I left work very early today.  My wife called me at about 10:30, barely audible through her sobs, and told me that my next door neighbor, friend, and overall decent human being had taken his own life a couple of days ago.  I took a taxi heading home, where there would be noise & distraction to keep me from falling to pieces the way I did to the 2 poor individuals who I only met 10 days ago.  Riding 13 miles in an unfamiliar city in a car with someone I couldn't communicate with was very surreal.  I'm living among 20 million people, and I find myself missing one man who was 6000 miles away on Monday, and is gone, now.  He was a good man who was always willing to help us, and was a very good neighbor.  The world is worse off without him in it.  I will miss him.

I need to find something to do with these emotions, find someway to deal with them.  It's too sudden, and too shocking.  My only other close experience with death was when my older brother passed away so many years ago.  I had an opportunity to say goodbye.  I was crushed when he died - I remember crying to sleep in my wife's arms that night.  But his death was slow, gradual, almost predictable, and when he died, it was what he needed, and I knew it.  Cancer had taken his eye, and was destroying his liver.  It was tragic, he was so young, so brilliant, so unfulfilled - so much lost potential & possibility.  But it wasn't sudden, shocking, and unexpected.

My neighbor was in his 60's, and had talked about his grandson with a glimmer in his eye before we left.  Suicide is so strange a concept to me, having never really dealt with any sort of depression at all, despite a significant family history.  I wouldn't feel so confused if he'd had a heart attack, or fallen of a ladder, or gotten in a car accident.  There would be a clear reason why he died.  But I don't have a reason, and I never will.  That's very hard.  I think what's so very difficult is that there may never have actually been one reason.

And I now come to the same point I came to with my brother.  He will be missed, but life moves on.  Knowing that John had wished us well on our trip here, that he hoped my family would have an adventure, I'll move on and try to make sure that our adventure is no less adventurous.