About a year after my friend Jamal killed himself, I decided that I’d made peace with it.
The act itself hadn’t come as a surprise, after all. It was, rather, the culmination of a process he’d slowly been perfecting in the years since his first bumbling attempt. Moreover, he’d always been up front about both his motivation for going through with it, the reasons he had for putting it off, and the knowledge that, ultimately, his desire to die would eventually win out. The last years of Jamal’s life were an endless ordeal of mental anguish and enormous physical pain; he hung around for a while longer to postpone putting those who loved him through the torment of loss, but all of us knew where this was heading sooner or later. We had to live with his suicide years before we got the news that it had finally happened. When it came, what was surprising wasn’t the fact of his death, but that alongside the devastating wave of grief that had upended my precariously ordered life, there was also a sense of immense relief that, at long last, the interminable, tortuous wait was over. It is possible for a part of yourself to actually rejoice that someone you love is dead—and for entirely selfish reasons—but it is maybe less possible to acknowledge that truth in the moment without feeling like a complete fucking pile of garbage.
It helps if you can shift the narrative a bit, find a selfless reason to be glad for your friend’s death. It can even be something true. Depression is an unacknowledged terminal illness, but its progression mirrors more widely-accepted ailments in ways that are distinct and obvious to anyone who’s ever had to live with it or near it: basically, without intervention—and oftentimes even with it—you get worse, and you get worse, and you get worse, and then you die. Bone cancer isn’t anybody’s fault, the toll it exacts on its victims is excruciating, and when they’re gone there is a genuine nodule of gratitude in the torn and bloody center of your grief that their suffering has come to an end. It took me long, agonized months to find that perspective with regard to Jamal’s death, but once I did, I found that I was able to accept all the things that had up to that point been unacceptable. I had loved someone with a terminal illness, and that person had passed. It was as simple as that.
Except that it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. Death is only that clean-cut for the dead; for the people left behind, the edges where your life was sewn up with the dead person’s are avulsed: left ragged, ripped, and frayed. They take an exceptionally long time to heal, and when they do, those tender places inside you are left deeply pitted and gnarled; they become scarred, inflexible, and obvious. That’s true for any death, but the violence of the act that Jamal occasionally referred to as “self murder” makes wounds that are particularly complex and nasty. I spent years thinking that I’d somehow “fixed” the hole he left when he died, when really I’d just layered some gauze over it and told myself that it was fine. Ignoring the festering cavity in my heart let me get on with the work of living in the world my friend had exited with both middle fingers extended, but that bandage was always going to come unraveled in the end.
That moment came late one night when I was reading an essay by Jonathan Franzen. Speaking in a pained and awkward voice about his own friend’s suicide, he penned a line that stopped me dead in a flash of overwhelming recognition: “To prove once and for all that he truly didn’t deserve to be loved,” he wrote, “it was necessary to betray as hideously as possible those who loved him best, by killing himself at home and making them firsthand witnesses to his act.” I had suffered the same illness as Jamal, but was kept from following it all the way to it its inevitable conclusion only by an intense, stabbing guilt at what it would cost the people foolish enough to have given a shit about me. I’d stood on the edge many times—some of them literal—only to walk away, awash with shame and horror at the mental picture of somebody I loved having to find me finally broken at the bottom.
The greatest crime seemed to me to do the thing at home. This is, of course, what Jamal had done, and the small details of what that choice had meant for those closest to him was something I’d willingly omitted from the tidy summary I’d written for myself of his decision to end his life. I’d had to overlook his ex-girlfriend, who had found him soiled and unconscious after each unsuccessful attempt just as she had found his dead body when he’d eventually gotten it right; I’d had to overlook his mother, whose life in the years following her son’s suicide became a bottomless well of anguish and bereavement with no clear focus beyond his absence. His suffering was immense, intolerable, and unsupportable. To insist that he continue such an existence would have been both heartless and absurd, but that did not erase the hard, intentional cruelty of what he had done. The very idea of being at peace with something so fundamentally unpeaceful is stupid: there is no peace to be made with something that takes a sweet and gentle and kind and thoughtful and funny human being and twists him in knots until he splinters and breaks and takes everyone he cares about down with him. Maybe the hole that process leaves behind should never be filled, should never be covered over with gauze, should never be healed. Maybe the only resolution that makes any kind of sense is no resolution whatsoever. Grief is, after all, just another form of love.
Jamal was a prolific musician. His output was astounding, not just in terms of its volume and consistent quality, but also its originality. Nobody sounded like him, and it was thrilling to be able to hear him, to work with him, and to learn from him. Every time he put out a new album, it was guaranteed to be a sonic experience unlike anything you’d ever heard before. And that included his last record, the release of which was delayed only a couple of months by his final failed attempt at dying. That album was, as it turned out, an hour-long suicide note.
It is extremely difficult to listen to, as you can probably imagine, filled with lines like, “The best part of me is already dead/The rest don’t wanna be alive no more/The best part of me is already dead/The rest don’t wanna be alive.” All this sung in a ghastly, merry, sing-song tone. When I asked him about it in an email, he replied, “I had a lot of the music already mostly finished for ages, I just needed to add vocals. I was stuck on that until I gave myself permission to be as lyrically bleak & dark as I wanted, then the words came pretty quickly & spontaneously & it right away turned into a suicide album.” Grim though it was, it was nonetheless a masterpiece of ingenuity and self-reflection, filled with thoughtfully constructed melodies and a handful of genuine bangers. I fucking hated it. While Jamal was still alive, all it did was remind me of the coming tragedy none of the people who loved this man had the power to arrest. But when he died I began listening to it constantly. It was soothing, in a way, to hear over and over in his own voice the rosary of agonies and sorrows he’d been forced to count in the years before his death.
It closes with a song he called “Endgame.” A departure from much of the album in both tone and content, it doesn’t feel like an examination of the artist’s tortured mind so much as a reminder to both the listener as well as himself that there is yet much more to the world than this vale of tears would suggest. Jamal’s life had become miserable and cruel in a way that had lead him to become miserable and cruel in return, but there was still more to him than this broad, encompassing illness. When, in Franzen’s words, this “depressed person then killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed,” he nevertheless left this sliver of his old, sweet self behind. After 20 tracks of turmoil, confusion, and despair, he nevertheless ended his final statement with a single tableau of serenity and beauty. Though he had been ruined by suffering, he nevertheless took a moment to look beyond himself; he nevertheless took a moment to say goodbye.