cold November rain

One month and twenty years ago tomorrow, I walk into the front doors of our 100-student high school to learn that one of my best friends, Matt Halley, has taken his own life with a gun over the weekend.

I am there now like it was yesterday, the halls quiet for a Monday, the bounce in my step collapsing as my sister’s friend Kindra tells me the news. I do not have words. There are no words, there is no air, the walls suddenly loom close. Somehow my feet carry me back outside. Without thinking I drive back up to the forested mountains above our house, five minutes from the front door of the Pine Eagle High School, where the scream that has building inside me can escape and lose itself in the ponderosas.

It is not raining. The sun is bright and the day is warm for the first of November. I ask the pine trees, “Why? Why? WHY?!” The tears stream down my face and all that I can do is follow my legs as they climb up and up.

Matt Halley. One grade younger than me. Great jumpshot from the upper left corner of the key. A smile and a laugh that catch you off guard and then catch you up in a contagious delight at the world. We got to ski together at Brundage Mountain, once, on a rare break from the all-consuming winter basketball schedule, and it was all I could do to keep up in speed, never mind form. Matt was the kind of kid who everyone wanted to be, precisely because he was comfortable being himself. I had a crush on his sister Miranda, who was in art class with me, but I don’t think Matt ever knew that. I would never get to tell him now. I would never get to go skiing with him, or shoot hoops, or suffer another long bus ride together. Was there a note? Was there a phone call? Was there something that could have been done, differently, by any of us? All I knew was that there was a gun.

I arrive at a clearing, where in spring the arrowleaf balsamroot explodes in yellow. Now their leaves are dry and brown, awaiting winter’s insulating snow. For the first time I feel the ache in my legs. My breath comes in ragged gasps. My screams have been spent but the tears will not stop.

From here I can look out over our little town, our little houses, our school. The already-white peaks at 10,000 feet hide behind the wooded ridge immediately above me. Another winter will come, another basketball season, another ski trip. The tears continue to slide down my face.

At this point I cannot know that Matt Halley will not be the only, or the closest, loss I will experience to suicide. I can only feel the raw ache of a life torn away too soon, a thread ripped out of the fabric leaving jagged edges and holes where before was a pattern. And I cannot know, hopefully will never know, the loss that his parents experience.

Mark and Gail, wherever you are, I am thinking of you.