4.2.24
I wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend

Trigger Warning: discussion of suicide
If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, please call or text 988 or visit 988lifeline.org.

I’m hurting tonight.

Someone whose work I admire — a comic book writer/artist — committed suicide yesterday. It’s hit me so much harder than I would have expected. Brought back a lot of feelings I haven’t felt in a long while.

The world is cold and grey and broken today. It’s the exact same way things felt 34 years ago when someone I cared very much about decided that struggling with alcoholism and the judgment of others was more than they could bear. The exact same feeling as a few years back when suicidal ideation was something a love one and I both struggled with.

It’s an ugly feeling.

Not as ugly as the feelings and thoughts that drive a person to and past the brink, though.

I’ve been dissociating to a degree today. Like, it doesn’t feel real that this has happened. At times I feel like I’m not really in my body.

This guy whose work I admired — Ed Piskor — he was one of the breaths of fresh air in the world of comic art illustration. His enthusiasm for the medium was infection. Over the past few years, I learned a ton from him about an art form I thought I already knew a lot about.

The dude also drove me up a freakin’ wall. His public persona was abrasive to me more often than not. And there were accusations over the past week or so about private behavior that was concerning, to say the least.

In the world we spend so much of our time in now — online — opinions formed fast, and both sides were resolute in their certainty. Certain that Ed was an evil man to be vilified, mocked, and discarded. And certain that he was a saint who did nothing wrong, was a victim of cancel culture, practically walked on water. The media jumped in, going so far as to interview Ed’s father with his street address in plain view of the camera.

Ed saw a major art show put on hold, a big project contract thrown into uncertainty, and his bright professional future thrown into doubt. Right or wrong for these things to happen? I’m not gonna say. Not my place. Everyone’s got their own nest to protect, right?

The court of public opinion — especially online — is a kangaroo court, and we’re all judges tapping away at our keyboards and tablets and phones. We wake up in the morning, become experts in bridge engineering over coffee, constitutional scholars during lunch, and arbiters of criminal justice before we sit down to dinner.

In turn, the passive-aggressive, vindictive shittiness we wield anonymously online spills over into our flesh-and-blood lives. If we can act like passive-aggressive, vindictive shits with impunity online, shouldn’t we have the same right in real life? To just be miserable and smug and awful to each other and not actually try to solve problems? And so we carry on. Because we are right and that is the most important thing, regardless of what facts or reality or human decency has to say.

It’s fucking exhausting.

And I’m so very tired of it.

And now Ed Piskor is dead by his own hand.

When that friend of mine I mentioned earlier killed himself over three decades ago, it really wasn’t much different, now that I think about it. He heard a whole lot about the sinfulness of his mental state. How he was falling short of the glory of God. How alcoholism wasn’t what God wanted for his life.

And he tried. He tried so damned hard. But he kept falling off that wagon, and finally he just couldn’t take it anymore.

One bullet.

Done.

Except it’s never over. Not really.

The aftermath of suicide is like the ripples in a pond if you drop a boulder in. They go on and on, spilling out and running places you wouldn’t expect them to go.

The only certainty in what happened yesterday is that Ed Piskor’s future is absolutely certain. It’s over.

I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. Not the person malign the choice, not their loved ones, not their bitterness enemies.

Because I know too well the repugnant bitterness suicide puts on a person’s heart. More than 30 years on, I can’t drive by a certain house without wondering if there was something I could have done to make a difference. Maybe if I’d visited more often. Or what if I’d spoken up in the face of harsh judgment?

I’ll never know.

And neither will he.

Am I still making sense? Or have I rambled off the rails? I don’t know. I think it’s time to call it a night. I can guarantee that what I’ve written here probably hasn’t amounted to a hill of beans for most people.

I’ll probably get an email from someone accusing me of defending an indefensible asshole. And I’ll probably get an email from someone accusing me of being part of the cancel culture hive mind.

That’s the world we live in. And as long as the world stays that way, people are gonna keep choosing to not live in it anymore.

Which breaks my heart.

We need to do better.

We have to do better.