Elaine.

I found out on Saturday that Elaine, one of the two staff writers from BC magazine where I used to work, tragically committed suicide last Friday.

When I heard, I really didn't know what to do, I didn't know what to say, I didn't know how I felt other than I knew I felt insensibly bad. Since then, thinking about it I have to admit that I didn't know Elaine terribly well, we worked together in an office where we never really talked, but sometimes, even all you have with another person is a shared awareness that you're both alive, that they will share in part of your own life's memory and as such the death of that person is inexpressibly tragic, woefully all encompassing, personally devastating.

It's funny, now that I want to try and describe her I find I can't, or maybe it's that I don't want to try because now that she's not here to disprove my inevitably innacurate description of her, my insipid simplification of her life, I don't want to confine her to words like "a good person" and "sweet" because they're not who she was. She was so much more than that. She was a living, breathing person with all the millions of unique traits both good and bad that we all have and that's the tragedy, the world is a little less special now that she's gone. It's selfish for the rest of us who are still here and who knew her, but we can't help it, I know I can't. I miss her. Even though I didn't know her very well.

It's funny, for the most part we really do live in a culture of denial when it comes to death. Anti-aging this and plastic Beyonce that, death is really not something that we like to acknowledge. It's just something we genuinely wish wasn't there at all and the denial is so huge that it dwarves any ability on our part to compare it to something in our lives that we understand, something ordinary. Death, it seems, is an emotional trigger we can't stand being pulled.

Our denial is mostly made easy by the fact that for the most part, all the people who are reading this, ie. people with computers, treat death as a rather unnatural part of their lives because the seldom experience it in others and never in themselves and when it does happen to others it's usually to people that you can kind of tell are going to die. So, when we are confronted with sudden death, the very rapidity of it means that it's something that we can't ignore because the absence of that person, combined with the total lack of solid dependable knowledge as to what has really happened to them means that we are confronted by a reality much realer than the one we've been living in. We find ourselves stumped as to how to deal with this new reality, we wish that we could go back to living in the old one because it was a lot less complicated and it didn't hurt as much. Death brings desperation. In response to this problem some turn to religion, others to addiction, many just shut down from the all encompassing nature of the pain, living for the rest of their lives in quiet, unassailable agony. I wonder, is there another option?

I am one of the luckier ones in that with regards to Elaine's death, I was on the emotional periphery because I didn't know her very well. Sadly enough, I can deal with it, apparently this event is not large enough for me to really learn anything really real about death. My sadness aside I can fall back into my life and this merely ends the chapter marked "Elaine" in my head, in the story of my life. I think the real tragedy of suicide is for the people who are closer to the dead, those who cannot escape or evade the pain. Elaine impacted on many people throughout her life, more than she knew, more than any of us knew.

The saddest thing of all is that if suicides knew how many people will genuinely miss them after they are gone, they'd probably never do it in the first place..