January 10th… It was about 10:30 at night when I got the phone call from my best friend. His voice was different. He told me that something terrible had happened. I assumed it was the usual. A girl had fucked him over maybe? I laughed and told him to stop stalling and let it out so I could laugh at his latest problem. He told me I should be alone for this news and that he would call me back. I guess he heard the voices of my friends around me at my fraternity house. I told him to stop playing games, chuckling a little more nervously now. He told me that his brother had died.
I grew up with Brandon and Steve, brothers about two years apart. My entire teenage years leading up to this day, they were my best friends. Every day we hung out back during those innocent, mindless summers. As soon as I woke up the next day, I sped from the University of Arizona to Scottsdale to a home drenched in tears. How surreal it is to lose a close friend, and to know that your best friend would never be the same again, that life would never be the same again.
Brandon’s death was of natural causes, at 18. Hiking a mountain with some of his buddies, he started feeling a little unusual. With time, numbness in his limbs set in. He asked his friend Stu to feel his chest; an irregular heartbeat… bumbumbumbum…bum…bum…bumbumbum…bum. The two guys that had cell phones had gone up ahead, and as the situation worsened, they climbed farther up, ignorant of the event that was about to take place. Brandon collapsed, and stopped breathing, his heart stopped. By the time several other hikers on the mountain could be called over to call the chopper, it was probably too late. By the time the chopper landed, he was gone, his still warm body in the arms of his friend.
That night I stayed up thinking about all the great times we had had together. I realized that this was a guy that honestly had never wronged anyone. I became aware of how good he was, in every sense of the word. I recalled the years of friendship, and while I had fought dozens of times with Steve, I could not think of a single time I had been mad at his little brother. Nobody could. With these thoughts setting in, I received a phone call from one of my fraternity brothers.
“I know this may not be the best time, but I wanted to be the one to tell you,” Tyler said. “Alex… he killed himself.”
Nobody knew where Alex had been for the past week, but it was winter break and nobody in the house thought twice about it until his sister arrived hysterical. He had just moved into the house at the beginning of break, but apparently, despite a incredibly happy front he wore daily, something on the inside had gone wrong. He hung himself from the loft in his room with his own belt. He had been hanging there for about a week, meanwhile his brothers partied in rooms right next door, drinking, having a great time completely unknownst to the fact that a body was slowly decaying with only an adobe wall blocking the view of the horrific sight.
Brandon didn’t show any signs of fear in the moments before his death, and I guess Alex didn’t either. His hands were not bound, and his toes touched the floor. If he had any second thoughts, he could have saved himself. He feared living another day more than death.
What could it possibly be like to have this mindset? I cannot imagine. There have been times I thought about suicide, but the idea of leaving my family behind, my friends, the black unknown that is known as death, have all kept me from doing it… then of course there is the certainty that happiness will come with time, no matter how horrible life may seem. But these things did not stop Alex. When we pledged our fraternity together for life, none of us thought a life would end so soon.
I had to choose which funeral I wanted to attend, as they were both in the same weekend. Naturally, I chose Brandon’s, as he was a close friend as opposed to a friendship that had been developing for only a couple of months. While the decision was easy, it didn’t make the guilt of not attending another friend’s funeral any easier to bear.
As I sit writing this, I wonder who is next. Before January 10th, I had not known anyone who had died who wasn’t elderly. Those deaths you can prepare for. These you can’t. I thought I was invinceable. I thought my friends were invincible. I was wrong.
RIP Brandon
RIP Alex
