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RIP MARK

 The other day I received the worst news of my life. One of my closest friends, Mark, had committed suicide. The worst part of it all was that the day before the ordeal, I had spent it with him, day drinking and all. I’m sad and pathetic, cause I failed my friend.

Why didn’t he tell me? Did he know that it would be the last time we see each other? Was I too engrossed with my imaginary problems that he couldn’t tell me what he was intending to do? Is there any other way this could have ended? What did he think about me in the end? A selfish friend? Ohh God.

Our day, like other drinking days, started with some rounds of shooting pool, some steak, and then full-blown drinks. Amidst the drinks, our conversations would wander off from one topic to another seamlessly: great men of the past like Alexander the Great, renowned philosophers from old ones like Thales to Socrates all the way to Carl Jung, great poets and authors, quantum physics, cryptocurrency, music, business, films, football, local and international politics, and our all-time favorite, women. He had one of the sharpest brains I ever met, cause he was an avid reader, which is why the news was profoundingly sad to me. Smart people should know better, right?

He had told me that he and his girlfriend of two years had broken up about a month before, because she had cheated on him with her boss. I didn’t want to go deeper because I prefer to internalize such things on my own, and I thought he’d prefer it that way too. He had also said that his startup which made house hunting around Nairobi easier had finally found some investors about three months before. That was good news, right? His skin had become alive, his smile was more radiant, and he seemed happier overall. He even footed all the bills for the day.

I read somewhere that people who commit suicide are courageous for facing death, and cowards because they couldn’t face life. How can you embrace the unknown and shy away from the known? Mark must have gone through a lot, and I can only hope that the end was easy on him. I hope he got what he wanted, and that the last day we spent together was a flashback that gave him some ounce of peace at his death.

We are living in one of the best epochs of human history objectively but the worst one subjectively. People three decades ago had it worse than us, and I mean it in almost every sense of the word. We don’t have the Great Depression, no major wars, our children don’t die before turning one, we don’t die before 40, the world is literally a global village, if we want to write we don’t need a typewriter. Our quality of life is so much better, and this is not to bash Mark’s decision to end himself, I’m sure he had his reasons, and the least I can do is to let him go.

I love you, man. Till we meet.

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