Wise Words of Everyone

Joshua Putnam

Summer Solstice, 2000

My daughter, Tanisha, is seven years-old. Sometimes she says the most amazing things. A few weeks ago, as we were sitting down to dinner along with Tinuviel, my wife, Tanisha had a seriousness about her.

“Daddy,” she said. “Do you know what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately?”

“What?”

“I’ve been thinking how everyone and everything in the universe is everyone and everything in the universe but they’re also nothing and nobody.”

I was momentarily speechless. “Ding!” I said, and touched her gently on the forehead.

“I’m going to write that down.” I decided. It was the first time I had ever written something she said down, though it had occurred to me to do so on other occasions.

“Wise words of Tanisha…” I said aloud, as I wrote.

“No!” protested Tanisha. “Don’t write wise words of Tanisha. Write wise words of everyone.”

“Wise words of everyone,” I agreed, erasing Tanisha’s name and writing everyone instead.

“That’s profound, Tanisha.” Tinuviel said.

“What does profound mean?” Tanisha wondered.

“It means something deep. Something that has a lot of meaning.” Tinuviel explained.

“The Jewel is really in the Lotus with you, Tanisha.” I said.

“What does that mean?” Tanisha asked, with a very puzzled countenance.

“Well,” I replied. “The Jewel is consciousness or awareness and the Lotus is each of your Chakras, especially the highest Chakra, which has to do with universal consciousness. When you said everyone and everything is everyone and everything and also nothing and nobody and then when you insisted that I write that those were wise words of everyone, not wise words of Tanisha, you spoke from universal consciousness, so I said that the Jewel was in the Lotus with you.”

“Yeah,” she replied, almost dismissively, “well you know what else I’ve been thinking about a lot.”

“What?”

“I’ve been thinking how anything you can say has a million meanings but it’s also nonsense.”

Three days later, Sasha died.

Tanisha made her pronouncement about everyone and everything on Thursday night. On Saturday morning, I visited my friends Jessicka and Thistle and found them in good spirits. On Monday, I went to work at my job as network administrator for a top-tier management consulting firm and found a desperate email from Thistle.

“Please talk to Sasha. I think he needs help. You know a lot about healing. I was on the phone with him last night and he was talking about killing himself and now I can’t reach him. I went to his house and no one answered. I’m really scared.”

I called Sasha’s house.

“Hello.” The voice that answered the phone was gruff. It was not Sasha.

“Can I speak to Sasha, please.” I asked.

“Who is this?”
“I’m Sasha’s friend. Josh. Who’s this?”
“This is Sergeant Smithson of the Cambridge Police. Why are you calling Sasha?”

“I came to work and I had an email from a friend saying he was worried about Sasha and would I check on him so I called…” I managed, nearly breathless.

“Who is this friend?” demanded Smithson.

“His name is Thistle. I’m sorry. I don’t know his real name. I guess if you’re there that mean’s that Sasha is not alright, doesn’t it?”

“I can’t give out any information.”

I hung up on him.

I left the office. I had to get outside. My pulse felt like it was beating a thousand times a minute.

I felt ill.

Nearly eight years earlier, Sumi, my ex-girlfriend of five and a half years, committed suicide. Although we were no longer living together when she killed herself, Sumi’s death was the most difficult thing I ever lived with. For a long time after she died, I felt nothing.

Sasha’s death reminded me of Sumi’s. I felt like I was re-experiencing the shock I felt when I’d learned that she was gone.

Sasha and I met within a circle of friends I have been closely involved with for about a year. The people in this little group enjoy a greater share of diversity, tolerance and genuine love and acceptance of one another than I have elsewhere encountered. Many other people helped me to get through the painful times after Sumi’s death, but through my interactions with my new friends, including Sasha, I experienced healing which I did not think possible.

Outside in the sunshine, my thoughts returned to the day Sumi died. The feeling of being overwhelmed, of drowning, returned to me.

I called Mark, one of my oldest friends. We talked for a few minutes and he calmed me a bit. I went back into my office and called Thistle.

“I called Sasha’s house and the police answered,” I told him.

“They called me here,” Thistle replied, his voice weak. “Sasha is dead.”

“How do you know that? The police told me they couldn’t give out any information.”

“I asked him straight out and he told me.”

We talked for a few more minutes. We were both really shook up. I told Thistle I was probably going to go home. He said he would come over later, if he could.

