tl;dr It sucked. It still sucks, but less.

I was a senior in high school, he graduated the year before me and lived down the street. We grew up together. I came home for lunch between classes and there were police cars near his house, not that uncommon since his dad was always mixed up in some shady business. Ate lunch, hopped back in my car, went back to school. I got home that afternoon around 3:30 and his older brother was sitting on the steps in front of my house. I walked up to him, he was crying. I asked him what was the matter. His brother shot himself early that morning.

I saw my friend the day before, everything seemed fine. He was tired. He and his girlfriend were fighting (normal). He was tired of working third shift. We talked for maybe ten minutes, we made plans to hang out and drink some beers that weekend. Everything was fine.

Everything wasn't fine. His girlfriend had a miscarriage. His oldest brother was in prison. His youngest brother had just gotten a girl pregnant, he was 15. His parents were divorced, his dad sold drugs and stole copper pipe and his mom was never grown up enough to have four sons. Everything was a mess. Just because it was the status quo didn't mean it sucked any less.

I drank a lot of whiskey the afternoon of the funeral. My mom told me not to go to school that day so I spent the morning sitting in my parents' kitchen wearing a black suit drinking my dad's whiskey. I sat on the curb across from my church drinking whiskey from a flask and smoking cigarettes. His mom walked out the front doors of the church and came up to me and sat down next to me on the curb. She had a drink and smoked some of my cigarette. She complained that it wasn't a menthol. We went into the church, she asked me to sit next to her. I started crying before his brothers and mother and father and stepfather. I felt terrible. His mom put her arm around me and comforted me during her own son's funeral. It was awful.

He didn't leave a note. He shot himself with his dad's Glock 21 in the shed behind their house. Two weeks after the funeral his dad knocked on my front door and asked me if I'd come down and help him with something. We tore down the shed. It fucking sucked. We loaded the boards into the back of my dad's truck and some of them had remnants of something on them, blood or old dark reddish brown paint. His dad was drunk. I went home and my dad and I drove out to the country and burned the boards and shingles into a cloud of black smoke.

Everything seemed symbolic and everything related to death and suicide for almost a whole year. The next year, less so. Even less so each year after. Great things have happened since then, not so great things have happened. Life goes on. I'm still upset that he shot himself, upset that he didn't tell me he was going to do it after hearing about everything in his life almost every day for seventeen years. I would have tried to stop him. If I could go back I'd still try to stop him.