Letter to a Dear Friend who Died by Suicide

The last time I saw you was a Saturday night. The air was cold and crisp outside, and your kitchen smelled like mulling spices and Christmas cake. You poured me a glass of red wine, like you had done so many times before, and we looked out the kitchen window into the darkness of winter.

I asked if you thought it would snow. You said you didn’t think so, but you were hoping. It was the beginning of March, but winter had lingered. The blue bells were struggling, and you still hadn’t put the last of Christmas away.  You kept out the snowflake napkins, because they were your favorites. You said you were thinking about using them for the rest of the year.

As I looked out your kitchen window that night, I remembered the way the snow glistened off the oak tree across the street the first time it snowed in November. I remembered taking Christmas out of your hallway closet in the beginning of December, and how you told me then that you already didn’t want to see the season come and go.

The last time I saw you, you walked me outside to say goodbye. You shivered just a little as you nuzzled your blue sweater up against your chin. You stood on the porch as I was leaving.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay for dinner?” you asked.

I was annoyed with you for a moment. I’d already told you I wasn’t staying for dinner. I’d already told you I had other plans.

Beneath my annoyance, there was something else. Your eyes looked tired and weary. You seemed down, further down than I’d seen you before. It seemed like something in you was begging – begging for me to stay, or maybe begging for something else, something you couldn’t quite put into words.

I almost asked if you needed something. I almost looked you in the eye and said “Robin, you look like you’re in a bad place.” I almost reached out hugged you.

But I didn’t. The space between us seemed too wide to reach my arms across. The words seemed too awkward to say. The silence in that cold, crisp evening seemed less awkward than the honest words that could have cut through it.

So I left you alone, in that cold, crisp silence.

When I got to the park down the street from your house, I caught a glimpse of the big dipper. The sky was a beautiful, deep winter blue. I thought of you again, and this time I reached out, but with my fingers instead of my arms. A vague text message was an easier, abbreviated form of the truth.

“Hey, Robin. Just wanted to say I’m excited to have dinner with you next week. And I hope you’re doing okay. The big dipper is out and it’s beautiful!” Smiley face.

An emoticon is an easy half-substitute for looking you in the eyes and smiling. Or looking you in the eyes and showing you that I could see your sadness. I sent you an emoji because it seemed easier than emoting how I actually felt, to you, in person, our eyes meeting that night.

You replied to my text message before I got to the other side of the park: “Don’t worry about me, I’m under the weight of my own shit right now. You’re one of the good ones.”

I put my phone back in my pocket and kept walking. I was half-satisfied with your response. And half satisfied was enough for me to forget that I was worried. I went to my friend’s house. We ate ice cream and watched The Voice.

I’d just moved my things into your house the day before. When I had a four-week gap between my work contract and my lease, I thought it was so kind of you to offer for me to stay to fill the gap. I was excited about it, even.

I spent Sunday morning scrubbing the oven. I took a load of stuff to the charity shop. I didn’t hear from you, but I wasn’t thinking about it. I was busy clearing food out of the fridge and cleaning the bathtub. I’d see you Monday evening.

In the weeks and months to come, when I was angry with you, I thought it wasn’t kindness that made you offer me to stay. When I was angry with you, I felt like your offer for me to stay was a knife stabbed into my heart and then twisted.

I had no idea your text would be the last thing you ever said to me. I had no idea those few words, “Don’t worry, I’m under the weight of my own shit,” would be burned into my mind as they started to take on new and complicated meanings.

I had no idea your text would be the last thing you said to anyone. I had no idea I’d be the last person you ever saw. No idea I’d be the last person who had an opportunity to look into your glacier blue eyes.

The police couldn’t determine when exactly you did it. They only knew it was sometime after I saw you on that cold, clear Saturday night and before the next Monday morning.

We were supposed to meet on Monday so I could move in. I texted you that morning. You didn’t reply, and I texted again two hours later. I needed to know when I could come over. You were going to give me a key.

Monday was a long day. I was at work, exhausted from all the cleaning and packing over the weekend. I had no idea my exhaustion had only just begun.

I was planning to go to your place – my home for the next few weeks – after work. I got the text message at 5pm.,  from a mutual friend. It just said, “Don’t come over. Robin is dead.” I found out later her boyfriend had to type the text out while she hyperventilated on your front porch.

