This started as a comment on a post by laurenjwalter but took on a life of its own. Rather than go off-topic on her comment thread, I decided to make it into its own post.

When I was 12, a dear friend committed suicide. He worked at the barn where I rode;  he was a beautiful 22 year old boy who was friendly and loving and wonderful with horses and my friend and I had the biggest crushes on him which he was outstandingly generous and tactful in the way he handled.

I remember the last time I saw him alive. It was the weekend of a horse show, and he was transparent with exhaustion - it was his job to feed and care for everyone's horses, help with trailering and grooming and a thousand other jobs. And that morning a car had driven through part of a fence, then backed out and driven away without telling anyone. By the time he arrived at work, before dawn, dozens of horses were roaming a well-trafficked road. He chased them all down, caught them, fixed the fence, and made it to the show barn in time to do all the other things he was supposed to do.

I had a mare who was legendary for refusing to load properly into a horse trailer. I don't know what trauma or bad trainer had made her that way;  she had come to us like that. It was one of her few flaws. "We'll get that bitch to load," said a visiting trainer, a man whose precise reason for being there I can't remember - although I will remember him the rest of my life as an exercise in evil, a human skin stretched over abomination. If I ever cast the Devil in a movie I will cast that man. I was young and easily swayed by my mother, who was there, which is the only explanation I can give for why I put up with what seemed so wrong to me even at the time. He tried to drive my mare into the trailer, tried to frighten her, force her, beat her in. He hit my mare in the head with a 2 by 4. She was rearing, plunging, soaked with foam, and no closer to getting into the trailer to go home. This had gone on for hours. At one point I pleaded to be allowed to get on my mare and ride her home, but it was too far with too much traffic and I wasn't allowed.  My mother was near-hysterical;  I don't know why she never resisted what was happening, but apparently the force of the evil trainer's personality was such that it overwhelmed her good sense.

That was when the boy stepped in. He was young, half the age of the trainer, and he had no authority, but he took the lead line from the trainer and told him to go away, far away where the mare couldn't see him. And he caressed her and spoke to her and breathed on her, and then he walked into the trailer and she walked up right behind him and I rushed and shut the ramp. 

My mother was calling him eleven kinds of saint and savior. I had no words, I just stared in wonder. He was pale that day, with black hollows around his eyes, such beautiful brown eyes. I wanted to be near him, to say something, and I lingered while my mother started the truck. He looked at me and smiled, so tired I could see all the bones beneath his flesh, and he said, "I'd like to hit him with a two by four." And he went back to his work.

I fell in love with him then, real love, not a child's crush. I dreamed of him that night. It's the first sexual dream I ever had that I can remember. In the dream we were making love, only the dream kept veering away at crucial moments because I had never experienced what I was dreaming and couldn't really imagine it, so it dissolved into a dream of wonderful brown eyes, strong supple gentle hands, beautiful muscled back and arms as he stood on the washrack in the sweltering summer and ran the hose over himself to cool down.

Like a Victorian heroine, I was in love with a stable boy.  So was my best friend and next door neighbor (age 11.)  So was my best friend among the other girls who rode at the barn (age 15), and one of the riding instructors at our barn who was the closest thing he had to an official girlfriend (age 22, I think), and so was a spectacular trophy wife who took riding lessons there and was fighting with her husband and wanted to have an affair but the rumor was he wouldn't sleep with a married lady (age 30 something, I would guess, but she had had a lot of work done.)

The next day my grandmother picked me and my next-door neighbor up from school and drove us to the barn to drop us off for riding lessons as usual. My mother's car was there as we pulled into the yard, which was unusual. And when my mother emerged from the barn and strode quickly towards the car, I knew something was very wrong. My grandmother rolled the window down.

"There are no riding lessons today, take the girls home," my mother said. "Patrick has killed himself."

I lost my breath, as if someone had punched me in the gut. I needed to scream, but I couldn't breathe. Then I was breathing, sucking in air, in a breath that wouldn't stop. I will remember the way that breath felt until I die. Then I did scream. My next-door neighbor was screaming too, with tears streaming down her face, and when I stopped, she couldn't stop.

My grandmother took us home, and we spent the day weeping and eating ice cream sundaes, my grandfather's answer to childhood griefs. My grandmother brought out a calligraphy set she had bought against future birthdays and my friend and I wrote our names and his name, Patrick Patrick Patrick in glorious curves and sweeps. "It's the first time the children have ever been touched by death," said my grandmother, over and over. She was an actress and had more than a streak of the dramatic about her.

The whole story came out when my mother came to pick us up later that night. Although he had never mentioned it to anyone, Patrick had once been in the Navy. He had run away because he couldn't take it, and lived for four years working off the payroll at menial jobs and hiding from the government. At our barn he had fallen in love;  his girlfriend wanted to know why he couldn't get married, why he wouldn't get a better job, and the stress of living a lie was too much for him. So he called all his friends one last time to say goodbye. He didn't reach me, he tried to reach my mother and failed, but he reached my 15 year old friend, and she was so freaked out by his mood that she begged her mom to do something, call someone, but it was a school night and her mother told her not to be ridiculous. So she went to bed. She was the last person ever to speak to him. He hanged himself, alone in his apartment. The barn manager found him the next day when she went over to see why he hadn't arrived at work. He had stood on a chair to hang himself. The drop hadn't been far enough to break his neck;  he had strangled;  there was evidence he had tried to pull himself up and failed.

Such a strong person, strong enough to stand up to a powerfully-built man twice his age with twice his authority, for the sake of a horse;  yet not strong enough to face his own mistakes, to go to prison for something stupid he had done when he was only 18. Such a gentle, beautiful, wasted life. So many people loved him so very much. 

The newspaper headline the next day said, "AWOL Sailor found Hanged."

I don't remember the name of the reporter. I did at one time. I remembered it for years and years. It was the Commercial Appeal, still Memphis's paper today, that published that article, and I hated the Appeal for a long time and read the Press Scimitar instead until it went out of business. I wrote the reporter a letter, my first ever letter to a newspaper, suggesting that they should think about the feelings of those connected to the articles they wrote. 

No one was able to find any next-of-kin to notify, and so the body couldn't be released. There was no funeral, and in those days there could be no church service, not in a Southern church, not for a suicide. There was a memorial service in a nasty brown-carpeted modern chapel at a funeral home, led by a priest who had never met Patrick.

"I don't know what to say," he said. "I only trust that God must be kinder than human beings are." And we cried, all of us together, standing room only in that stingy little chapel, thinking of that beautiful strong young body lying in a freezer. Halfway through the service the trophy wife walked in with her usually-perfect makeup streaming down her face and a black eye;  her husband had forbidden her to attend the service, and she had left him at last, finally and forever.

A year later his body was released, but there was no one to claim it. His girlfriend paid for a pauper's funeral. The adults at the barn discussed paying for a stone, and I think there was a stone eventually, but I didn't go to see it.  I couldn't think of Patrick.

So much more than an AWOL Sailor found hanged. A person, a person who once dared me to touch my boot to the electric fence, did it himself and laughed because he knew all along the fence wasn't on. A person who taught me the old wives' tale that you must never let a writing spider see your teeth or it will write your name in its web and you will die. A person who horses trusted and children went to when they needed betadine and a bandaid. Fuck you, newspaper reporter, whoever you were, wherever you are today. Fuck you and all like you who live to add pain to pain and get paid for doing it.  Oh please, all of you, remember, each headline is about a someone. Go gently. I've done it too, commented blithely or nastily about someone else's tragedy. Forgotten that I was speaking to or about someone like myself. We have so much power as writers, as people. Let's be kind to one another.