My boss came into the office. I started to tell him what happened and broke down. While I sobbed, he called me a taxi.

On the way home, I just cried.

Suicide, more than any other form of dying, raises epistemological questions about who we are, why we are here and what is our relationship and responsibility to each other and to the universe.

After Sumi died, I watched the effects of her decision ripple through our circle of friends. I was, perhaps, the most disturbed. There were many others who were also gravely depressed. Some people displayed their shock, their anger, fear or sadness, on the surface. Others tried to hide it, yet it was still plain.

Sumi’s death was itself a ripple from an earlier tragedy.

Four years before she killed herself, Sumi discovered the body of our roommate, close friend and lover, Jody, who had died of an apparently accidental suffocation while inhaling nitrous oxide. Jody had passed out with a garbage bag pulled over his head.

Two days before he died, I had discovered Jody in his room inhaling the gas from a bag and had told him that it was incredibly stupid to inhale it in that manner while alone, because if you passed out there would be no one there to pull the bag off of your head. I thought Jody heard me. I was wrong.

In spite of the willful stupidity inherent in his death, neither I, the police, nor any of Jody’s immediate family believed that he had committed suicide. He had left no note. He was a happy person intensely involved with friends and in his communities. He did not appear depressed or distraught.

Moreover, accidental suffocation while inhaling NO2 is a disturbingly common phenomenon. The police who investigated Jody’s death told me of three similar cases in Somerville that year. I believe that Jody’s death was a sad, stupid, tragic accident. I do not think it was a conscious choice.

Sumi, however, came to feel otherwise. She became obsessed with the idea that Jody had killed himself. Whether or not her belief that Jody killed himself deliberately was ultimately correct or not, we will never know. We must each simply live with our own judgements and our own questions. We do know, however, that Sumi’s judgement was at least partly based on a misperception. After Jody died, Sumi found some poems in his papers, which the family left behind. One of the poems seemed to be an expression of existential despair, of not wanting to live. Sumi believed the poems were written by Jody. She showed them to me a couple of months before she died, trying to convince me of her conviction that Jody’s death had been a suicide.

At the end, in the days before she killed herself, Sumi’s obsession with Jody became overwhelming. She filled her room with photographs of him and objects he had created. Sumi died surrounded by reminders of Jody.

Later, I was able to track down the origin of the poems Sumi had found and attributed to Jody. It turned out they were by a woman in the Pagan spiritual group in which Jody was a leader. She had given them to him to critique. So the poem, which was the only real piece of evidence ever presented in support of Jody’s having killed himself, turned out to be the expression of another.

Ripples and ripples and ripples.

Everyone and everything is everyone and everything and also nothing and nobody.

I went to pieces after Sumi died. Having lived through the deaths of half a dozen of my closest friends from AIDS during the years when Sumi and I lived in San Francisco, between 1985 and 1987, and then having dealt with Jody’s death a year after we moved to Boston, when Sumi committed suicide, I completely went to pieces. The one person who had shared with me every major joy and sorrow of my adult life, the one friend who remembered with me the lost friends we had known, had given up on life. Though some part of me always knew I would not give up, I wanted to.

It was the love of my friends and my family and the love I still dimly perceived from everyone and everything that held me.

In the days after Sumi died, my few surviving friends and my relatives were consistently supportive. Their love was the anchor that held me. The tether that their support provided allowed me to begin to experience the pain of Sumi’s death, to let myself be overwhelmed by it for a time. With their help, I eventually began to look for lessons in what had happened.

One of the earliest and most obvious lessons to suggest itself was the need for every member of a community to take every other member of the community seriously and the importance of involving the community when any member shows signs of terminal or near-terminal distress. This is a lesson well known to counselors and mental health workers. It is imperative to take talk about killing oneself seriously. The consequences of underestimating the seriousness of a suicidal proclamation vastly overshadow those of overestimation.

Unfortunately, in the case of both Sumi’s and Sasha’s deaths, overt statements of suicidal intent were overlooked or not acted on decisively. Before Sumi died, she talked to a woman friend several times about wanting to kill herself. After Sumi committed suicide, the woman Sumi talked to said she never told any of Sumi’s other friends because she herself often talked of suicide but was never herself serious. Because she didn’t take herself seriously she didn’t take Sumi seriously.

We are alienated from each other and we are alienated from ourselves.

