Phoenix

Content warning: suicide

Your obituary was a shock but not a surprise. None of us had heard from you in four years, since you gave up on all this and went back to Michigan.

You grew up in a tiny town. The largest ‘city’ in the area had a population of 6,000; the ‘suburb’ where your family lives had only 1,500.

You were Anishinaabe, the endonym for your people. You loved your culture, talked about it a lot. I'm sorry I don't remember. Something about a game where you toss something on the ice, and maybe you won.

It was so long ago that you told me anything, more than nine years now, and then there were four years when I rarely thought about you. I wanted to forget, for my own reasons. I'm ashamed of that now, but it's too late to remember.

For most of that time, you were already dead, and I didn't know. By the time I found your obituary, it had been two and a half years. And yet I was the first to find out.

Charitably, I could say that maybe no one else remembered your real name. Realistically, nobody cared. You were a kind, sweet person, but you were not valuable to them. They cast you aside and never thought about you again.

The night I found out, I walked over to where I knew I would find people who had known you. One of our old housemates put his head in his hands. Two others seemed appropriately shocked. The woman who you called Chief, who you always spoke highly of, had nothing kind to say. I don't think it touched her at all.

You were the first person I met when I visited California for the first time. You were the first person who was kind to me, asking me if I needed to go to sleep when your housemates were still occupying the couch I had rented and it was after midnight. I said, "No, no, I'm fine," and you looked at me, and said, "Have you heard of tell culture?" And then I told you I was tired, and you found me somewhere to sleep.

We knew each other in person for, what, six days? But I was young, and everything was intense, and you kept me up late talking on more than one of those nights.

You told me about your daughter. Alice. How you got your high school girlfriend pregnant, and you tried to raise the child together, but she was colicky, and it was so hard. Your girlfriend found a new man, someone to be a father to Alice. You discovered LessWrong and knew you had to work on existential risk, so that your daughter would have a world to grow up in.

You moved out to California with no connections, with so little plan that you spent the first week sleeping on the streets with your suitcase. When you attended Solstice, my future housemates took you in like a stray cat. The community was small then, and you were instantly at the heart of it all. MIRI, CFAR, Paradigm, everyone gave you a chance. You didn't know how to rise to those chances.

This community makes it quite clear that they value a certain kind of person. You were not that kind of person. You were kind, you cared, but that is not enough. You had a year of community college, and I don't think you'd ever known anyone accomplished or ambitious growing up. You couldn't keep up, and soon you got depressed and didn't want to.

We Skyped often, while I was finishing my last quarter of college. Three months before I'd move to California, and we'd be in the same place again. You were sweet, wonderful, at least at first. You helped talk me through the jobs I might have, you helped me debug my problems, you encouraged my projects. We never said "I love you", but I thought about it.

Something changed. Hard to blame something specific — clinical depression, failed work trials, spending time with people who encouraged you to do drugs and not leave the house. No way to trace the causal arrows between those. By the time I got to California all the life had gone out of you. Our relationship didn't last a week after my arrival. You moved back to Michigan two months later.

Your obituary was a shock but not a surprise. You'd learned the world was in danger and then found out you had nothing to offer in saving it. You were already not thriving in your tiny town, and then you tried to make it in the big city, and you failed. You gave up. You had a daughter who was being raised by a man who you respected more than you respected yourself. You had no place in California, and no place in Michigan. So no, I was not surprised to learn you'd killed yourself.

Your mother contacted me, five years after you died. Still heartbroken, still in mourning. Of course. You were a good boy, and you loved your family and talked about them often. Of course she wasn't over it.

Your mother wanted to know about the life you'd had in California. She wanted to see pictures of you. Any little piece of you she could get, when she knew there’d never be any new ones. I told her what I could, which wasn't much. I regretted deleting the pictures I had of you, though there were only two. I posted in the Slack of our old group house, asking if anyone had pictures of you, to share with your heartbroken mother. Only one person responded, a handful of photos and her regrets. No one else even acknowledged the message. I passed the photos along, feeling it was a pathetic offering.

Today, it's been seven years since you died. Alice is twelve years old. The world has transformed, and you will never see it.

Most suicides I've known have felt misguided to me, people in crisis mistaking temporary despair for something they can never escape. Your case feels more complicated.

I wish you hadn't died — you were a good person, and the world was better with you in it — but I wouldn't go back and tell you "it'll get better". You couldn't see a path forward for yourself, and I can't see one either. You were dealt a terrible hand in life. It is no virtue on my part that I was born smart and with high executive function, to loving, smart, reasonably successful parents who pushed me to succeed, in a city large enough to be full of opportunity. That was all luck, and everything I have is thanks to that.

You and I tried the same thing: Moving out to California with no plan, just to be where the rationalists were. Trying to help. We were both given opportunities. And I am still here, and you have been dead for seven years.

I'm sorry your life went the way it did. I'm sorry I couldn't do anything to change what happened.

You were a good person. It was wonderful to be loved by you, for a short time. I wish I could thank you.