The Past Possesses all that is Present for better or worse

When Dr. Sexson mentioned at the beginning of the semester that one, if not a few of us, were going to loose someone very close to us, I’m sure everyone was thinking the same thing, “he’s probably right, but I hope it’s not me”. I had forgot his prediction till he mentioned it in class yesterday and unfortunately I had a very close friend die a couple months ago. He was the kind of person that you know through your parents, my dad and his dad went to college together and afterwards his dad bought some property in Mexico, where we would meet every couple years. Dillon was someone I knew from the time that we were about five or six years old, not someone that I would call a best friend, by any means, but like a cousin. Someone who you know better than most of your friends and someone who knows you the same, just because you’ve seen each other grow up and the changes that come along with that. I didn’t think that I would see the end to those changes for a very long time but Dillon ended his life with a shot to the head. This ties even further into what we are doing in class in relation to Hector’s wife coming to terms with the fact that she has to let her child die. Dillon was fully ready to end his life, and had made the preparations necessary to take care of his body after he was gone. He wrote a letter to his parents stating that he wanted to be cremated and have half his ashes spread over the mountains in Colorado, where he spent much of his childhood, and the other half over the Caribbean in Mexico where we had spent so many times snorkeling, cooking, and laughing with our families. He stamped that letter and sent it off the day he shot himself, but he didn’t say his goodbyes over a letter, instead he called his parents 300 miles south of him at their home in California, and told them that he was going to kill himself and there was nothing that they could do, it was time.
It’s hard to judge what’s worse; the fact that he killed himself in the first place or that he called his parents to say goodbye. I’m sure his intentions were not malicious in calling to say goodbye, but I imagine the sense of panic his parents felt was very similar to the sense of panic Hector’s wife felt when she heard the news her son must be killed. Of course there are some differences; Dillon took his own life while Hector’s son was being murdered, but all the same the terror and fright that both must have felt is something that brings tears to my eyes.
Now that Dillon is gone, his parents are dealing with this sense that he is dead and they are alive as best they can. I can only imagine they are wondering what they could have done to stop this tragedy, because the young are suppose to bury their elders not the other way around.