In the case of Sasha’s death, Sasha was on the telephone with Thistle telling him he was in the process of killing himself. Jessicka suggested to Thistle while this was happening that she should go to a payphone and call the police, but Thistle was afraid that this would upset Sasha. He did not take Sasha’s claim that he was killing himself entirely seriously, but he did not entirely discount it. He immediately, in the middle of the night, rode his bicycle to Sasha’s house. He rang the doorbell and knocked loudly several times. When he could not rouse Sasha, he hoped that Sasha had gone to sleep and went home.

He sent me the email first thing in the morning.

There is no one responsible for Sumi’s and Sasha’s decisions except for Sumi and Sasha; there are only lessons for all of us from what occurred. I know that Thistle cared for Sasha and that the woman Sumi confided in also loved Sumi. I do not think that anyone should feel guilty for what has happened, though I am sure every one of us who cared for Sumi or Sasha or someone else who committed suicide has encountered guilt.

Eventually this guilt can be healed. This essay is as much about the healing as it is about the hurt, as much about forgiveness as about remorse.

After the obvious lessons, the more subtle truths begin to emerge. As I regained a modicum of emotional stability, I began to seek ways to distract myself from the pain I felt. 11 years after dropping out of High School, I enrolled in a BA program at Harvard’s School of Continuing Education. I told myself I would lose myself in study. The fact that I was expecting a child in the spring, the product of a short and tumultuous relationship that followed my separation from Sumi, gave me an additional incentive for my studies. I took classes in child development, among others.

Beneath it all, I could not escape the emptiness and the sorrow that I felt. As winter vacation approached, I decided to visit San Francisco. I had not been back there in two years, since the death of my friend Robin. I figured that since every one of my friends in San Francisco had been touched repeatedly by the kind of senseless tragedy I was now drowning in, maybe they would know how to throw me a lifeline.

As it turned out, just being around my friends had a salvific effect on me. My friend Rob, a gay Episcopal priest, told me that he had lived in the same apartment on Nob Hill for all of his twenty-two years in the city. During that time he had shared the space with twenty-six roommates, all but four of whom had since died of AIDS. Of the twenty-two who had died, I counted four as friends, including two I did not learn had died until that visit. My friend Edward’s roommate Bill told me he went through sixty-six days in a row when someone he knew died every day. After that, he started going to therapy because he was having nightmares.

In spite of everything that had transpired, my friends in San Francisco remained immensely positive, beautiful, faithful, activist. They cradled one another with gentleness. They welcomed me back into the circle of their love.

One day, I went to the beach with Edward and my brother, Sam. It was the gay nude beach at Land’s End. We had to climb down through the rocks and bushes to get there. It was a beautiful day. The area leading to the beach had always been a gay cruising area. I wondered if AIDS had put a stop to that. I was pleasantly surprised to discover, repeatedly, that it had not.

We got to the beach. It was windy and a bit chilly. There was a homeless man feeding a small fire. There were a couple of guys sunbathing in the buff, but behind barriers of sand they had built to block the wind. I sat on a log and listened to the sea. Edward rubbed my back.

At some point, I addressed the ocean inwardly and said “Give me whatever it is that I need to be happy again.”

I very clearly heard the ocean answer, “Yes.”

I immediately removed all of my clothes and walked into the sea. As it was rocky there and the Pacific is quite cold in San Francisco in December, I am sure I got some attention. I played in the surf until I felt cleansed.

I walked out of the ocean changed. Whether or not the voice that answered me truly came from the ocean or from some place inside of me is irrelevant. I believed it when I heard it and its truth has been borne out by my own history.

I took all the money out of my wallet and threw it in the homeless man’s fire. This made my brother feel bad for the homeless guy, so he gave him some money.

Walking back up through the bushes, I was struck by how beautiful everything was. The light slanting through the branches, landing on the golden needles, the cliffs rolling down to the sea and the feel of Edward’s hand in mine are all still etched in my memory after all these years. The startled looks on the faces on the lovers we accidentally disturbed looked positively cherubic to me in my new state.

Upon returning to Boston the following week, I immediately encountered two wonderfully sensitive new friends, Damian and Rebecca. The three of us fell in love and for a year and a half they cared for me more tenderly that I could have imagined possible. I have written about this elsewhere, but I need to say a few words about it again.

