Eulogy

He chose to end his life.

This void little life, embodied in an unusual sensitive nervous system yearning to expand beyond norms and expectations.

The news only mentions an accident on the railway track.

Somehow, shivering briefly, I feel infuriated. The word accident seems to take away the last breath of his agency. His will. Then again, I imagine his vulnerability imploding year after year, until those last upheavals of liveliness were symbolized in the act of walking towards the rail track. This, I know, is a deep existential invitation for me to grieve, just grieve…Will or no will, this is not the question.

He was one of the first persons I briefly accompanied as an emotional guide for the gifted, more than 10 years ago. We concluded that a different kind of guidance would better suit him. It was my impression we stopped when we approached the emotional abyss.

Of course, the question roams in my now existentially widened, sensitized mind...Should I have done something different? Should I have trusted my instinct more, didn’t I? Is this even a viable question…. Life does not grant you any guarantee to solid answers.

The only thing I knew for sure, was that we could not cocreate a deeper sense of openness, of energy in motion. The loneliness appeared bitter. My own sense of autonomy a bit too brittle.

“I think he sensed this different kind of awareness, but he just couldn’t actualize it”, I hear myself say out loud. Simultaneously, I start to wonder how social systems have failed him, must have failed him to feel enlivened as the remarkable creative person he was, in the midst of society, of connection and care.

He appreciated our connection back then, so much was clear, soothing my conscience. A knowing that goes beyond the easy appeasement of recognition though. I cherish the gratitude I believe we both felt.

I also felt his enclosed, looping anxiety, slowly taking over his whole psychic structure. One might call it a negative disintegration. Emotionally, it feels like the slow vanishing of intense aliveness, calling into mind his characteristic intensity. Non-relieved chronic states of emotional ambivalence ultimately break one’s self-determination. Or intensify the chance of a “will to rupture” to impulsively take charge in the eventually absolute form of a death instinct. Or so I imagine.

He stopped creating. Even music did not find its way anymore through his fingers. This must have silenced his sense of meaning.

He was the architect of astounding technological infrastructures. Extra ordinarily gifted. But really.

None if it rung a caressing bel to his tinnitus threatened ears. Achievement meant nothing for an attachment hungry soul, the hunger stemming from places which even a sense of belonging with special friends could not still.

We keep on thinking about those brief moments in time before his body moved towards the rail track. History keeps on rewriting itself endlessly, marked by his footprints, the only proof of his physical life that remained intact after death, a little bit longer. Is this a consolation? My heart mourns.

Were we alive there and then, in his pain and sorrow? Was this, to him, the best way to leave his loved ones, to unburden them, as I imagine he might have thought? He must have been in deep pain, a pain overshadowing one’s ability to perceive it as perceiver dependent suffering, a pain gasping away the breath of self-awareness, finally.

A little aching child inside my chest longs for the tinnitus to keep on resonating in the sound of an electronic peep one hears in hospitals, affirming cardiac arrest. Longing for the sound of his afterlife, actually. We now only have the bells of the train, or so I imagine again, trying to conjure a felt sense of logic out of this tragedy. The machinist desperately trying to warn him, doing what others could not, trying to overpower the sound of the peep in his ears and awaken him before it was too late. But of course, the machinist did not signal him with his existential angst. In the end, against all the odds of his diminishing life energy, everything went much too quick, and no one could have had the power to intervene. Like he knew better than anyone else, we can not thwart physics.

Painfully, I feel like he sought relieve on levels of reality that were actually much too small for his creative reach. Self-medication and a hyperfocus on chemistry could not avoid the disintegrating impact of his spontaneous self-expansion and the accompanying frustrated need for a shared social reality, all infused in ongoing self-rejection.

What is left is finding our own rituals to say goodbye, touched by the imagination that loved ones may have been struggling with this pending farewell for years already. Tiny tiny goodbyes until the remaining one was swept away in fragment of seconds, beyond the realm of connection. What is up for us to do now, is honor his echoing existence in our lives by remembering him for who he was, before and beyond the suffering. Soothing is the image of life and death as intertwined contact boundaries of intimacy.

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We miss saying goodbye to you, pall, like those nearby often yearned to say hello to you. Don’t feel guilty now, we are just going to remember that untethered authenticity. Inhumanly vulnerable to you, profoundly unique to us.

With the kind of love that embeds you with pure softness, stroking the suffering into a felt presence in our hearts.

May you be well. We never wished you anything less. Farewell.