A distant friend of mine committed suicide. Should I feel worse than I do?

In My Humble Opinion
1

So, calling the man a ‘friend’ might be a stretch. However, I’ve probably spent 20 hours of my life talking to him, some online, some in person. To summarize : the man more or less had it all. With just a high school diploma, he somehow managed to get a series of well paying IT jobs. Later, he got into oil and gas, and somehow managed to convince people to invest in him. He had a sound wall company, that makes some kind of noise abating wall that goes on drill and production wells in Texas. He then got into this business called ‘sound metering’, where he would install monitors at oil and gas drilling sites and produce daily reports measuring how many dB of noise was emitted. Those ‘independent’ reports would be submitted to local and state governments and used to defend the oil companies from lawsuits.

So he made a ton of money. Well over a million dollars. And he bought every toy (RVs, motorcycles, trucks), and went on regular vacations. And his wife looks like a blond sorority chick.

And he was a huge Trump supporter, and would gloat about the GOP win. And he would insist that he didn’t need subsidized healthcare of any sort - despite one of his kids being born needing major surgery to fix his ears, and him just barely managing to get a ‘corporate’ health care plan in place for his company with 3 employees and somehow getting them to cover it. And despite making $500,000 at the peak of the oil and gas boom, somehow he was totally out of money to pay his taxes and thus the IRS had him on a payment plan.

(somehow he spent more money on toys than the after tax on 500k)

And he was hugely impulsive. He’d buy those vehicles on credit on a whim, spend all sorts of money on other stuff at the slightest impulse, and apparently had only moderate self control. And of course he was a big law and order type, and a big Christian, despite doing lots of drugs when he was younger and sleeping with lots of young women.

So anyways, apparently one day his wife let him know she’d been cheating on him and doing drugs with another man. So he went into the garage, started up some of his gas powered equipment, and suffocated in the smoke.

I just feel so…well, almost vindicated. “see, that’s what you get for being goddamn impulsive and giving in to the first stupid urge you have”. And I keep talking about him with my other friends, basically calling him a total moron. Even under the worst possible divorce + child support scenario, he would still have plenty of personal money and ample resources to chase younger, more attractive women to replace his wife. He left his 3 kids and his whole family behind as well. He’s never going to enjoy any of his toys or possibly get to see whatever the far future has in store for us. (he was 38, and I think statistically, being a caucasian man with money, would have lived until his 80s. And that’s assuming we don’t manage to crack the problem of AI in the next 50 years and use machine superintelligence to find some method of delaying or halting death from old age. I don’t necessarily even mean an AI you can talk to, just a series of software tools that accelerate biomedical research a few orders of magnitude by essentially automating the work of most scientists, and developing models to more accurately predict what possible drug candidates will do before wet testing)

2

His Wife, who he apparently loved very deeply, betrayed him.

You are letting politics infect your character.

I regard your views as deeply inappropriate.

BTW–I am a Sanders Democrat.

3

I fail to see what his politics have to do with it. You mentioned he was 38, so his kids are probably young. 3 young kids just lost their dad, that’s very sad. Who the hell cares who he supported politically.

4

Y’know it is ever so slightly possible that he truly and deeply loved his wife and was so devastated by this betrayal that not only was he not thinking about replacing her, he couldn’t bear to live without her. It may not be rational, but that is sorta how emotions work. Kicking him for being a moron seems gratuitously cruel, especially when you can’t really know what was running through his head.

It could be he was a colossal prick in life, though I’d argue that is hard to judge with incomplete knowledge. Regardless it wouldn’t necessarily mitigate the tragedy of his death.

5

Sometimes it takes a little time before the impact of his death sinks in. And just 20 hours of conversation doesn’t make him that close to you. I can understand this doesn’t mean much to you at first. Later you may develop a different perspective.

6

Sounds like you were jealous of him and now you want somebody to tell you it’s okay for you to be happy he’s dead. I guess you can’t help how you feel. That said, your pleasure at his suicide isn’t something you need to share. It’s more a solitary, shameful vice kind of thing.

7

I gave up trying to decide how I should feel about deaths years ago. I have had close friends die and have very little real impact on me and others who I didn’t really care for I would find myself thinking about them for days and even weeks.

