By JT Santana | jtwb768

Content note: This article discusses suicide, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, grief, family rejection, and mental illness. It contains no descriptions of suicide methods.

Some Stories Do Not Become the Past

National Suicide Prevention Week comes around every September with familiar language: awareness, warning signs, reaching out, checking on people, asking for help. I support all of it. I have used some of that language myself. Yet suicide has never existed for me as an awareness campaign or a public-health abstraction.

Suicide has a name for me.

John.

I was 22 years old when John, the love of my life, died by suicide. Thirty-six years have passed. I still think about him every day.

That sentence can sound dramatic until you have lived long enough with grief to realize that remembering someone every day does not mean spending every day incapacitated by grief. I have lived a full and complicated life since John died. I have loved, raised a family, made friends, lost friends, worked, written, advocated, laughed, screwed things up, repaired some of them, survived illnesses, gotten angry, changed my mind, and grown older. John did not freeze me at 22.

He never completely left, either.

A person can become part of the architecture of your memory. You do not consciously summon them. They are simply there. Sometimes John enters my thoughts through a direct memory. Other times there is no obvious trigger. His name passes through my mind and then the day continues.

For years, I thought there ought to be some point when that stopped. Thirty-six years has taught me otherwise.

My relationship with suicide became more complicated later in life. I have experienced suicidal ideation myself. I have made several suicide attempts. I know what it is like to stand on both sides of a subject people often discuss as though there are only two groups: the person who dies and everybody left behind.

I have been left behind.

I have come frighteningly close to leaving.

Neither experience gave me a simple explanation for the other.

That is the story I want to tell during National Suicide Prevention Week. Not a story of tragedy followed neatly by healing. Not an inspirational account in which terrible things happened and I emerged permanently wiser. Life has never been that orderly.

It is a story about loving someone who died by suicide, carrying him for 36 years, experiencing suicidal thinking myself, surviving my own attempts, and discovering that suicide becomes harder to judge once you have seen it from more than one direction.

The numbers place millions of Americans somewhere inside this conversation. In 2024, 48,824 people died by suicide in the United States. An estimated 14.3 million adults seriously considered suicide, 4.6 million made a suicide plan, and 2.2 million attempted suicide (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2026a). 

Those are public-health statistics.

John was one person.

I am another.

Every number contains a story that statistics cannot tell.

John Was More Than the Way He Died

One of the things suicide does to memory is threaten to turn the final act of a person’s life into the headline for everything that came before it.

I resist that with John.

John was not “the man who killed himself.” He was the man I loved. There was a relationship before there was a death. There were conversations, ordinary days, affection, arguments, plans, private jokes, habits, frustrations, and all the mundane pieces that make love real rather than cinematic.

I was 22. I loved him with the intensity that often accompanies young love, yet I do not dismiss what we had as youthful infatuation. I knew what he meant to me then. Thirty-six years later, I know what he means to me now.

Our relationship existed in a period when two men loving each other openly carried social consequences that younger LGBTQ people may have difficulty picturing today. We were not legally recognized as a couple. Marriage equality was still decades away. Gay relationships were routinely treated as morally suspect, temporary, embarrassing, or something families had every right to reject.

John’s father did reject it.

His hostility about John being gay and about John being with me was real. I remember the contempt. I remember the rejection. I remember what it did to John, and I remember what it did to me.

That history created one of the hardest questions I have carried since John’s death: Did my presence make things worse for him?

Grief likes questions that cannot be answered.

At 22, I could take an impossibly complicated death and draw a straight line from one event to another. His father hated that John was gay. His father hated our relationship. John died. I was part of the relationship. Some part of my young mind could turn those facts into an accusation against myself.

If I had not been there, would the conflict have been different?

If I had recognized more, could I have stopped what happened?

If I had said something else, noticed something sooner, stayed closer, pushed harder, responded differently, would John still be alive?

Those questions feel like investigation. Often they are grief attempting to negotiate with history.

