Yesterday I went to the funeral of a young man named Nick who died because he chose to take his life. He was just 41, and he shot himself.

The funeral service struck me for its earnestness, but also for the priest’s attempts to make everyone feel better about the fact that we could have done nothing to prevent this. God forgives us.

I squirmed and wrestled in my seat about all that, and I am still wrestling.

I saw Nick just a few days earlier in front of EarthFare, and we waved at each other and he smiled at me, his ironic Irish smile not much different from any other time I had seen him, really. Dark-haired and handsome, a bit smartass and smirking, Nick was smooth and cool and below the waves. But yes, yes, something, when I got in my car, something crossed my mind, a small thread of a thought, an instinctual feeling that Nick was not feeling great and that he looked sad and resigned.

I should have turned back and asked him something — asked him how he was doing — but I didn’t. I didn’t stop, and I did not ask. I had stuff to do, places to go, and so I tended no hand into Nick’s life, no sense of my presence. I am not sure that it could have made a difference — I don’t know what was happening in Nick’s life — but I like to think that it would have because at times I wished that someone had done the same for me.

Three years ago I came back from spending a year away, in Italy, where I grew up, and upon my return I found a place entirely changed: I had lost my lover of ten years, my cat – an animal I loved like a child – and a home. I traveled the streets of Charleston like a ghost, and no one, with rare exceptions, tended me a hand or a smile, or an invitation to dinner, or a hug, and at night I cried myself to sleep night after night for months on end, with no one but my resilience to hold me. My loneliness was deep live a cave.

It reminded me of the end of my marriage, ten years earlier, when everyone in Charleston seemed poised to throw some stone at me and leave me dead in a ditch. Even people who I had been friends with for many years and who ate at my dinner table and who I cared about failed to show up, to be there for me. Judgment was all that mattered — not my truth. And at night I went home and choked on my tears because I had lost so much and there was no one to make it better. I felt like I was entirely alone in negotiating what appeared to be an insurmountable situation.

I, contrary to Nick, I was able to pull through it—not without Nick’s very same thoughts—and I still live. And, of course, every life is different, lived uniquely and with one soul. We cannot walk in the steps of one single other human being.

But, it is also true that life is hard, and that we are fragile. And it is also true that we fail, often, to shine light in the path of other people’s lives. We fail to ask, we fail to listen, we fail to hug, to hold, to give. We fail to offer compassion and kindness and understanding. We fail to show up. And as a result people are alone. We are alone.

Suicides happen because people want to die. They really do not want to live anymore. I like to believe that someone could change that, that someone could offer someone a reason to live, and of course I think it is true. It is possible. As the guy who, while planning his jump from the Golden Gate Bridge, wrote in his suicide note, if just one person smiles at me while I cross the bridge, I will not jump.

Let us all be that smile.

Love to Nick and to his family.