I just received the following e-mail from a friend at my previous job, regarding one of our former co-workers:



I wasn't real close buddies with David, but he was part of the group that used to go out to lunch fairly regularly, so I did know the guy more than just as a mere passing acquaintance. I'm surprised at how shaken up I am by this. I think this might be the first person I've known to commit suicide, if that's what this turns out to be when it's all said and done.

lousy

last year we (well, I) terminated a guy and then he shot himself in the heart. it was pretty disturbing.

Damn FT, I realize how much this can shake you up. One of my friends from college committed suicide our sophomore year, and while we weren't the closest, it still had a profound affect on me. It just blindsided me. I still think about him alot and wish things would have turned out differently.

What makes me feel bad is this guy was a pretty hardcore alcoholic (possibly recovering, though I was never entirely sure) and he had the shakes/DTs something fierce, so that was obviously the source of much laughter/good-natured ridicule among the group. I'd also heard he was at one time (if not still up to his death) on TEH COKE, so this could just as likely have been an OD or liver shutdown. It seems a rather Staleyesque way to go.

You hate to "hope" he died a certain way, but I'd feel much better if it was natural causes than suicide.

Damn, Bob.
I'm sorry.

Jarring isn't the word, but I don't think there is a word.

Man, that's a really tough one. I've never been good at firing people, which is why I've never enjoyed being in positions of management. I'm glad I finally found a gig that pays management level without actually having to manage people. I don't have the stomach for it.

I have almost exactly the same story. Back in 1998 I worked in a small office. There was only 3 people employed there including myself. I was relatively new but the other two guys had worked there for years. One day one of the guys didn't turn up for work. The next day he didn't turn up either. The boss asked me to come out with him to the guys flat and we shut up the office. It must have been close to Christmas because I remember Christmas decorations being up in the window. He lived in a tennement and we asked around the neighbours. This was Tuesday and no one had seen him since Friday.

Eventually we phoned the police and waited and waited and waited. We had been literally waiting for 4 or 5 hours for the police to come when we decided to go in ourselves. Being much the bigger of the two I got the job of kicking the door in. There was a hall leading from the front door and a bedroom at the end. He was lying half in the bedroom and half in the hall. It was dark in the flat because all the curtains were closed but you knew he was dead straight away just from the way he was lying. The smell was really terrible, I think he had defecated himself. We didn't go in and were going downstairs to his neighbour to phone the police again when we saw them coming up the stairs - only about 5 hours late!

They took the body away and we had to give statements to the police. Really annoyingly they keep asking if we had ever seen him drinking, had he come into work drunk, etc etc. They obviously wanted to write him off as an alcoholic, must be less paperwork.

Believe it or not the police then just went away and left us to phone his relatives. He only had one living relative, a sister that lived in Canada and although I didn't phone her, my boss did it, apparently she pretty much didn't give a shit. Then we had to get a locksmith out to secure the door because it had been kicked in.

He died of a heart attack.

Why do you presume that it was suicide?

Sorry Bob. Hard to know what to hope for, isn't it?

Sorry Bob.

I guess I'm lucky that I've never known anyone who's committed suicide.

Yeah, I was wondering the same thing.

Shit, I don't think I could continue working if that happened to me, especially if he included getting fired in his suicide note.

As for assuming it is suicide in Bob's case, I am guessing it has to do with age and the fact that someone went to check on him and found him. I realize it can be some freak medical issue that killed him, but I'd probably assume suicide the way the email was written.

Dude's in his 30s with no major health problems, other than the aforementioned chemcial dependencies, so logic would seem to dictate that suicide is likely cause #1.

It might have been anything from a brain aneuyrism to an undiagnosed congenital heart defect, I guess. But it just seems more likely that it's probably a suicide. He was something of a loner, too, so I would guess depression factors in somewhere, as well.

DING DING DING!

Two suicides in my family, though one I don't remember -- I was one year and change when one of my father's sisters did it with pills -- and the other I was out of country for -- so I missed the funeral, even.

That said, some of you Obners, namely Back_space, might have seen the spot where my Aunt Judy perished on Easter '03. There's a plaque in one of the Summerfest gardens, something small (she and her husband were booster of Irish Fest), where she stopped falling. (She jumped from the Hoan Bridge, which goes over the Summerfest ground.)

Suicide causes trouble for those who aren't the ones who died.

Yes, he says, as one who knows and what not.