One day in the spring, just after the birth of my daughter and the death of my (and Sumi’s) ex-boyfriend from HIV, Damian and Rebecca and I went to the National March for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Rights in Washington, D.C. This was the big march after Clinton got elected the first time, to press him on his promise to integrate gays into the military. Although I did not support having gays, or straights, in the military, we wanted to be there for the march.

At the end of the parade, I was surrounded by old and new friends from both the East and West Coasts. I started to cry, remembering Sumi, wishing she was there. I had my head in my lap. When I looked up, Rebecca was crying too, as hard as me. She was sharing my pain. There was an incredible healing that she gave me right then and there, as Damian brought us tissues to dry our eyes.

Rebecca also taught me a big lesson that day. She taught me that the ripples of my pain had an echo, a resonance. When I was caught up in my sorrow, alone, I felt it’s infinity. Like all circles the circle of sadness has no beginning and no end. It goes on and on. Out and out. As long as we feel our pain by ourselves we feel powerless.

Rebecca showed me that there are no parallel lines and that in the curved space-time in which we live, all the little individual circles of our pain rippling outward eventually intersect. Where there is contact, where we touch each other and feel each other, there is healing. Rebecca shared my pain for a moment and in that moment my pain became bearable. It became the basis of a deeper shared understanding.

Years later, when I met the group of friends who eventually introduced me to Sasha, I found them united around an anarchistic musical community called Circle. Their symbol, the Seed of Life, is a pattern made from seven circles in which all the circles intersect. Many people in Circle are young, idealistic, unrepressed and sexually adventuresome. When I met them, they were also innocent of the types of tragedies I had known. I hoped that they would stay that way.

It was beyond my competency to make that hope a certainty. Now we are all dealing together with the loss of Sasha. Too late for him and us, but perhaps not for others, I am trying to pass on the lessons I discern in what has transpired.

In the days since Sasha left us, I have re-experienced many of the feelings from Sumi’s death, but with more understanding. I was much closer to Sumi than I was to Sasha. I am also more deeply attached to my friends in Circle, of which Sasha was one, than I have ever been to any other community. Since meeting Circle, one year ago today, I have felt more loved and better understood by people who I was not in love with than I have ever felt before. I spent some amount of time with my closest friends—Zalika and Jed, Ben and Christa--almost every day. On the many days when I felt too depressed to reach out to my friends, days that had been common for me ever since Sumi died, my friends always called me.

One weekend, a few months after we started hanging out together, I was so depressed I didn’t answer the phone or the doorbell for two days. When I did reconnect with my friends, on Sunday night, I could see that they were sick with worry about me. Their love and their concern snapped me out of my depression. Gradually, I went inside less and less. I became more involved with them in making the world brighter.

Eventually the healing and love I was finding made me feel again, as I had felt years before, that my friends and I were the luckiest people in the world. I looked around and saw how strong we were together, how our racial, sexual, social, philosophic and emotional diversity gave us a depth and a beauty few people believe is possible. I began to look for ways to share this good fortune with others, to repay the kindnesses the world had done to me.

Sometime in March, I was reading the New York Times and noticed an article about a proposed 1.6 billion dollar aid package for the corrupt and vicious Colombian military being debated in Congress. The package, which at that time looked sure of passage, would have represented a ten-fold increase in aid to Colombia and would have displaced or killed tens of thousands of rural peasants. The justification offered for the aid was the rhetoric of the War on Drugs, though the money would actually have been given to a military establishment known to be in collusion with the cartels and with ruthless right-wing death squads.

I was reminded of Reagan’s war against leftist peasants in Central America in the Eighties. That war claimed hundreds of thousands of innocent Indian lives.

Along with Jed and Zalika and Ben and Christa and some of our other friends I started a group, the New England Resistance to the War in Colombia, to fight against the aid package. We called senators, other activists, and newspapers. We visited leftist professors and politicians. We held a demonstration. In short, we became activists.

Taking action against the War on Drugs and institutional racism in general was a major step for me. It was a grand return to all the motivations that led me to drop out of high school, eighteen years earlier. Speaking out required courage, because over the years I had become attached to shelter from the system. I had sought to protect my friends and myself by not speaking out. Suddenly, though, I had remembered that to live in fear is to be in prison even though you are free. I decided I would live by my faith and my convictions as long and as well as I could, regardless of consequences.

As soon as I did this, I became happier. I began to meet other wonderful people who were working to change the system. They inspired me to go further.

