Last summer, I got a phone call from a good friend back home. She never called me, preferring the voice notes and Instagram DM’s that have become our generation’s hallmarks of long-distance friendship. I knew something was wrong on the first ring.
“It’s Mike,” she said.
And the floor fell from the universe.
Mike was a talented soccer player and a natural blonde. Mike did well in school. He made all the teams. He got the girl. I gave a speech at their engagement party. We danced at their wedding. They had two beautiful children and moved into a craftsman townhome in a good neighbourhood on the west side. I helped them with the baby room. We chose polka dot wallpaper. They visited me in London with their newborn daughter. We ordered sushi and drank and laughed. He had the best laugh. His humour was bone dry and good-natured.
One month before his 35th birthday, Mike died by suicide.
The last time I saw Mike, he was waving to me outside an Uber on my street corner, a baby carrier strapped to his chest, blonde hair catching flecks of Sunday morning sunlight. I waved back. I called out, “See you soon,” I called. I didn’t know that would be his last goodbye.
I have always remembered, reluctantly, a quote from Mary Schmich’s famous commencement speech: “The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind. The kind that blindsides you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.” The truth is, we never see that Tuesday coming. I recognise people who have known that kind of blindness now. It’s a wildness in their eyes. They live, walk, and talk, but just a little. I want to say: I know. I’m still finding my way back too. But I don’t. I cast my eyes down. I pick up my dry cleaning. I go to work.
Mike’s death sent me into a thin, porous place. And then it sent me home to Canada where I found rooms and schools full of people who loved him, huddling close in the wake of his death like sheep bracing against a storm. All of us parroting the same questions.
When did it begin?
Why?
And the question that rang like an iron bell: What could we have done to save him?
I cannot speak to Mike’s story. I cannot speak to Mike’s body, his brain, the part of his life spent in quiet pain. To the family left behind whom I love like my own. There’s so much we’ll never know. I can only speak to what the feeling of the absence of him was like for me, his friend, in the aftermath.
There were no easy answers. No singular and definitive cause that led to the rupture. No clarifying or satisfying facts. The void between question and answer widened quietly. It blurred my vision. And when I got back to London, I felt dumb with grief. I couldn’t look at any man in my life, including anyone’s husband or son, without battling the nearly compulsive impulse to ask: Are you okay? And simultaneously battling my conditioning to bury that most innocent of questions in “politeness.”
You feel like you’re the only person in the world going through it. But in fact, you are not. Numbers are just numbers until the number is your friend, husband, brother, son. Here they are anyway. Males account for 74% of the suicides in the UK annually. There are 17.4 deaths per 100,000 males. Which means that every day in the UK we lose 18 men to suicide. Suicide rates are rising for both men and women. In fact, since we’re speaking of them, 1:5 people will have suicidal thoughts in their lifetime. It seemed that suicide is a tide that is not receding. So I could get sad and angry about this – and I did. But once I was awake to it, I wanted to look it in the eye.
I reached out to many local organisations with somewhat of a long-winded plea that boiled down to: I want to understand more and I want to help. The first charity who answered my email was Men’s Minds Matter. They are suicide intervention and prevention specialists who also passionately advocate for awareness in the UK. The man who answered the phone was a man named Mike. You can believe in signs or not, but there it is. They helped me understand both how complex and common suicide is. They encouraged me to get involved, and they encouraged me to get curious.
I’ll preface the rest of this piece by saying: I have no business making assumptions. I am not a therapist or a psychologist, and I certainly am not qualified to make a sweeping statement about men’s interior struggles. I’m here to share simply and plainly what I’ve learned by speaking to the closest men to me, and more recently, rooms full of strangers.
I’ve always liked to chat. This quality has worked for and against me in my life. Most of my girlfriends love to talk, so much so that one of our most cherished acronyms is DMC – Deep Meaningful Chats. We talk all the time, about all kinds of things. Sex. Work. Heartbreak. Politics. The reviews for my gift for gab from my boyfriends, however, have been mixed.
It’s a cliché to say men don’t like to talk about their feelings. It’s more accurate to say not all of them know how to or feel they have permission to. So I started asking my male friends how they were. About what they needed to challenge the many stigmas and shame society has shrouded around the phrase “men’s mental health” for far too long. About the why of it all.
