I’ve been contemplating this post for a while, and I’m still unsure of the best way to go about it. Big trigger warning, as I’ll be talking about suicide, abuse, trauma, etc.
A little over a month ago, I found out a friend of mine committed suicide. I was attending my last creative writing class of the semester. I received a text message from a friend I’ve known since childhood.
“What happened to Cameron?”
My heart immediately began pounding. I walked out of the classroom, into the hallway and dialed my friend’s number.
“What is going on?”
“He killed himself.”
I couldn’t speak. A feeling of immense heartbreak washed over me. You see, as shocking as the news was, I can’t honestly say it was a surprise. Cameron did not hide, at least not from me, his struggles with suicidal thoughts, depression, and anxiety. The feeling that keeps overriding everything else: Cameron deserved so much better. I wanted so badly for him to find something to hold on to. I wanted so badly to help him see that life could be worth living. The moment I heard the news, the inescapable truth that there was no hope for that anymore was hard to accept. It’s still hard to accept.
Cameron is the nephew of this childhood friend I’m talking about, so I’ve always been aware of his existence, albeit from a distance. However, when I returned home from travelling, I “re-met” Cameron, and I began to get to know him as himself, rather than having a vague sense that he was my friend’s nephew. We sometimes walked around our small home town, usually at the ungodly hour of 3 AM. The sleeping city was an escape from the four walls of our separate bedrooms. We’d had a similar living arrangement as we both lived with our alcoholic, narcissistic fathers. This led to us spending far more time than we would’ve liked, shut in our bedrooms, avoiding our fathers.
A few times, Cameron and I would travel out of town to get Starbucks or lunch somewhere. Conversation was easy, and Cameron was always eager to treat me by purchasing the meal. He was so giving, so animated. I remember how our conversations would flow from serious topics, right into humorous ones without a second thought. As time went on, I got myself a job working weekends, and Cameron got a job working at a factory. He seemed to love his job, but it demanded a lot of his time. He had weekends off, but of course, I was stuck at work.
Since I worked at a gas station, overnight, it was easy to go long stretches without any customers. As a result, Cameron would sometimes come into my gas station just to hang out. We would talk for hours sometimes. This is where I really got to know him best, where he admitted what his life was like and what was happening in his mind. We jokingly called it our weekly therapy. One night in particular, Cameron was having a rough time. He walked into my gas station at 10 pm, having just woken up. He told me he’d been sleeping way too much. As our conversation progressed, things got darker and darker. I realized the problem was much too much for me to help. I tried to convince Cameron to go to the hospital, but since he had to work the next day, he didn’t want to. Desperate to help in some significant way, I wrote the number of a therapy office on a receipt, placed it firmly in Cameron’s hand. I looked directly into his eyes and asked him to please call the number. He promised he would. Weeks later, he came in, excitedly telling me about his first appointment. He said he felt hopeful that things could be better for him. I felt like I was glowing with happiness for him, but the glowing came from him. Cameron was literally glowing. It was as if the weight of the weeks previous had been lifted. He was genuinely optimistic.
Cameron’s aunt I mentioned earlier, was my best friend throughout childhood. We were practically sisters. Her family became my own and vice versa, though neither of our families were all that desirable. Cameron’s family was not unlike my other friends: a bit (quite) dysfunctional. I think Cameron found it easy to talk to me because I knew quite intimately the family he came from, and I came from a similar one. We talked often of the next generation of children in his family, and how he wished he could simply adopt them all himself to save them from what he knew was inevitable.
As news of Cameron’s death spread to all who knew him, I heard one sentiment repeated more often than others. “Cameron was such a good kid.” I have to agree, but for a less obvious reason.
Cameron was a good kid, as in, he was good at being a kid. He was good at relating to kids. Kids gravitated to him because he treated them like humans, rather than objects. He acknowledged their feelings, made them feel heard and loved, and always went out of his way to take them out to do fun things. The reason this was so natural and easy for Cameron was because of how intimately he knew the opposite. He knew exactly what it was like to grow up in a home that did not give him the love he deserved. He grew up with parents that did not value him as a human being, instead he was ridiculed for having any individuality and reprimanded any time he was less than perfect.