I could see that Zalika, whose bouts of depression I had often feared would lead to suicide, was also getting stronger.

One day, shortly after we met, I was at work when I got a fearful intuition about Zalika. I made up some excuse about why I had to leave and rushed out. When I got to Zalika’s house and knocked on the door, Jed answered. He was crying.

“What’s up, Jed?” I asked

“Zalika says she’s going to kill herself!” he sobbed.

I pushed passed him and ran down the hallway to the bedroom, where I found Zalika.

“What’s going on? Jed says you’re going to kill yourself!”

“Uh huh.” was all Zalika would answer me, but her eyes said volumes.

“You guys had a fight, didn’t you?” I could see she wasn’t going to talk about it with Jed in the room, so I asked him to wait in the kitchen

Over the next hour, I got Zalika to tell me about their fight, the details of which do not need to be repeated. I also got her to tell me about her lifelong battle with depression and low self-esteem. Over and over she said she wanted to die and over and over I told her how much I loved her, how hard I had taken Sumi’s death, how I couldn’t take it again.

In the end, Zalika said she had to go to class. I said she had to promise me she would never kill herself first. She refused. After a long time, she finally promised not to kill herself that day and to talk to me first if she ever was going to do it in the future. She also promised to let me meet her right after class. I could see I had already cheered her up a lot. I settled for that for one day.

Shortly after we began our activism period, about thirty of us from Circle gathered at my friend Aaron’s farm in New Hampshire to celebrate the Spring Equinox. Late in the evening, I found myself high, emotionally charged and alone with Zalika. Suddenly, I wanted her to promise me that she would never commit suicide. I asked her to do so, again.

“Dude, I don’t know if I can handle that.” She said. “I already promised to talk to you first.”

“That was ok when I had only known you for a month. Now I love you more. I need you to do this for me.”

She thought for a while. “OK. I promise. I can do that for you.”

I smiled and drifted off to sleep.

A few weeks later, we were with Jed in my bedroom and I brought it up again.

“Zalika.” I said. “I am so happy you promised never to kill yourself when we were at Aaron’s.” I was siting behind her, rubbing her back. I put my arms around her and hugged her firmly.

“I don’t know, dude,” she replied. “I want to go back to the old promise.”

I moved around to face her. This time I was sober and her words hit me hard. “I just can’t handle that Zalika. Maybe once I could, but now I can’t. I can’t.” I started to cry.

I explained to her how much I loved her. I told her that after Sumi died, I never thought I could love anyone more than I had loved her, but Zalika had shown me I was wrong. Zalika, more than any other person in my lifetime, had made me feel loved for just being me, not for anything I did.

Zalika told me she felt our love intensely too, but she didn’t want to give up the option of suicide, because sometimes life was just too hard. I tried to involve Jed, but he just mumbled that he didn’t believe Zalika would ever hurt herself and then he left my apartment to go home and use the computer. I went on, explaining to Zalika how Sumi’s death had hurt so many other people. I told her that how Sumi’s suicide disheartened our circle of friends. I begged her not to introduce that sorrow to Circle. I said I didn’t know if we could handle it. After a while, we were both crying. We hugged each other.

Then, after maybe an hour had passed, the energy changed in the room. We both felt it. It was like there was a strong, spiritual, loving, presence there beside us. I felt words coming from my mouth that did not seem to be my own. I no longer spoke from my fear of losing Zalika. I spoke from universal consciousness.

“Zalika, you are a healer and you know it. You are called to healing and you are doing the work of healing. That’s why you’re getting a degree in art therapy and why you’re working with emotionally disturbed girls. You know you can reach them, call them back to life. But to do that you have to affirm your own bond with the life force. You have to pledge yourself to life.”

“Not all of Zalika lives in here!” I declared, touching her chest. “Part of Zalika lives in here, too.” I touched myself. “And part of Josh lives inside of you. We are connected. We all live inside each other. If one of us let’s go, cops out, a part of all of us dies. If you kill yourself, you kill a part of me. I know you would never want to do that to me, but that is just how it is.”

“Only the wounded healer can heal. But before you heal others you have to begin to heal yourself. You have to make this promise, not just not to kill yourself, but to love life, to return to life as a human on this Earth if such a thing is possible for as long as the healing of the Earth remains unfinished. You have to take a bodhisattva vow. That was the first spiritual oath I swore in this lifetime and, though it has been really hard, it has also been rewarding. Some of the greatest rewards have come from you, Zalika.”

