The Only Thing That Matters
I spent much of the first half of 1998 thinking about dying.
Not my dying, necessarily, although those thoughts were almost inevitable. I spent several months reporting a magazine story about a brilliant, accomplished student at my alma mater — the University of Virginia — who had inexplicably committed suicide.
It’s impossible to spend that much time with people traumatized by an unexpected death and not be deeply affected yourself. Every interview I did meant asking someone to talk about the worst and most painful thing that had ever happened to them, about how losing someone you love suddenly can radically alter your entire worldview. It was humbling. It was overwhelming. But it was often inspiring and eye-opening.
I spent many hours during that time with the young man’s mother, who opened herself up to me without reservation, entrusted me with telling her son’s story. At the time, I was a single 20something not that many years out of college myself. We still remain in touch, although I am now roughly the same age she was in 1998, with a son just a few years younger than hers.
And there’s something she told me during one of those interviews that I’ve never forgotten.
We were talking about what she’d learned from her son’s death, how it had changed her.