The CDC’s current suicide-prevention framework makes a point that I wish every person grieving a suicide could be given early and repeatedly: suicide is rarely the product of one circumstance or event. Risk can arise through a combination of mental-health conditions, hopelessness, relationship conflict, loss, social isolation, discrimination, financial stress, serious illness, previous attempts, substance use, violence, access to health care, and conditions within the larger community (CDC, 2026b). 

That does not absolve people who treat LGBTQ family members cruelly.

It does mean that I cannot honestly reduce John’s death to his father, our relationship, myself, or any single event.

There is humility in admitting that.

I loved John intimately. I did not have unrestricted access to every thought inside his mind.

Nobody does.

Thirty-Six Years Is a Long Time to Carry One Day

People often ask versions of the same question after a major loss: How long did it take you to get over it?

I no longer believe “getting over” John is a useful description of what happened.

I adapted.

Those are different things.

The first months and years after a suicide death contain their own kind of confusion. There is grief, then there are questions attached to the grief. There can be anger at the person who died. Anger at other people. Anger at yourself. Shame about being angry. Guilt for laughing. Guilt for continuing your life. Guilt for failing to recognize something. Guilt attached to conversations that seemed completely ordinary until death converted them into evidence.

Memory becomes an interrogation room.

What did he mean when he said that?

Why did he act that way?

Was that a warning?

How did I miss it?

What if I had called?

What if I had stayed?

Thirty-six years gives you time to recognize the limits of those questions. It does not necessarily erase them.

My grief over John changed with age. The 22-year-old grieving John did not possess the same perspective I have at 58. I understand mental illness differently. I understand trauma differently. I understand stigma differently. I know far more about suicide now than I did then.

Knowledge did not erase the loss.

It did help me stop demanding that a 22-year-old version of myself somehow should have possessed everything I know now.

John appears in my life differently today. Sometimes I miss him. Sometimes I wonder who he would have become. I wonder what he would look like. I wonder what he would think about the life I built. I wonder whether we would have stayed together or discovered, like countless young couples, that loving each other deeply did not guarantee permanence.

That last possibility is strangely comforting.

Loving John does not require me to rewrite our relationship into a destiny interrupted only by death. We might have grown old together. We might have separated. We might have remained friends. We might have become strangers who still remembered each other fondly.

Death closed every possible future at once.

That is one of suicide’s particular cruelties. The person dies, and every unwritten version of life with them disappears at the same time.

The CDC describes suicide as a death with lasting effects on families, friends, and communities. That description is clinically accurate. It is almost impossibly restrained when measured against lived experience. 

A suicide death can keep moving through a person’s life long after the funeral.

Mine did.

Losing John Did Not Make Me Immune

For a long time, one assumption seemed obvious to me.

After seeing what John’s suicide did to the people who loved him, surely I could never become suicidal myself.

I was wrong.

My own mental health has included periods of suicidal ideation and several suicide attempts.

I do not recount that history as proof that I have suffered more than somebody else. Pain is not a competition, and suffering does not become more legitimate when it reaches a particular threshold. I include it here since leaving it out would create a much cleaner story than the one I actually lived.

There is a contradiction that troubled me for years: How could someone who knew firsthand what suicide does to survivors contemplate inflicting that same loss on other people?

I eventually realized that the question contains a faulty assumption.

It assumes suicidal thinking operates like calm moral reasoning.

My experience was different.

There have been times when psychological pain narrowed my view of everything around me. The future could become difficult to perceive as something real. Problems felt permanent. Options seemed smaller. My ability to assess my own value could become badly distorted.

I could know people cared about me and still feel alone.

I could understand intellectually that circumstances might change and still have difficulty believing emotionally that they would.

I could remember John and still become suicidal.

The existence of love did not magically eliminate mental illness.

That distinction changed how I think about people in suicidal crisis. Telling someone, “Think about what this would do to your family,” may sound persuasive to a person outside the crisis. It can create more guilt inside someone who already believes they are causing pain.

Guilt is a poor substitute for treatment.

