifts while we look for balance.

It is tempting, in times like this, to offer advice if you feel you have some, but I am not sure that any advice can really apply here. It is like the world is an alcoholic parent that is just now realizing it has a problem. It reels, tries to recover, looks for solutions, but cannot process the answers. Until it finally touches the bottom, the best most of us can do is find ways to cope with the havoc. Those ways are different for different people: Some of us detach. Some of us patiently rebuild the house, glue the plates back together each time they are broken. Some of us descend. Most of us muddle through and wait to fix the damage when things are better.

It is a turbulent new year. My best wishes go out to all of you. It will get better.