This morning over coffee Antonio told me that Sarah's friend and schoolmate at Berklee tried to kill himself yesterday. Members of their group chat hadn't heard from him, so they walked over to his apartment only to find the police there. Danny Salazar had swallowed a bottle of pills and tried to hang himself. Over the course of the day, we found out that he would be ultimately successful. He was brain dead, and the doctors waited for his mother to arrive from Texas to take him off life support.
It is indescribably devastating to imagine his mother's flight to Boston and her arrival at the hospital and at the bedside of a warm body that no longer contained her son, and to sit with it while the machines were turned off and ceased to keep its heart beating and its lungs filling, knowing that what was left was just flesh and that the child she had carried and loved beyond all rationality was irretrievably gone. My mind withdraws from imagining myself in her place, like a finger pulling back after accidentally brushing against a hot stove.
I never met Danny and I knew very little about him. He was a drummer. He had a crush on Sarah last semester, and when he met Antonio, he was full of bluster and casual, "playful" insults for Antonio, who could not even view him as a serious rival for Sarah's affection. Then he had an unreciprocated crush on another girl. Then another. He moved out of the dorms and into an apartment with friends. His band Archon Theory recorded a song—with irony worthy of Gen-X, it is called "Optimist"—and made it available to stream. They had scheduled a mini-tour of dates for performing live.
I don't know what else was going on. Was he failing out of school? Was he unable to continue paying the tuition? Was he on medication that wasn't working? Or that he wasn't taking? Should he have been?
I do know that every one of these amazing musical children—now young adults—is the product of years of effort and support from their families and teachers and coaches. The thousands upon thousands of dollars and hours that went into even the least talented of them, to end up at one of the most renowned music schools in the world, is staggering, and often worth every penny if it brings art and sometimes just joyful noise into the world with it.
And yet, Monday evening, it seemed to Danny that it was not enough to light whatever darkness he felt. He chose a permanent solution to what were only temporary problems.
If he felt he wasn't a good enough musician, he could have practiced more—he was in school for music after all! If he was failing out of school, he could have worked harder. If working harder wasn't enough to pass his classes, he could have taken a leave of absence to improve enough to be ready for the curriculum. If he couldn't pay the exorbitant tuition, university education is not at all necessary, or even common, to being a rock musician. If a woman didn't like him back, there are 4 billion others. At 18—just barely beyond being a child!— and in reasonable health, the list of things that you are just impossibly too late to start and succeed at is quite short, limited mostly to "child prodigy" and many, but not all, elite sports.
I have often said, with respect to suicide, that it is not my place to decide how much pain other people should be forced endure. But in this case, there were ways out that he did not take. Many different paths in life, medication, therapy.
It is such an unnecessary tragedy.
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