As I spoke then I was crying, tears of joy not sorrow, and as I type these words I find myself crying again.

Zalika was smiling now and it almost seemed as if there was a light glowing all around her, around us. “Your right.” she finally agreed. “I understand. This is really heavy. I will take this vow with you.

Together, looking into each other’s eyes, we said: “I vow to always love and respect the life force in all its manifestations, to revere and return to the Earth and to work for the healing all who live upon her throughout all time and incarnations.” Zalika threw her arms around me. We hugged each other for what seemed like hours.

When Zalika finally left and I went to sleep, it was past three in the morning. I only had four hours before I had to get up to go to work the next morning, but I awoke more refreshed than I remembered feeling before. I knew in my heart that I was finally healed of the guilt and the sorrow of Sumi’s death. By getting Zalika to promise me what I had failed to get Sumi to promise, I had gotten myself to forgive myself. I knew Zalika would keep her promise.

Since that time, in spite of Sasha death and other hard changes, I have seen both Zalika and myself stronger, more whole and more deeply connected to everyone around us.

Everyone and everything is everyone and everything and also nothing and nobody.

When I got home on the day Sasha died, I did not go straight into my house. I went next door, to the house where Jed, Zalika, Christa and Ben all lived. Only Ben was home when I got there. Thistle had already called him. Like me, he was in a state of shock.

I called some other people and invited them over to my house. I called Thistle back at work and he said he and Jessicka wanted to come by for a little while, before he went to talk to the police. Ben and I headed over to my place to wait for the others.

I don’t remember much of the next several hours. More and more people showed up. Mostly, they were visibly upset. Ben and Brenda read poems. After a while, Thistle showed up. He was more traumatized than I had expected, for two reasons.

First, before Sasha had died he had cursed Thistle, blaming him for causing his breakup with his ex-girlfriend and for “ruining Circle.” It was a cruel, senseless act of a desperate, disturbed person.

Also, the day before Sasha died, Thistle’s housemate Skye had overdosed on heroin. This came as complete shock to Thistle and his other housemates, who’d had no idea Skye was using hard drugs. Thistle had just finished dealing with the police following Skye’s death, now they wanted to talk to him again. I was afraid for how they would deal with him and afraid for Thistle. He was sobbing and blaming himself in a thousand ways. Everyone was trying to comfort him, but he was still upset.

One person was not herself upset. Christa betrayed no trace of sorrow. This upset me a great deal. She kept saying “Well, everyone chooses everything that happens to them.” Not only did I not believe that, I thought that even if it was true it was irrelevant to the tragedy at hand. Although I knew Christa had faced overwhelming tragedy in her lifetime, having been orphaned as a child, and that her faith was a way of dealing with all the pain she’d experienced, I felt angry with her for not dealing with the dark in what had transpired. I was mad that she was repressing the pain.

I was also mad at myself for feeling that way.

Tinuviel arrived. Seeing her made me feel better. Just being with her was good medicine. We had to go out to pick up Tanisha from school, so everyone decided to go back over to Jed’s. On the way down the stairs, Christa said cheerfully “These certainly are interesting times we live in!”

“May you live in interesting times is a Chinese curse.” I muttered under my breath.

I didn’t see Christa again until two days later, at Sasha’s funeral. I was amazed by his funeral. Although I had known Sasha for a year and had worked together with him on an internet startup, I knew only that he was Russian and not that he was also Jewish.

Sasha’s funeral was held in the same Jewish funeral home in Brookline where my grandmother’s funeral was held. It was the most unusual Jewish funeral I have ever seen. Sasha had left instructions for his body to be cremated, so they had embalmed him first and the funeral was open casket, all of which is anathema to Orthodox Judaism. There were over two hundred people at the funeral, filling the chapel and spilling out into the hall. All of Sasha’s Circle friends, his ex-wife, his sixteen year-old son Eugene, his ex-girlfriends, his many friends from the world of high-tech and from Russia. Sasha’s funeral was one of the most diverse gatherings I have ever attended.

At the funeral, everyone cried. We all took turns getting up and talking about Sasha. It lasted for hours. When Christa got up and spoke, the tears rolled down her cheeks. It was really good for me to see that. I realized that her feelings were as deep and strong as mine, that they just needed to come out on their own schedule, not my schedule. I felt how much I loved her more intensely that before.

