“Adam is dead.” My brother-in-law’s voice was shaking. “He bought a gun. He shot himself.”
I fumbled for words, then handed the phone to my wife so she could talk to her brother herself. I stared at a bedroom wall and realized I would have to call my own son and daughter and tell them that their young cousin had died of suicide.
The last time I saw Adam had been on Thanksgiving a few weeks earlier. He was the same young man I had always known, no quieter than usual. He downed his share of turkey and more than his share of pumpkin pie, then sat in our den and watched football with his dad and brothers while his younger sister dozed. And he made a whimsical Christmas request, a videotape of Disney’s “Dumbo.” The wrapped gift lay beneath our Christmas tree on the morning his father called.
Nothing I saw that day gave a hint of Adam’s emotional fragility. He was huge, 6 feet 4 with thick hair and dark, intense eyes that girls must have found intriguing. In middle school, he played Magic, collected tiny figurines of wizards and dragons, and developed skill at backgammon. He was a high-school athlete, competing in cross-country and track. And he was smart—about to graduate from college with a degree in physics. He took very seriously a part-time job driving a campus shuttle bus. I never rode with him, but I can imagine him behind the wheel, smiling at passengers when they got onboard and offering directions whenever he could. He had no apparent dark moods, no use for drugs or alcohol, no girlfriend who might have jilted him. And he left no note. In fact, no one knows exactly when Adam died. It happened in the bedroom of his student apartment in Davis, Calif., while his roommates were away.
For the last two years, I’ve pondered Adam’s death. Why did this happen to my brother-in-law’s family and not to mine? When the kids were little, we shared birthday parties and went to Yosemite together one summer. The kids hiked and splashed in the pool at the hotel while we parents grinned at their antics. Like my wife and me, Adam’s mom and dad shook their heads over the challenges of child rearing, and like us, they tried to navigate the delicate line between providing guidance and allowing independence. They laughed with their kids at family jokes and teased Adam good-naturedly when he came home after his freshman year with a mohawk erupting from his shaved head. Adam engaged eagerly in his family’s life, and we know that he always told his roommates how great his family was.
So I return to the question: what went wrong? I’ve tried to find answers. I’ve learned about depression. I’ve read the sad statistics about tens of thousands of suicides—especially among young adults. Now when I thumb through my family album and see Adam’s face mugging for the camera among his cousins, I think of my own children, who are at about the same stage of life as Adam would be if he were still alive. My son graduated from Berkeley last year and lives in a cheap apartment, taking odd jobs to pay the rent while he writes music I don’t understand and indulges a passion for baking. My daughter left a comfortable job in her late 20s to take out a huge loan and return to school. Should I encourage their enthusiasms or be alarmed at their aimlessness? Do they have moments when life seems to be going nowhere? Do they ever think that what Adam did makes sense?
And then I look at myself. Like most people, I have dark moments when the ups and downs of life or brain chemistry overwhelm me with disappointment and anger because I am not all I want to be. So I think I have some understanding of what happened to Adam. But his mom tells me that we can never understand with our heads; we can only try to understand with our hearts. She says, “We all see suicide with our healthy brains and call it a choice. It’s not so. It’s not a choice. Suicides don’t want to die. They just want the suffering to end.”
On the day of Adam’s funeral, my then 21-year-old son was very quiet, perhaps resigned. I asked him how he felt about Adam’s death.
“Adam was sick, Dad,” he said, “and he died of the disease.” That’s as good an explanation as I’m ever going to have.
