I guess I'll go ahead and write mine.
I started dating my girlfriend about 5 1/2 years ago. She had a little sister (I'll call her L) about 3 years younger that looked a lot like her. They were both very pretty and were into a lot of the same things since they grew up together.
At the beginning of the relationship I was pretty close with L. We were pretty good friends. She would come out with me and her sister to hang out, party, to do whatever. She was interesting to talk to; she was always really fascinated by space. We would get kind of tipsy and have long conversations about what infinity is, what we think of god...you know those beer-fueled 3am conversations.
Around the three year mark I started noticing subtle changes in her behavior. She wasn't taking care of herself. She started to leave her laundry in piles on her floor. She wasn't showering very often. She started spending hours upon hours on Facebook just scrolling through pictures of people and listening to music. I guess no one really thought much of this at the time.
What really tipped me off that something was off was what she said one night. She and my gf went to meet someone to get pot one night. I texted something to my gf like, "I know you're getting pot right now" or something similar because I just had a hunch. L, for some reason, was entirely convinced afterwards that I had bugged their phones with tracking devices and was monitoring their conversations through the microphone.
I wasn't even really sure what to say about this. It was extremely weird. She really believed it...with conviction. I just kind of avoided the topic when my gf brought it up because it was ludicrous. This went on for about three weeks and then took a turn for the weirder. I walked into the house one night after class (like I usually did on Thurs.) and L was sitting at her desk with a towel over the monitor because "she didn't want them to see her".
I told my gf and her mom that something was clearly wrong with her and that it was getting worse. I don't know if it was denial or what, but her mom didn't seem to share my outlook. The household just kept getting more and more strange and eventually I stopped going there altogether.
My gf was starting to finally come around and realize that something was really wrong with her behavior. L was drinking all the time, not socializing with anyone, kept absolutely horrible personal hygiene and became absolutely obsessed with the concept of death. What happens when we die? Is God real?
Her mother finally brought her to a psych that diagnosed her with Schizo-effective Disorder and put her on a myriad of different drugs which seemed to only make matters worse. L was also, for whatever reason, in charge of her own medication and would constantly miss doses of anti-psychotics and SSRIs which I imagine made her symptoms a million times worse.
Sometime around last semester I was talking to my girlfriend on gchat and doing homework. My gf stopped replying for a long time and I was starting to get worried. I called and got no answer. No reply to texts. Turns out her sister had gotten the pistol from her mom's bedroom, went to the driveway and shot herself in the head.
It was a nightmare trying to console my gf. It really all seemed to come out of nowhere because L was completely normal when I had met her and now she was dead. I think about it a lot. Mental illness is very scary.