Now, I did not grow up in Cameron’s home. I cannot speak from personal experience, nor do I wish to play a blame game here. Moreover, the problem is much larger than just Cameron and just his parents. Neglect and abuse is an epidemic that affects children everywhere, every single day. While it is absolutely enraging to me that innocent children get abused and traumatized by their parents and then have to spend all of their adult lives recovering from said trauma, it is a societal problem. A problem that is entirely too easy to perpetuate. This paired with the problem that there simply is not enough support for people like Cameron makes a deadly combination. Even now, the anger swells up in me that this is reality. It isn’t fair, not even a little bit.
Cameron was such a good kid in such a shitty childhood home, that upon reaching adulthood, he was crushed by the weight of the terrible truths of this world. All of Cameron’s maladaptive coping/thinking/behaviors that stemmed from his childhood led to a miserable existence once he was finally free from his parent’s direct grasp. All of the ways he was failed manifested into him believing that he himself was the failure. In my eyes, that could not be further from the truth. He fought so hard against everything inside of him that told him to stop fighting. With no real parental support, Cameron kept going as long as he could.
The weekend before Cameron’s death, he’d come into my gas station for the last time. Our conversation was briefer than normal. He seemed a bit tired, but he said it was due to a busy weekend. He said he was feeling better lately. At this point, he’d been going to therapy for a year, after my prompting. He’d been spending time with friends, he was getting a promotion at work. He seemed excited that things were going well for him. I guess that’s what stings the most. I wish so badly I could take those feelings from him that weekend and give them to the Cameron on Wednesday, May 5. I wish I could’ve reminded him that the part of him that was convincing him to end it wasn’t permanent. It wasn’t him.
As with any death, especially deaths by suicide, I am ridden with what if’s. What if I could’ve done more for him? What if I didn’t listen to him that weekend? What if I’d messaged him, called him, tried to hang out with him more? What if he wasn’t raised in his home? What if his parents cared more? What if society cared more?
Ultimately I know these what if’s aren’t helpful. It’s too late to change anything, though admitting that is extremely hard. For Cameron, it simply is too late.
It’s hard to mask the anger I feel towards Cameron’s parents. They probably will never understand their role. To them, Cameron’s death is a result of his failures, not their own. They will never understand the depth of Cameron, how much he cared and loved, even those who did not give him the time of day. They’ll never know who Cameron was, because they were too busy demanding that he be anything other than himself. The anger I hold towards them extends to my own parents at times, and the parents I see being unnecessarily harsh to their children for simply EXISTING. This anger will never fade, I can only hope to find the right place to direct it. This world disappoints me, but the optimist inside me refuses to accept it.
Cameron and I often talked about all that is wrong with the world. How the educational system doesn’t teach us what we really need to know. How the medical system profits off of sick people and pushes pills rather than addressing the roots of problems. How the government is corrupt and doesn’t give a damn about us. We talked about it with fervor and passion, but each and every conversation ended with us feeling hopeless and dejected. A sigh and a “well, what can we do?”
Well, what can we do?
I don’t know, but I am not going to sit here and wait for someone else to figure it out. Since Cameron’s death, it’s been weighing heavily on me that I need to take actions, however small, to make the world better. I cannot raise all of the world’s children (nor will I ever claim to be good at parenting.) I cannot save all of the homeless and hungry. I can’t dismantle the government and demand the changes we so desperately need. I cannot end human suffering. That does not mean I cannot do anything. That does not mean I should do nothing. And I encourage each and everyone of you to consider this: how can you make the world a little brighter? How can you remove the sting of the harshness this world has to offer? How can we be better friends, parents, partners?
I don’t know the answers, but I know we can do more than we are. Maybe we can be a little like Cameron. We can treat others like humans, truly listening to them. We can go out of our way, when possible, to do nice things. We can work hard and love harder. We can try. We can fight.