I was really glad to see Thistle at the funeral. I had been afraid Thistle wouldn’t be there, because he had expressed a fear that someone in Sasha’s family would blame him. At the end of the funeral, I hugged Eugene. Then I saw him go over to Thistle and take him aside to talk to him. I didn’t hear any of what was said, but I could see from Eugene’s face that there was no anger there. I was really glad, for both of them.

There have been a lot of frayed nerves since Sasha died. I have watched my friends dealing with the stress of his passing in different ways. Some people seem more shook up than others, depending on how close to Sasha they were and how strong they were before he died. I have seen a great willingness among many people to open up to the lessons in Sasha’s life and death. This essay is my attempt to contribute to that questioning. I do not pretend to have all the answers, but I have found a few that are useful for me.

One answer is that we must not allow ourselves become apathetic. We are all connected in a great circle. We all need to work together to make that circle whole, to bridge the enormous gaps which our alienation from each other has created. To bridge those gaps we must care more, more about ourselves and more about each other. We must take ourselves seriously. We must recognize that how we are with ourselves affects everyone else. If we give up, others will give up too. If we hold on, others will respond to us.

I cannot bring Sumi back and I cannot bring Sasha back. What I can do is try to approach their deaths with compassion and honesty. All I can do is to share the lessons I have learned from them, especially the lesson that we are all interconnected, that we all depend upon each other. I wish that there did not have to be such terrible tragedy for me to realize these truths. All circles intersect was little more than a slogan to me before. Now it is my reality. I wish this deeper meaning had come at a lesser price.

Still, I am grateful for the lessons and the blessings I do have. That Sumi and Sasha’s circles intersected with mine was undeniably a blessing for me. I am richer, no doubt, in more ways than I can know.

I do not know if these words I have written have a million meanings or if they are just nonsense. I do know that whatever meaning they can hold is pale compared with the deeper, inexpressible truth of love, which holds us all together. I know it is the love I share with my friends that finally healed me from the pain of Sumi’s suicide, that allowed me to face Sasha’s death without withdrawing so completely.

I have also been helped beyond description by Tinuviel, my wife, and by my daughter, Tanisha, whose words inspired this meditation. Whether or not my words resonate with larger audience, I know at some level everyone and everything is related to her truth.

Everyone and everything is everyone and everything and also nothing and nobody.

Suicide.

Sumi. Sasha.

Sasha. Sumi.

Dearly departed.

Circles. Round and around and round.

The main ideas. What are the main ideas? What happened? What did you have in common? What do you have in common with me?

Emotions. Anger. Grief. Despair.

I also know mortal fear, which you two forgot.

Tears fall and prayer is weak and we you left behind now need to find our own way back together.

There is a place I like to visit as often as I can. The place where

it is a gift to give.

If I could give…

But I can no longer give to you.

And we left behind

can only ponder

the gifts

you left us.

Bright, golden memories.

Dark, ominous questions.

What did you

what did we all do

that allowed you to forget

to take your leave

of us?

There is a place

where our love is a circle

without beginning without end

I want

to go back there

with you two

again

but there is also

a sense

in which your leaving

seems

to say

that place

is a lie.

And I am mad at you

for leaving us

mad at us

for letting you slip through

our fingers

mad at myself

for feeling this way.

And I am sad

about what happened

and part of me

will always

be.

Other parts

let go

but we who were all

torn apart

by your

disaster

now must find a stronger

bond.

Is this a poem or a letter or an extended reflection?

It is an intention

meant to convey, to impress on each and every one who knew them

(Sasha and Sumi and those others)

who chose to no longer bear with us the burden

and share with us

our rest

that none of us are separate

feeling

or not feeling

alone

we are all connected

each living

in every other

heart

and when one of us

is absent

a place

in all of us

is gone

now some of us are being strong and some of us are being philosophical and some of us are being emotional and some of us are just barely getting by

and the rest of us had better do a better job of figuring out which of us it is

who are having the hardest time

and do more to let them know

that it is also our

hard time

and it will be a lot harder

without all of us

together

as the time goes by.

I want to apologize

if I have upset anybody

and my apology

is a lie

because I would do anything

to shake us

out of our

complacency

to make us seize

again

with greater love and tenderness

each other’s

hands

to see us

still together

after much more time

and tribulation

and rejoicing

has honed our simple

family

into a noble

tribe.