So you don't forget (Bourdain, but also many others)

Today is my friend's birthday and when I log onto Facebook to leave a message, I see she has changed her profile picture. It’s the photo I had remarked upon, the one she had posted when her brother committed suicide. 

It’s of the two of them, and my friend is maybe 18 years old or 20 years old in the photo. Her older brother has his arm wrapped around his little sister, affectionately, protectively. 

To cut to the chase, the photo haunts me.

In fact, I opened up a separate Facebook tab this morning so I could keep my eyes on that photo, so I could return to it periodically throughout the day, as a reminder of some specific things, of some nonspecific things -- basically of everything about life that is fraught but also good.

As I told her once, the look on her face is the glittering, breathtaking promise that life offers us when we are young (Actually, the line I think of comes from a James Bond movie: she looks like “promise itself.”) She is innocence defined, but also, the photo taken as a whole – with his arm draped around her – telegraphs how much she loved him and looked up to him. 

It’s the photo from the Good Days, capital G, capital D. The photo from back before -- back before life happened. They are both tan, and young, and looking as though they’ve just competed in a fun family three-legged race contest or some other such joyful, innocent, salt-of-the-earth, life-is-great kind of activity.

And now the photo inserted into the small digital corner where we can identify ourselves visually on FB telegraphs all that can be lost. All that makes us tear our hair out.

The haunting nature of life on earth defined. You like this? It will be gone. 

You like living? You love your family? They may disappear in ways you will never, ever forget.

For a long time, I kept his online obit bookmarked on my phone so I would have to thumb over it to get to Facebook or whatever site I was seeking to access. Like that 'finger in the wounds that are still infected,' which Elena Ferrante talks about. Almost as if to say, Jeanne, do whatever you need to do, smile and laugh and cross 1,000 tasks off your to-do list, but your friend’s brother committed suicide and nothing can reverse that fact. 

It’s like a slow-moving virus, silent and stealthy, and you won’t know who it’s stalking until it’s too late.

Why does this photo haunt me so much? How I feel doesn’t quite square with the facts. He was not my brother and while she is a good friend, she was never my best friend or anything like that. I don’t even know if my visceral reaction can be explained by saying I like her very much. The reaction in fact is a mystery – somehow this photo of someone else’s life triggers a reaction in me similar to all the other deaths on my account – Tom, Uncle Joe, my father-in-law. 

In fact, it’s like that photo I have of Uncle Joe with his parents (my grandparents), in the kitchen in Bayonne, back before. Back before my grandmother died young or at least, too early for me to know her, back before my uncle also died young (or at least before his time, as we like to say).

The photo of my friend with her brother long before suicide caught him is sorted in my brain in a box near the one that houses the photo of my uncle, my fun-loving uncle whom I never knew as much as I wished.

I'm thinking about this now all the more so, perhaps, because of the Bourdain movie, which I tried desperately to see at one of the local arthouse movie theaters in Hartford. (I will try to see it on CNN, I guess, because I think it will be screened at some point). 

While we were watching Anthony Bourdain on TV, vicariously enjoying his culinary and global adventures, suicide was out there, stalking him, from country to country, maybe.

Perhaps given the nature of his fame -- that he was known by millions of people all over the world -- we are seeing suicide in a new light. Paying attention to it in the way we should. Maybe.

In any event, to my friend's brother I say: Rest in peace. You are mourned by people whom you never even met.

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