Current federal data show just how many people experience some version of suicidal thinking. In 2024, 5.5% of American adults reported serious suicidal thoughts during the previous year. Among adults ages 18 to 25, the figure was 12.6%. Roughly 2.2 million adults reported an attempt during that year (National Institute of Mental Health [NIMH], n.d.). 

Most of those people cannot be identified by appearance.

They have jobs.

They have partners.

They have children.

They laugh.

They complain about traffic.

They make dinner.

They post photographs.

They show up at family gatherings.

They answer “fine” when someone asks how they are doing.

Mental illness does not always announce itself dramatically.

Neither does suicidal thinking.

What Surviving an Attempt Actually Means

There is a temptation to tell stories about suicide attempts in a predictable format. Someone reaches the bottom, survives, discovers how precious life is, and begins a new chapter.

Real life is less cooperative.

Surviving a suicide attempt does not automatically resolve whatever brought someone to that point.

You wake up to the same brain.

The same history.

The same relationships.

The same financial problems.

The same grief.

The same diagnosis, if there is one.

The same unresolved trauma.

The same life that felt unbearable before the attempt.

Something has changed, certainly. Survival creates a new reality. Yet survival is the beginning of what comes next, not proof that everything has been repaired.

The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline recommends ongoing counseling, connection with supportive people, and a safety plan for people who have survived attempts. Its guidance recognizes something that should be obvious: the period after an attempt requires continuing care. 

I wish our culture had a more mature vocabulary for attempt survivors.

Too often, the language swings between romanticizing survival and condemning the attempt.

Neither helps much.

I have no desire to romanticize the times I attempted suicide. There was nothing profound about reaching a point where my own continued existence became negotiable. I do not regard those experiences as badges of authenticity.

I refuse to treat them as moral failures, either.

They are part of my medical and psychological history. They tell me that there were periods when I was in serious distress and my ability to remain safe deteriorated.

That framing removes some of the shame without removing responsibility.

I still have responsibilities surrounding my mental health. Treatment requires participation. Safety planning requires honesty. The people around me cannot respond to information they do not have. There are times when I need to say plainly that I am struggling rather than waiting for someone to decode my behavior.

At the same time, responsibility cannot become an excuse for blame.

“Why did you do this?”

“How could you do that to us?”

“What do you have to be depressed about?”

“You have so much to live for.”

People often say those things from fear. I understand the fear.

I have felt it from the other side.

John’s suicide devastated me. Part of me still wishes I could ask him every one of those questions.

Experience has made me less certain that the answers would satisfy me.

John Changed How I Hear Other People’s Pain

There are things I notice now that I might have missed at 22.

I pay attention when someone’s language becomes unusually hopeless. I notice when a person begins speaking about themselves as a burden. I notice withdrawal. I notice abrupt changes. I notice when someone’s future tense seems to disappear.

I do not assume those things automatically mean suicide.

I take them seriously.

John taught me that after death, everyone becomes an investigator.

We reconstruct conversations. We search text messages. We remember expressions. We assign new meaning to comments. We look for the clue that should have told us what was happening.

Prevention asks us to pay attention before there is a death to investigate.

That does not mean treating every sad person as an emergency. It means creating relationships where difficult truths can be spoken without punishment.

“Are you thinking about suicide?” is a frightening question to ask someone you love.

It is still a question worth asking when there is reason for concern.

The goal is not to become an amateur psychiatrist. The goal is to give someone permission to answer honestly.

A person should be able to say, “Yes, I have been thinking about it,” without immediately becoming a moral problem.

The CDC identifies social connection, reasons for living, supportive relationships, access to quality physical and behavioral health care, and connection to community as protective factors against suicide. 

Those protections sound simple on paper.

Living them is harder.

Connection requires people willing to stay when another person’s emotions become uncomfortable. Health care requires clinicians, appointments, insurance coverage, transportation, continuity, and trust. Community requires more than telling isolated people that they belong.

Prevention cannot rest entirely on a person in crisis having enough energy to rescue themselves.

