One ex-boyfriend and two colleagues. One colleague was predictable (he had absolutely no family or friends for social support and it took a week for someone to wonder why he wasn’t showing up to do his cases and call the police out to his apartment), the other was a complete shock even though he was very frank about his depression. He had a wife and young children and was attractive and successful–a total Richard Cory story.
None - you needed a zero option really…
Yeah, this is so not working out. Needs a zero option, also needs some way to account for age.
Oh well. I am getting the sense my feelings of being above average in this area are true.
Thanks to all who voted.
“Less than 1 per 10 years” still isn’t “zero”. You poll options should have had a zero.
Another for zero, to the best of my knowledge. I’ve lost track of a lot of people I used to know, so I can’t say for sure.
One per 12 2/3 years.
“Kinda” knew two - my daughter’s grade-school art teacher, and my wife’s cousin. Met each a couple of times. Those don’t seem to meet your threshold of “knew personally” - either way, it’s fewer than 1 per ten years.
Kinda knew two as well.
One was a former teacher, a father of a girl I worked with and husband of a good friend of my mother. It was years after I moved out of town, so I wouldn’t say I really ‘knew’ him at that point. Still shocking.
The other … well, I wouldn’t say I really knew him at all, but he was the brother of a girl I’d just met and become friends with. It was pretty weird. He was only 16 or 17 and he went completely off the deep end, murdering his neighbors and barricading himself in their house. He did himself in when the cops showed up. Creepy especially because my apartment was about 50 yards from where it all went down.
a distant cousin (shot himself after wounding his wife)
a former schoolmate (We’d gone to elementary school together but had gone to different high schools. She turned in a term paper and came home and shot herself.)
my brother (obviously the big one in terms of affecting me)
my mother’s significant other (although that was more of a death by misadventure while being really depressed and messed up)
the religious education director at the church I attended
Another zero here. The closest I can think of is a woman who was in my graduate program, but I’d never actually met her.
In H.S. my next door neighbor, nice quiet kid, got off the phone with a girl, put a shotgun under his chin and blew his head off.
In college a guy we used to party with got depressed over Christmas and hung himself.
A good family friend, very successful lawyer suffering from depression shot himself in the bathroom.
Another very good family friend, an extremely successful entrepreneur in the health products industry who himself feared old age sent his secretary on a short errand and shot himself in his office.
Another college friend, very health conscious, shot himself when he got herpes.
My second cousin. His brother and mom never really accepted the fact he wasn’t perfect like them, something I of course never forgave them for. He came across as slow but I loved spending time with him, he had the biggest heart in the world. He drove into the garage, left the car running and shut the door leaving behind a loving wife and two girls that adored him. His brother died of a heart attack later that year and right after his mom was severely disabled by a stroke leaving her second husband, who’d waited 40 years to marry her, a weepy mess. Reads like a greek tragedy.
At least 6 then. I know I’m forgetting a couple. Don’t mean to but I can’t help but view their deaths a little differently.
Four that I can think of - two guys I went to HS with, a cousin, and a guy that lived in my building.
One HS guy was my age, popular, moved away, went into law enforcement (I think he was a deputy sheriff down south somewhere) and later shot himself.
The other HS guy was a year ahead of me, fine musician, theater, athletic, Yale, Wall Street, he jumped off a building in Manhattan. A classmate theorized it had to do with his sexuality.
My cousin shot himself, I never found out why.
The guy that lived in my building was probably in his 50s and had other people’s money invested with Bernie Madoff. He jumped and landed on the roof of the parking garage, outside our friends’ window. They have a little girl but fortunately no one was home.
A guy I knew when he was in his mid 20s. He just got back from Vietnam and could not resolve what he did there. He was a co-worker, good looking and bright. He hung himself in a Shell station on the way to work.
Yeah just remembered; my best friend growing up died recently from prostate cancer. That caused his dad to lose his will to keep battling cancer so he quit taking the medicine that kept him alive. Then his older brother, who’d not had the easiest life killed himself too, all this within a year. I tear up thinking about his mom, what she’s had to endure. 4 men in her life, a close family and suddenly she’s down to 1 son.
Three that I know of for sure. Two in-laws and a good friend. I’m 41.
Only one, a friend of my mom’s but they’d drifted apart. I remember him well, he was a really awesome guy. When my mom remarried, she tried to find her old friend but was told by his sister that he’d killed himself a year earlier.
This was in the 80’s, and he was gay - we speculate that he had tested positive and gone for a quick death rather than (what was then) an inevitable slow decline.
Gosh, I’ve known quite a few people who killed themselves. I am 25 now. In order: my aunt (jumped out from under an overpass in the dark, in front of a plumber’s van), my close friend’s older brother when we were in 6th grade (hanged), a boy in my group of friends several years ago (took a whole bunch of barbiturates and opiates), a close friend two years ago (hanged), and a customer at the bar I work at last year (shot to the head). So one for every 5 years of my life.
I know a ton of people who attempted suicide but didn’t succeed (heck, half my friends in high school tried to kill themselves). I’ve also known a few people who died because of drugs and alcohol, but it’s assumed those deaths were entirely accidental.
I only know of one person, the EMT that would hang out in the scoring booth with us at my kids’ hockey games. A year or two before he was driving an ambulance that struck and killed a kid walking along a road. He always seemed cheerful and upbeat to me, but I guess he never really got over that tragedy.
Same here. I’ve known at least 8, and I’m 35. I do know a lot of people, though; there are a couple more that I didn’t know well enough to count them under the OP’s conditions.
I’ve also seen one stranger hanging in a park - he turned out to have been involved in some huge banking scandal. Plus, as I walked through the deserted financial district one Sunday morning, I glimpsed some movement out of the corner of my eye and it was a man freefalling off a 12-storey building.
6 of the suicides I’ve really known have been in the last 4 years, with 3 of them coming at quarterly intervals. Another friend died about a month ago and nobody’s saying exactly how she died, but I suspect it was suicide.
There’s another one that doesn’t count, because I wasn’t even born at the time: my Dad’s first wife committed suicide. she stuck her head in a gas oven and was found by my eldest brother. It’s still having repercussions 45 years later and, even though I’m not personally upset by it, it does feel like I’ve been around suicide all my life.
Ladeda I’m so sorry.
No one I knew well. One of my husband’s cousins committed suicide after a very sad life, but I only met her once.