Words cannot adequately express the pain at the magnitude of your loss. However, if you will allow, I’d like to offer some perspectives from one who has fought these demons for decades.

You ask “why” but for someone contemplating suicide, the question may be “why not?” There doesn’t have to be a trigger or event or depression or any other rational excuse because suicide is intrinsically irrational. Some people have a healthy fear of passing and do everything possible to avoid it. Others are just not wired like that. With a belief that it’s just one more decision and little consideration that this decision takes away all future decisions, the act itself becomes trivialized in the mind of the victim.

Suicide hotlines are great, but they cannot be 100% effective when there are people who will not call them because doing so would be rational and suicide is a grip of a powerful irrational. In the throes of that demon, I don’t want sanity. I just want some ethereal it to change.Maybe the “it” is pressure or stress. Maybe the “it” is just feeling like it’s been a good day and things just can’t get any better than this moment. Or it could be any shade of grey in between. To the rational, it’s mental illness. To someone in it, however, it feels perfectly normal.

Herein lies the great chasm. An irrational act cannot be explained or changed by rational thinking. I’m sure you have lost many nights of sleep in wonder of what could have been different. But that’s rational. The only rational explanation is that he made a choice. To him, it felt like the right choice at the right time. To you, it is a never ending train ride through hell.

I understand your pain as I have also lost people close to me this way. And stories like yours helps keep my own demons at bay for another day.