Crashing to a halt

I used to work as the Indiana Daily Student police reporter. One of my detective friends filled me in on some details as I rode with him to Ballantine Hall yesterday around noon. A 22-year-old IU student took a chair, broke a window with it and proceeded to jump out of the eighth floor of Ballantine Hall with the intent of falling to his death.\nAs I stood looking at the faces of other officers I knew, like Laury, George, Phil, Kevin and Tom while they surveyed the broken glass, I began thinking about my own experiences.\nI went to a Catholic high school in Fort Wayne. Needless to say, coming to understand my homosexuality wasn't the easiest thing to do in an environment filled with the testosterone-packed bodies of high school football players. And with that came a two-year period of depression.\nI began to feel at times there was only one alternative to end my suffering. Suicide.\nI had it all planned out. I wanted the pain to be over. And listening obsessively to "Will you Remember Me" by Sarah McLachlan didn't help. I had the service all planned, the note was written and redrafted repeatedly.\nBut I didn't do it.\nI got to thinking and the bottom line was this: My family and friends loved me.\nI knew my family would torture themselves with questions.\n"What could we have said," "What could we have done," "If only I would have given him a hug yesterday."\nI didn't want my parents to feel the nightmare of losing a child.\nI didn't want Del Nelson, my beloved Spanish teacher to have to clean out my locker for my parents. Not that she'd be able to figure out what was trash and what was actually valuable stuff. \nI've never been the cleanest person.\nI knew if I would have killed myself, I would have missed out on a lot.\nThe most important lesson I would have learned was from Mike Hanson, IU Police Department's longtime chief. He's my dad away from Dad. \nMike is indeed an interesting person, one with whom I have shared quite a lot of this struggle during our many private, wonderful conversations.\nMike has worked a number of suicides. The causes were always stuff like "I got a D," or "My girlfriend left me." The normal stuff all college kids sometimes think they can't handle -- and decide they don't want to be around to try and face it.\nAnd then they make a decision in the heat of the moment that isn't one you can reverse.\nThey take their own lives over stuff that won't even be remembered in 10 years. \nMost of the small stuff people do on a day-to-day basis isn't worth fretting over for more than 10 or 15 seconds. There's some stuff that seems pretty serious, but most likely it isn't something that's going to kill you. Unless you decide to let it, that is.\nMike taught me that when we die, we don't really, because your loved ones will always carry your legacy with them. Me killing myself isn't the legacy I want to leave behind. And I'm certain it wasn't the legacy the 22-year-old student now pondering his potentially life-ending plunge wanted, either.\nThe key is talking.\nAnd you do this by not being afraid to let people listen to you, by talking about your problems or things you think are unbearable, but are really pretty stupid to worry about.\nI'd like to think I'm writing this on behalf of my friends at IUPD -- Mike, George, Laury, Phil, Kevin and Tom -- so they don't ever again have to race to another call like this one, where all they can hope for is the ability to piece together the now broken pieces of human life like they saw yesterday.\nWe almost lost a member of the IU community yesterday. We lost another last semester. And we lost IU English Professor Tim Wiles last summer. Let's all reach out and try and talk with people and strive to ensure we don't lose another.