I don’t know how we became best friends. We just did. And the friendship deepened in the last a few months before he ended his young angelic life.

Tom and I loved the roughhouse matches we played with our Coach, Mr. Jackson. Coach Jackson was a grown up version of Tom. He was athletic, charming, and could run like the wind. The trick to the “matches” was to smack Coach on the ass with his clipboard - when he wasn’t paying attention - and then try to outrun him before he could tackle you and grind you into the playing field; leaving the clothes your mom had worked so hard to wash and iron for school in a wrinkled mess of grass stains and dirt.

Tom and I always lost the roughhouse matches, but that never stopped us from trying. And I think losing was the point. It made us feel special and the girls loved cheering and watching us get pummeled by Coach.

About two weeks before Tom took his life he began telling those of us who were his friends what he was planning to do. Because Tom was so gregarious and outgoing none of us took him seriously. He was just messing around. He had to be. Everybody joked about doing it. After all, nobody we knew had ever committed suicide. Kids who committed suicide were older and on drugs or crazy or came from bad homes. Tom’s life was characterized by none of those things. He lived a charmed life, had genuinely caring parents, and was blessed as a boy could be.

On the day before he died Tom and I were walking in a ravine near his house. He told me I was his best friend, the only friend who really understood him, and that he wanted me to have his faux raccoon coat. Tom was the first to wear wild fashions at our school. He loved his weird raccoon coat and his black and white saddle shoes. I continued wearing my “squad cars” for years after he died. I never took the coat.

As a kid of 12 I had very little understanding of the permanence of what Tom said he was going to do. None of his friends did. We all assumed he’d be at school the next day and we’d all be goofing and messing around like we always did. Even when he said “goodbye” to me I could not put it together - despite the strangeness of how it felt.

On Wednesday morning, February 16, 1966 I woke feeling horribly uneasy. I told my parents what Tom said he was going to do and we immediately called his house.

His lovely older sister answered the phone that terrible morning. I will never forget our brief conversation as long as I live. “Hi, this is Dennis. Is Tom there?” I asked, remembering the manners I had drilled into me as a kid. 

His sister softly and quietly replied, “No. He died last night.”

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Tom’s service was held at the Episcopal Church. His coffin was closed. The Cleric did his best to comfort us young boys about the death of our friend, but honestly he wasn’t too good at that part of his job.

All I can remember of those terrible, nightmarish days was hearing the Mama’s and Papa’s singing, “California Dreaming” on the radio. I can recall standing on a steep grassy knoll at Rose Hills Memorial Park as Tom’s casket was lowered into the ground. The wind was blowing, the sun shining, and I was feeling the strangeness of a world that my best friend was no longer in - though I kept expecting to see him at any moment, walking toward me and shouting at me in his familiar excited voice.

I wrestled for years feeling I was to blame for Tom’s death. I still feel I was. I was his best friend. I failed him. When it mattered most. If I had only taken him seriously and called the night before, the day before, the week before, Tom might still be alive.

Years later, I wanted to ask his parents to forgive me. But my parents counseled me to leave those dear grieving folks alone and not stir the awful memory afresh in their hearts and minds. I fought that advice hard until I realized I would only be trying to make myself feel better. My need to feel exorcized was robbing me of any sort of sensitivity as to what it would be like to remember finding your 13 year old son had taken his own life.

Not long ago I made my peace with my old best friend. I stood at his grave, on a windy sunny day - much like the day he was buried. With my teenage daughter at my side, holding my hand, I told Tom how very, very, sorry I was for having failed him. He’d heard it before. Thousands of times in fact. But this time another teenager heard it too. And I am certain she will never fail her friends.

She will make the call that I did not. She will understand that suicide - no matter how jokingly referred to - is a deadly serious thing.

That doesn’t bring Tom back. Nothing can do that. But I know he’d smile and shove me and tell me it was okay now. And that he is okay too.