The first time I saw Brad he was entering a restaurant carrying a big set of teeth. My dinner companion, another teacher, guessed he used them to teach pronunciation. He was right. And in Brad's words, everyone was doing it wrong, and Brad was the only teacher in all of Asia doing it right. I liked Brad the moment I met him. He had a way of insulting you and making you love him all the more.
"I'm the most depressed person you will ever meet. I hate being alive. The only time I was truly happy was when I discovered that I could double my dosage of Prozac. That lasted for two years." He had been, and still was, self-medicating additionally with alcohol and pot nearly all of his life. But you would never, ever, know that he was depressed. Brad was more fun to be with, even while continually telling you that you were depraved, deprived, and deranged, than anyone I've ever met.
I didn't take him seriously. About suicide or his nasty insults. He was just too funny. But the pain that he lived with wasn't. I don't know if we can blame life for this or Brad's insistence on everything having to be his way. We were all wrong. Brad was all right. He would only teach his way, which led him to getting fired from just about every job. In the end he ran out of money and they were throwing him out of his apartment. I believe he did this on purpose so that he would have to end his life, having nowhere else to go. (Had I been there and given the opportunity I'd have done something about that, but I wasn't and didn't know.)
We all are Brad to one degree or another. We all will die. We all will be thrown out, if not our houses, out of our bodies. We all want to be right. We all criticize other people. We all self-medicate one way or another, to lesser or greater degrees. And we all, at some point, want to escape the lives we have created by doing these things.
I don't know why Brad's death affected me the way it did. It was more than losing a friend. It was more than not being able to prevent it. I think it was the feeling that I am Brad in some ways, in the sense that I connected to him more than I do with other people. I could see myself in Brad and I could see the tragedy, the sadness, the sense that if only I paid more attention to the stupid things I do, life could be more meaningful.
Years ago I nearly crossed that line myself and I didn't because I didn't want to leave my children without a father. I truly believe that saved my life. Brad didn't have children or loved ones to keep him here. And I think that was why he could leave. Is it fate, or destiny, or our own choices, that decide which of us have links to life and which of us don't? Because in the end, it is those links, those people whom we love, who keep us here, and make life worth living. Maybe we shouldn't take them for granted and maybe we should make them stronger because we never know when we may want to cross that thin line.