I knew what happened without anyone having to tell me what happened. You chose to leave us. Our friend had to find you there. Dead.

The police called me. I was the last person to see you alive and also the last person who received a text message from you. So, they had to interview me.

At the police station, they invited me into a small interview room. The officer said it was just a few simple questions to help them close the case.

Close the case, I thought. I wished it was that easy. I wished I could stamp your death over with a defined reason, an answer. Case closed.

But it wasn’t that easy. For me, you weren’t a file that I could put into a binder and place on a shelf somewhere to gather dust.

The officer asked me if you seemed distraught in recent weeks. I didn’t quite know how to answer that question.

“Yes,” I finally said, slowly.

“Was she more distraught than she had been before?”

I thought when I last saw you – only days before, but a world away. I thought about how I’d almost hugged you. I thought about how you seemed to beg me as you asked again, “Are you sure you don’t want to stay for dinner?”

The officer handed me a box of tissues. For a long few minutes, I couldn’t answer her question. My mind was stuck in a loop, back on your porch, in the crisp air of that Saturday night.

“Yes,” I finally said. “She did.”

“Did do or say anything to you that would indicate …”

I took another tissue. My mind wandered to so many moments, all the tiny little moments that we don’t think about, the ones that might mean something if we’re asked later to find a meaning, if we’re asked to answer why.

The officer asked if you had been under personal, relationship, or financial stress. I said yes, you had. She asked when I thought your stress began. Once again, didn’t know how to answer.

Was I supposed to tell her you’d missed work lately and it was obvious to your colleagues that you couldn’t cope? Was I supposed to tell her you’d talked to me about your mortgage payments and you took in language school students only because you didn’t want to lose your house? Or should I begin with your accident, and the brain damage from it, or your husband’s leaving you the year before?

I swallowed hard, thinking to another beginning, to the nights you told me about when you were fifteen.

Your brother and his friends were so drunk, they made you drive them home.

“It was a game for his friends to take turns raping me,” you told me.

No one else seemed to know this part of your story. It seemed satisfying to everyone else that you were estranged from your family because of a falling out about your mother’s will, and that your accident gave you a disability.

Still, I couldn’t shake a deep, dark, painful truth. Your pain began so long ago, Robin. And maybe that’s part of why it was so hard to escape it, Robin.

I didn’t tell the officer about your brother’s friends, about the abortions you had because of them, or about your husband leaving. I told her that you’d suffered brain damage from an accident and you’d found it hard to keep up with your life since then. I knew as I was telling her that it was a simple version of a half-truth, a distillation of so many truths.

But it was true, what I said. And maybe, Robin, it was the only truth that that stranger deserved hearing. I thought for a long time about who needed to know what about you. Did your friends need to know what happened when you were fifteen, and how you carried it around with you? Did your sister need to understand?

I gave the officer a satisfying answer, an answer that would stamp your death as definite suicide.

Case closed.

The question mark remained over your stated time of death. You must have been planning it for some time. The letter was detailed. The instructions for your funeral were specific. The rope was probably in your closet, for how long, Robin, weeks? Months? For as long as I’d known you?

The month before you died, you showed me the collages you’d made of your life. There was one for every stage, as you called them: every place you lived, every boyfriend, every degree, every promotion. You told me the stories of every mountain you’d climbed. You told me who each of the men were, and you showed me the pictures of your niece from before you and your sister lost touch.

When you showed me those collages, were you hoping I’d stand at your funeral ready to point out what you’d said about the faces and places that you’d meticulously arranged on those poster-board reflections of your life?

It wasn’t easy for you to talk about your emotional pain, Robin, I know that. I think you knew I could sense it was there, anyways, and knowing that gave you comfort. Maybe that’s why you told me about your brother’s friends and the abortions. Maybe that’s why you shared those collages with me. Maybe that’s why you asked me to stay for dinner the last time I saw you.

You never said you felt so deeply saddened. You never showed you were scared or weak. Not in obvious ways.

So many times, you’d shown me images of your brain scans. You’d hold them up to the sunlight coming through the kitchen window. “That’s where my brain doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do,” you said, pointing.

It was easy for you to talk about your brain. It wasn’t easy for you to talk about your mind.