The LGBTQ Part of My Story Is Not Incidental

John and I were gay men at a time when open hostility toward gay people was considered socially acceptable in places where it would now receive more scrutiny.

His father’s rejection remains part of my memory of that period.

I do not claim that rejection caused John’s suicide.

I will say something narrower and more defensible: rejection can injure people, and decades of research have made it increasingly difficult to dismiss that injury.

Current data among LGBTQ young people remain grim. The Trevor Project’s 2025 national survey found that 36% of LGBTQ young people ages 13 to 24 seriously considered suicide during the previous year. Ten percent reported an attempt. Among respondents ages 13 to 17, 59% reported being bullied. LGBTQ young people living in very accepting communities reported suicide attempts at less than one-third the rate of respondents in very unaccepting communities (The Trevor Project, 2026). 

Those numbers do not mean LGBTQ identity causes suicide.

They point toward the conditions surrounding LGBTQ people.

Rejection matters.

Bullying matters.

Humiliation matters.

Discrimination matters.

Being told that your relationships are shameful matters.

Growing up hearing politicians debate whether people like you deserve equal standing can matter.

Living in a home where love becomes conditional on heterosexuality or conformity can matter.

The Trevor Project explicitly frames elevated suicide risk among LGBTQ young people as connected to mistreatment and stigma rather than sexual orientation or gender identity itself. 

That distinction would have meant something to my 22-year-old self.

It means something to me now.

I cannot retroactively give John the acceptance he deserved.

I can refuse to participate in the rejection of somebody else.

Suicide Prevention Begins Before the Crisis

One of my frustrations with suicide-prevention messaging is how frequently it begins at the edge of catastrophe.

Call this number.

Watch for these warning signs.

Take the person to the emergency department.

Those interventions can save lives. They belong in every serious prevention strategy.

They are late interventions.

The CDC’s prevention framework places suicide risk across individual, relationship, community, and societal levels. Lack of health care, discrimination, financial problems, isolation, relationship loss, violence, stigma, mental illness, serious physical illness, and hopelessness can all contribute to risk. 

That widens the conversation considerably.

Suicide prevention includes access to therapy.

It includes psychiatric care.

It includes stable housing.

It includes affordable health care.

It includes responding seriously to domestic violence.

It includes reducing isolation among older adults.

It includes supporting veterans.

It includes competent care for people with substance-use disorders.

It includes making schools safer for LGBTQ students.

It includes families learning that rejection is not discipline.

It includes workplaces where seeking mental-health treatment does not carry professional shame.

It includes treating people with mental illness as adults rather than permanently unreliable characters in somebody else’s story.

We cannot expect a crisis line to repair social conditions that have been deteriorating for years.

A hotline is one door.

There need to be others.

In 2024, suicide became the tenth-leading cause of death in the United States. The age-adjusted suicide death rate fell modestly from 14.1 per 100,000 people in 2023 to 13.7 in 2024, yet 48,824 people still died (Xu et al., 2026). 

A lower rate is good news.

Nearly 49,000 deaths remain nearly 49,000 deaths.

What Thirty-Six Years Has Changed

At 22, I wanted an explanation for John’s death.

At 58, I am more willing to live without one.

There are things I know.

I know I loved him.

I know his father’s rejection hurt.

I know John was carrying something I could not fully see.

I know his suicide changed my life.

I know I spent years replaying pieces of our relationship.

I know I have experienced suicidal thinking myself.

I know my own attempts changed how I interpret his death.

I know that none of this gives me access to the final private reasoning inside John’s mind.

There are things I will never know.

That used to feel intolerable.

Now it feels like part of loving someone who is no longer here to answer questions.

My own suicidal history complicated my anger at John. It became harder to condemn him once I had experienced the narrowing of thought that can accompany a suicidal crisis.

It did not make his death hurt less.

Empathy and grief can occupy the same space.

I can understand more and still wish he had stayed.

I can recognize that suicidal thinking alters perception and still grieve every year he did not get to live.

I can forgive myself more than I did at 22 and still occasionally revisit an old question.

