November 1st marked six years since a young man I went to high school with passed away. I will never forget the phone call when I learned about his death. I can’t mourn his death the way his family and those who were truly close to him did. This time of year will perhaps always come with a deep sadness and regret for them. For me, the sadness I felt every year has slowly become more of a solemnity. All Saints’ Day, or more accurately, Dia de los Muertos, strikes me as especially significant because this holy day is dedicated to remembering the deceased. In a way, it seems poetic that this young man would take his life on the day where mourning is coupled with celebration.
I don’t want to necessarily write about the actual event, because it is not my place and I want to respect his family and friends. I mostly want to share the effect that it had on me, and how it changed the way I think about things. His family hurts enough, and they don’t need any more pain, especially by someone they don’t even know. For this article, I’ll call him Matthew.
I’d known Matthew since our freshman year, but always in a tertiary way. He was a childhood friend of the boy I dated throughout most of high school, so my interactions with Matthew were limited to gatherings where we both happened to attend. I don’t know what it was, but for some reason during senior year, we started to text each other and hang out with friends of his that didn’t go to our school. I felt very at ease talking to him, and our growing friendship was very platonic. I admired Matthew. He was so incredibly confident and charismatic.
I had been breathing the recycled air of Catholic school since kindergarten, and while I loved God and I wanted to be a good Catholic, I felt painfully out of place amongst my peers. Matthew was a fresh breeze. For part of the fall semester, I didn’t feel out of place because I had met someone who was like me. He was weird, and he embraced it. What I loved the most about him was that while I had been trying way too hard to feel like I fit in, I didn’t have to with him. I could be a big ole weirdo and it was okay. He introduced me to local coffee shops, Regina Spektor, and snappy dressing. He wanted to write a screenplay about a dinner party.
Matthew had so many friends, yet he still made me feel special. While we never entered the part of our friendship where we could consider each other close, he was more to me than an acquaintance. I’m sure, given more time, we could have been very good friends. The fact that I had such an incredibly short time to call him friend should tell what a great person he was. I cannot fathom the pain that others who knew him for years must have felt when news spread.
I never experienced the loss of anyone I considered close. Death was still very foreign to me. It happened on the news and at other high schools. Not mine. Perhaps that was why it rocked my world so much. The day before Matthew died, he texted me and asked if I wanted to do some service hours with him (As a requirement for graduation, students had to complete so many hours of service per semester as part of a religion class. A noble idea meant to foster a love of service but in the end something that made me resent any sort of volunteer work.). Lazily, I said no. He asked me again, this time to just hang out. I still said no, and asked if we could the next day. He didn’t respond. I brushed off the weird feeling in my stomach. That night, I got a call saying he had committed suicide.
As I said before, I was not in Matthew’s close circle of friends. We were just beginning our friendship. I don’t want to pretend that I was on the same level as others who had known him longer, so when the big “Why?” started to be asked, I didn’t pry because I felt like it would be inappropriate. There were rumors, and the one that I heard from classmates who were closer to him was that he had come out of the closet and his family rejected him. This was my first conscious experience of seeing hypocrisy in religion. I became very angry that my friend was driven to such a point because of close-mindedness. Before, I always thought the phrase “hate the sin, not the sinner,” was a safe way to practice love and forgiveness while still following the 10 Commandments. After, I couldn’t reconcile the thought of Matthew and countless other individuals being driven to such a dark place because dogma preceded love of a neighbor.
Not long after, I got in a stupid Facebook fight with several of his more conservative friends. My poorly thought out comments were antagonistic, bitchy, and only served to isolate me when I went back to school. If I would have been more mature about the whole thing, I would have been able to adequately express my anger over a homophobic status. I just didn’t understand how, if Matthew really did end it all because he experienced rejection for being gay, his friends could still view being homosexual as wrong. That further made me question religion, which led me to wonder if I could be a good Catholic and still think being gay was okay. When the answer was no, not really, then I started to wonder if I could be a part of something where hating the perceived sin was more important than forgiving (or accepting) the sinner. It is unfortunate that it was something like this that triggered my critical thinking, but in life Matthew had already started to plant the seeds of independent thought. Through his death, I was able to understand and view things around me in a different lens than the one I had been handed in school.
Matthew’s death didn’t just change my view on religious thought. It also caused me to appreciate my family and friendships more. I thought about losing my own loved ones, and that made me want to be a better person for them and to them. While I slip up a lot on this, I try to remain aware of the inner battle everyone else is fighting. When we came to school the day the news broke, there were no cliques. Everyone was a friend that day. It was like a spell was cast over the school. I hugged people I’d never spoken to during all four years of school. For one day, we could support one another, and we did. It was beautiful, but incredibly sad that it had to be death to bring everyone together.
Matthew was a wonderful person and I think about him weekly, even after all this time. Now I mourn for his family during this time of year, and I wonder what kind of man he would be had things been different. I am thankful for the short time I had to get to know him, and for all the little things he taught me or introduced to me. Loss is never easy, and there are some who will continue to dread this time of year indefinitely. Matthew’s time in this world was brief, but the impression he left still resonates. The fact that his death changed me so much is a testament to the kind of person he was. I can only hope to be as good of a friend to others as he was to me.