There were hundreds of people at your funeral. People loved you, more than you could know. People wrote poems and songs for you. Some people talked about making a memorial bench in your name.

“Somewhere by the beach,” someone said.

“No, somewhere in the mountains,” another said.

“What about on the university campus?” another asked.

Of course it should be on campus, everyone agreed. Literally hundreds of your students were there to celebrate you, because you’d touched every one of them.

There were bundles and bundles of wildflowers that your friend collected over the weekend. They were so colorful and bright, just like you were.

“This is such a shock,” people said. “I would have never guessed.”

I felt a knot of sad bewilderment in my stomach. Because I could have guessed, Robin. I could have guessed, and maybe I should have. What would have happened if I’d reached out that night to hug you? What would have happened if I’d agreed to stay for dinner if you agreed to tell me what was wrong?

Would it have made a difference? Or was your offer for dinner just some part of you fighting, stalling, buying more time before the other part tied the knot and dropped the rope?

Some people have told me what you did was selfish. Some people have told me if they were me, they’d be angry. How could you do it? How could you leave us like that? I tell them I’m not angry. I was angry for a moment, but only a moment. I still wish you didn’t do it. But how could I be mad? You were clearly suffering, more than the world had known.

Some people said they felt guilty. I don’t know if what I felt was guilt. See, I followed the rules of conduct that we’re given by this world. I didn’t reach out, didn’t ask you, because it was going to be awkward. Because that’s just not something that people usually do. Because we don’t usually say it when we see it.

We try to keep things on the surface, avoid things getting too deep. It’s penetrating and even disrespectful to other people’s boundaries to ask, to prod, to say we see beneath the surface. Most people don’t want to be seen. Most people prefer that you admire their mask rather than offer to hold the fragile, broken figure standing behind it.

So, I wasn’t really guilty, because I was doing what we all do. I was doing what society taught me to do. What society shamed me into believing is normal. What society rewards me for doing.

Because of you, I’ve learned something. Because of you, I’ve decided there isn’t a truth too awkward to say or a question too awkward to ask. I look people in the eyes more now because of you, Robin. I hug people when I have an instinct to hug them. I ask them how they’re really feeling when it looks like they’re feeling down.

It was hell to have moved into a house that became a crime scene, Robin. The police wouldn’t let me go inside for a week. My friend was doing Ph.D. research in the Middle East, and she arranged for me to stay in her room. We were the same size, so I could wear her clothes. I wore her black trousers to your funeral.

Even after the police said I could to collect my things inside your house, I still couldn’t. It took me two weeks. I had to have a friend come with me. She stood downstairs while I puttered around packing the things I’d put into your guest bedroom. And then, I wandered into your bedroom, and I could smell your scent in the air. I laid down on your bed, Robin, and I imagined that you were there with me, and that I could hug you there.

I imagined holding you and letting you cry about everything. Tears fell down my face, and I had the feeling that they weren’t only my own. They were also yours. They were our tears, Robin. I cried those tears, because you couldn’t.

I wanted you to be there when it snowed again in April, six inches in one night. I walked by your place and stood outside as the snowflakes dropped, imagining your delight, imagining throwing a snowball at you, and then going inside to drink hot cocoa in one of your favorite Christmas mugs. For a moment, I expected you to open your door and come outside. But, of course, you didn’t. You’ve left us, forever, Robin, and there will always be a hole where you once were.

Spring finally came. The bluebells that had struggled were in full bloom. Alone, I walked the valley path we used to walk together. That summer, I struggled with the reasons why you chose to leave us. That fall, I wished I could go inside and bake cookies with you. Winter came again, and I still missed you.

I took one of your snowflake napkins when we went through all of your things. I always think of you when I use it. Sometimes, it makes me sad. For a while, I thought about keeping it in a box, hidden out of everyday sight. But I didn’t put that snowflake napkin in a box. Because I want to be reminded of who you were, of the happiness your life brought me, even if it includes pain. I still wish you hadn’t done it. But I forgive you.

There are so many things, Robin, that I wish I could still say to you. Mostly, it’s how much I love you, and how special you were to me. Mostly, it’s that I’d like to hug you, hug you like I thought of doing but didn’t when it felt too awkward and the truth was too hard to say.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The name “Robin” is a pseudonym.

© 2026 Allison Songbird. All Rights Reserved. Written for Speaking of Suicide.