8

?? Why do you ask? What do you want to know?

There’s no such thing as “should” when it comes to emotional reactions. You react however you react. How you react may reveal how educated, aware, thoughtful, empathetic and so on that you are, or are not. But that’s as far as it goes. You are who and what you are, at this stage in your life. You would not be changed into someone else, if you claimed to have a reaction that you did not have.

Do you want other people’s reaction to what you’ve written about what you have thought so far? What we think your reaction tells us about you, and your understanding of the world? Your reaction reveals nothing about your…acquaintance, it only reveals yourself.

In observing myself and my children, I know that as I have experienced more, I have gained new understandings of what others have had to deal with. When I was a child and someone died, I didn’t react much at all. If someone were murdered or killed in an accident, that made no difference to me emotionally. If someone I didn’t like died, I was less reactive than when someone I liked died.

But as I grew, I found that my reactions changed. I came to appreciate why someone who behaved differently might still be as worthwhile and valuable a person to their friends, as I wanted to be for my own friends. So, for example, although I didn’t like Ronald Reagan (for reasons not necessary to mention here), when I heard that he suffered Alzheimers and then died and left his wife alone, I was sad for Nancy’s sake. Similarly, I never liked Hilary Clinton. But because of who I had come to be by the time I found out about Bill Clinton’s betrayal of her, I felt bad for her when his dalliances were revealed so publicly.

I know people who tell me that I “should” feel good about Bill betraying his wife, because they don’t like her either. But as I said, the idea of “should” doesn’t apply to reactions.

9

Good advice. If his death doesn’t mean that much to you, well, maybe that says a lot about how you felt about him. People die all the time. I don’t get folk who act as though they are all distraught every time someone they know (or even a celebrity) dies - or kills themself.

10

My impression is politics including as proxy for general worldview was among the reasons OP didn’t much like his ‘distant friend’. And this dislike is part of the question of whether he ‘should’ feel worse about it.

Anyway, in your heart of hearts, you feel what you feel. If the question is about manifesting it publicly*, that’s more complicated.

*say somebody dies you outright didn’t like and didn’t make a secret of it. Are you making things better or worse by putting that aside to attend a ceremony or pay respects personally? Depends but it’s not all about you. How you actually feel kind of is, IMO.

11

Emotional capital is a finite thing. You can’t force yourself to feel the same grief for strangers and mere acquaintances that you do for those close to you.

12

Correct. His reasoning for his political (and religious) views were incoherent and illogical. And hypocritical. So it’s not as surprising that he did something that is incoherent to end his life.

13

Damn near half the country fits this description. :smiley:

14

My mother shot herself, away back many years ago. I was devastated, and, more than anything else, I was furious as this betrayal of her family’s love.

It took me many years to get over that, and to come around to a better comprehension of how much pain she was living under, and how she thought this was the only way out. Now, my reaction is mostly sympathy and pity.

igor frankensteen is right: there is no “should” other than what you make for yourself. If you honestly think you “should” feel worse than you do…then you’re right. If you don’t think you should feel worse than you do…you’re also right.

Examine your own feelings, but don’t obsess over them. And leave room to change your mind as time passes.

15

A distant friend of mine committed suicide.

It doesn’t sound like he was any kind of “friend” to you.

16

This person sounds like a casual acquaintance, not a friend, and also that he may have had bipolar disorder, which puts him at EXTREMELY high risk of suicide.

I too fail to see what his political or religious views have to do with any of this. :dubious:

17

OP: you feel how you feel. There’s no right or wrong about it, especially with a suicide.

18

Why do you suppose this man never considered murder-suicide?

19

My theory he was so upset and impulsive that he didn’t even think it through. Just “I’m just gonna kill myself right now, I feel terrible, being dead will make it all better”.

Or some other inane bit of stupidity.

20

It probably was impulsive, in some sense every suicide is. Plenty of otherwise totally rational people commit suicide, it doesn’t have to follow the rest of their behavior in life.

You don’t know whether or not he considered murder-suicide. Maybe he did and decided that would be truly wrong. It’s one thing to rant about politics in a hypocritical manner, that’s not the same thing as becoming a murderer.