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I went out with a friend of mine last Saturday night and we had a mutual friend who committed suicide last summer. I was pretty close to him and was a lot closer to him geographically than she was. I've seen her since he died.
She started asking me right off the bat if I knew anything more than what was already known. I haven't spoken to the family since then, and really, it's none of my business. I've speculated with the some of the other mutual friends, but we know nothing concrete. I told her what I thought might have happened, but that I didn't know for sure and that it was just guesswork on my part. From what I've heard, the family has since moved on fairly well back into their regular routines.
This man had a long history of mental health and substance abuse problems, along with several other failed suicide attempts. Within a year of his death, he shot off the ends of several toes with a shotgun (no idea why you'd do this), nearly shot an eye out with rat shot (requiring several reconstructive surgeries at one of the best eye hospitals in the region), and within three months of the rat shot incident, was dead. That's not even counting the DUI, multiple totaled vehicles, other hospitalizations (he snapped his femur in two a few years ago falling down the stairs while high on prescribed painkillers), his epilepsy, and probably hundreds of office visits over the years.
All told, the guy's bills for largely self-inflicted problems have probably totaled into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, hundreds or thousands of labor hours for the doctors and other professionals who worked with him, untold hardship on his mother's behalf (she was his primary caregiver). All the time, money, and effort expended on this guy feels like a complete waste to me. These resources could have been spent elsewhere on someone who was not imminently suicidal.
I feel bad for the family because he is now gone. His mother especially was close to him after him neither working nor attending school for the better part of a decade. I know she must be feeling "what else could I have done?" There are lots of times I do miss having him around, no matter his faults.
Still, I can't help thinking that his whole life was essentially a waste. Because he neither worked nor went to school and had issues, his social circle shrank, and the funeral was the most sparsely attended funeral I've ever been to. I mentioned the lightly attended funeral and the waste of resources to the girl I was out with and she "couldn't believe I was that valuing his life in terms of dollars and labor hours." I recognize he does have value as a person, but my brain is wired in terms of numbers. I'm not saying his life is worth $X, but that he essentially ran up this huge tab of medical bills based on his own actions, and then "skipped out" on "repaying" the debt via improved well-being - his actions seem deadbeat to me.
Your mind may be "wired in terms of numbers," but it doesn't sound like your friend wanted to hear your theories about the economic costs of the dead man's turmoil.
IMHO, you said too much, which means you were not sensitive to HER feelings.
Your mind may be "wired in terms of numbers," but it doesn't sound like your friend wanted to hear your theories about the economic costs of the dead man's turmoil.
IMHO, you said too much, which means you were not sensitive to HER feelings.
She seemed to be closer with him than I knew. He was on Facebook a lot more than most and maybe she got to know him better through there. He never really talked about her.
She wanted information I simply didn't have. I know no more than I did six months ago and I'm probably not going to find out anymore. I knew his mother but I wasn't close with her. A few weeks after he died, his family wanted me and some other friends to come and sort through anything we wanted of the rest of his possessions, which I thought was odd. The parents gave an old project BMW that the deceased had to another car enthusiast friend. Most of the rest of us took some smaller items and some things were just thrown out.
My grandparents lived on a dead-end street and their neighbors were mostly their age or older and all of them had lived there for years together. I've seen a few "cleaning outs" of the deceased and even participated in some, but these were cases where the living family lived far away or the bulkier items simply were not valuable enough to retain. In these cases, they'd donate the stuff, or even give it to the other neighbors and their families. This didn't seem odd, as there was no one to really take it with them, and the kids were burying the parents, not the other way around.
She wanted information I simply didn't have. I know no more than I did six months ago and I'm probably not going to find out anymore.
Then say that, and nothing more.
All your rambling speculation about the varying costs he levied on his family was unnecessary and, apparently, painful for your friend to hear.
It's much like all the info you just wrote here about the "cleaning out." Nobody really asked for that, and it doesn't seem relevant to your OP.
Do you think you're a good judge of when you're saying TOO much? In other posts you've talked about family members getting upset when you talk about certain topics...
I went out with a friend of mine last Saturday night and we had a mutual friend who committed suicide last summer. I was pretty close to him and was a lot closer to him geographically than she was. I've seen her since he died.
She started asking me right off the bat if I knew anything more than what was already known. I haven't spoken to the family since then, and really, it's none of my business. I've speculated with the some of the other mutual friends, but we know nothing concrete. I told her what I thought might have happened, but that I didn't know for sure and that it was just guesswork on my part. From what I've heard, the family has since moved on fairly well back into their regular routines.
This man had a long history of mental health and substance abuse problems, along with several other failed suicide attempts. Within a year of his death, he shot off the ends of several toes with a shotgun (no idea why you'd do this), nearly shot an eye out with rat shot (requiring several reconstructive surgeries at one of the best eye hospitals in the region), and within three months of the rat shot incident, was dead. That's not even counting the DUI, multiple totaled vehicles, other hospitalizations (he snapped his femur in two a few years ago falling down the stairs while high on prescribed painkillers), his epilepsy, and probably hundreds of office visits over the years.
All told, the guy's bills for largely self-inflicted problems have probably totaled into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, hundreds or thousands of labor hours for the doctors and other professionals who worked with him, untold hardship on his mother's behalf (she was his primary caregiver). All the time, money, and effort expended on this guy feels like a complete waste to me. These resources could have been spent elsewhere on someone who was not imminently suicidal.
I feel bad for the family because he is now gone. His mother especially was close to him after him neither working nor attending school for the better part of a decade. I know she must be feeling "what else could I have done?" There are lots of times I do miss having him around, no matter his faults.
Still, I can't help thinking that his whole life was essentially a waste. Because he neither worked nor went to school and had issues, his social circle shrank, and the funeral was the most sparsely attended funeral I've ever been to. I mentioned the lightly attended funeral and the waste of resources to the girl I was out with and she "couldn't believe I was that valuing his life in terms of dollars and labor hours." I recognize he does have value as a person, but my brain is wired in terms of numbers. I'm not saying his life is worth $X, but that he essentially ran up this huge tab of medical bills based on his own actions, and then "skipped out" on "repaying" the debt via improved well-being - his actions seem deadbeat to me.
Do I seem extremely insensitive on this topic?
You just sound very practical to me and given the circumstances, I probably would have been thinking the same thing. Still, you might want to keep such thoughts to yourself in the future, or at least think about how they could be perceived before you speak. I might make a similar remark to someone like my husband, who I know would understand what I was saying and the context in which I was saying it, but not to a friend I didn't know all that well.
You just sound very practical to me and given the circumstances, I probably would have been thinking the same thing. Still, you might want to keep such thoughts to yourself in thefuture, or at least think about how they could be perceived before you speak. I might make a similar remark to someone like my husband, who I know would understand what I was saying and the context in which I was saying it, but not to a friend I didn't know all that well.
Sometimes it is better to keep certain thoughts to yourself.
She is more emotional and you are more practical it seems, as others have said. People deal with grief and death differently. Perhaps you could apologize to her and say you just have been dealing in your own way. Maybe you could give her the mothers number also and she can call and talk to her and offer companionship or help during this.
I get accused of being insensitive all the time by people who really don't know what I'm talking about, and who have been "trained" to see everything as insensitive.
People don't know how to think critically anymore. Consider it a badge of honor.
If I'd known the guy, I would likely have agreed with everything you'd said. But you just can't say stuff like that out loud unless you know the person you're talking to is okay with it. What you said is REALLY not PC. You're supposed to not speak ill of the dead, and just say some meaningless platitudes about how sad it is he died. So yeah, I'm not surprised at the response you got.
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