Human beings rarely heal in clean lines.

I no longer expect myself to.

I Still Think About John Every Day

Thirty-six years.

It is strange to write that number.

John has now been gone far longer than the period of my life in which I knew him.

Time has given me countless experiences he never saw. Children grew up. Technology changed almost beyond recognition. Gay couples won the legal right to marry. HIV became a medically manageable chronic condition for many people. Social attitudes shifted in ways neither of us could have predicted at 22.

I grew older.

John stayed the age he was when he died.

That may be one of the quietest heartbreaks in long-term grief. The survivor ages for two people.

I have sometimes wondered whether thinking about John every day means I never properly let go.

I reject that interpretation now.

There is nothing unhealthy about acknowledging that somebody helped form who you became.

John’s memory does not prevent me from living.

It accompanies the life I have lived.

There is a distinction.

I can remember him without living in 1990. I can miss him without believing my life ended when his did. I can love the person he was and remain invested in the people who are here now.

I can be grateful for my own survival without pretending I have never wished for escape.

That may be the most truthful thing I can contribute to National Suicide Prevention Week.

Survival is not permanent happiness.

Mental health is not a straight line.

Grief does not expire.

A suicide attempt does not render someone defective.

A suicide death does not erase the person’s life before it.

And asking for help should never require someone to prove they deserve to remain alive.

What I Want This Week to Mean

I do not want National Suicide Prevention Week to end with another collection of inspirational quotations that everyone forgets by September 13.

I want us to become better at hearing difficult truths.

When someone says they are depressed, believe that they are describing something real.

When someone says they are thinking about suicide, take them seriously.

When someone survives an attempt, do not reduce them to the attempt.

When someone loses a loved one to suicide, resist demanding an explanation they may spend decades trying to find themselves.

When a queer kid says home does not feel safe, listen.

When families discover that someone they love is LGBTQ, choose love without conditions.

When somebody returns from a psychiatric hospitalization, do not expect the crisis to have magically disappeared.

When people need treatment, make treatment accessible.

When somebody you know begins disappearing from their own life, notice.

None of those actions guarantees an outcome.

That fact is painful.

We want prevention to come with guarantees. We want to believe that if we say the correct thing, make the correct call, find the correct therapist, love someone hard enough, or remain vigilant enough, nobody we care about will die.

I learned at 22 that love does not grant that kind of control.

I learned later that losing someone to suicide does not make a person immune from suicidal despair.

I have spent the years since learning something quieter: people can survive periods they once believed they could not survive. Lives can change after terrible chapters. Treatment can help. Connection can help. Time can alter the size and shape of pain.

I am here.

John is not.

There will always be sorrow in that sentence.

There is no need to manufacture an inspirational ending around it.

Thirty-six years after his death, I still love him. I still miss him. I still occasionally wonder what I could have done differently.

Then I return to the life in front of me.

That is where survival happens.

Not in pretending the past did not hurt.

Not in denying the times I nearly gave up myself.

It happens in continuing to live with the whole truth.

John was the love of my life.

He died by suicide when I was 22.

I have survived suicidal ideation and several attempts of my own.

I am 58 now.

And I am still here.

If You Are Struggling Right Now

If you are in the United States or its territories and you are experiencing suicidal thoughts, emotional distress, a mental-health crisis, or you are worried about someone else, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Support is available 24 hours a day. The Lifeline can be contacted before a situation reaches the point of immediate danger. 

If someone is in immediate physical danger or has a medical emergency, call 911 or seek emergency medical care.

References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2026a, May 20). Suicide data and statistics. National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2026b, May 26). Risk and protective factors for suicide. National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

National Institute of Mental Health. (n.d.). Suicide. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Retrieved September 7, 2026.

The Trevor Project. (2026). 2025 U.S. national survey on the mental health of LGBTQ+ young people.

Xu, J., Murphy, S. L., Kochanek, K. D., & Arias, E. (2026). Mortality in the United States, 2024. NCHS Data Brief, No. 548. National Center for Health Statistics.