Themes emerged. We talked about societal expectations. Of the ways in which boys and men are conditioned to perform, achieve, and provide on marco and micro levels daily and increasingly intensely. We talked about social media. Its toxic illusions and misinformation. Its ability to numb, dumb, confuse and harm from a much-too-young age. We spoke of depression and mental illness in several of its forms and divergences. We spoke about purpose. We spoke about love. How hard it is to win, keep, lose. Parenthood and its emotional, logistical and financial gymnastics. We spoke about physical health and its vital role, and its crushing regimens and comparisons. We spoke about current politics, but not without the hair raising on my arms. We talked about pressure and the way it builds. It builds and it builds until there seems no way out. But mostly, we spoke about how we don’t speak enough.
We can, and we don’t. And these reasons led me to develop Good Chat.
The concept is simple and not easy. I wanted to create an environment men could feel safe in, a third space like a gym or pub, host a free event, and ask a few questions. Take the clinical nature out of the equation. Shake it loose. Normalise what’s been stigmatised. In this way, Good Chat is a non-profit, and it’s also an experiment. It’s new and imperfect and under development. It’s humbly facilitated by the fearless Mark Whittle, a performance coach and all-around profound guy who answered my rather manic phone call 6 months ago and rose to the possibility of it. The events and resources we offer are co-created with the men and women who are brave and vulnerable enough to show up, share stories, and ask big, scary, necessary, sometimes unanswerable questions on a Monday or Tuesday night. Good Chat is a courageous community who is learning who it is and how it can help make things better. All we’re really doing in there is poking small, almost unseeable holes in the pressure valve. I don’t believe one chat can or should solve everything, and I don’t believe it hurts. Good Chat is not an answer, it’s an offering.
Some of our next events will be men only, but to date, women have been in the room because women may love and live with men, but we don’t always get it right. We don’t always know what to ask or when. And when we do communicate, we can also accidentally criticise, judge, project, internalise. All of that is psychological lingo for saying that we might unknowingly make a conversation about us or take it personally, and I’ve been guilty of this endlessly. What I’ve learned through our community is that men sometimes just need us to listen. Women have an important role in men’s mental health, and our lives are much better off with men well and present in them.
My therapist recently told me that there is nothing noble about suffering. But I’d add there’s nothing noble about suffering in silence. I believe big change can happen on the micro level.
Here’s how.
Get curious. Read about it. Ask the men you know questions, not to solve, just to sit with. Edwin Shneidman wrote in his book “The Suicidal Mind,” that the most critical question to ask a suicidal person isn’t about “family history or laboratory tests of blood or spinal fluid, but ‘where do you hurt’ and ‘how can I help you? But you don’t have to be “suicidal” to have more meaningful chats, earlier.
Get involved. There are many resources beyond Good Chat to check out, volunteer with, or donate to. CALM – Campaign Against Living Miserably – a name I’ve always loved. If you haven’t heard of 3 Dads Walking, now is a good time. Mind, Suicide & Co, and many others.
Get help. Help is here for you. Whether you’re considering taking your life, or know someone who is, Mind has collected a thorough list of immediate numbers to call and people who will get you the help you need ASAP here.
What can I tell you about loss that I now know to be true?
I can tell you that I’m angry. Angry at myself for leaving Canada, when I should have stayed. For not asking more questions. For not keeping good enough in touch. For texting him: “I’m sorry I’m out, but I love you, Godfather”, on my last birthday, when I should have called him back. Angry and sorry that possibly none of that would have mattered. For not getting this article quite right. Even though it took a month to write and rewrite before I realised it can never be perfect, and that there was no more honest word to begin with than “suicide”. That my one voice is not going to be enough. That I need a symphony, an army, a Time Machine, a prayer. What can I tell you except that I hope it never happens to you. Except that I hope by talking about it more frequently together, we can get bigger and brighter than the forces that work against our peace. That it’s not so much about overcoming something as it is about becoming something we weren’t before.
None of this will bring Mike back. But it might help keep someone here.
Suicide folds time. It makes a day, a month, non-linear. Mike died nearly a year ago today. But sometimes he is waving on my street corner. Sometimes he is in the baby room, commenting on his unborn son’s line-up of miniature sports jerseys with pride. Sometimes he is at the end of the aisle where I walked with his bride, not a wink of sleep but every hope for their future in her heart. Sometimes he is beside me, on my worst of days, telling me to get on with it. To keep saying the hard thing. To finish the piece. The sun is coming up. The morning light does not require us to be ready.
DeQuincy Meiffren-Lézine on Suicide Prevention and Having an Openness to Possibility