Of Learning to Pay Attention
September 21, 2026
Raj and I were friends in college. He and I and a big guy who knew Raj used to hang out in the rooming house where I was the manager and janitor in exchange for reduced rent. Other residents gathered with us in the communal kitchen: Abbas, an Iranian engineer who had a cat named Little Goldie, his only companion in the world; Lucky, an ex-con in a Chicago Police leather jacket, who had worked the captive-bolt gun at a slaughterhouse and loved his job; his girlfriend and another young woman in bonnets and flip-flops, talking only between themselves; a Chinese national who insisted angrily we call him Isaac, his confirmation name, after he understood the joke in the big guy’s pronunciation of his surname.
Raj was a good-looking, funny, smart kid majoring in business. He said he felt a lot of pressure from his family to be successful, and they were already disappointed he was not at Northwestern. He gassed himself in a Mercedes in his parents’ garage, over Thanksgiving break as I remember. Part of the shock of it to me was, I have not paid close enough attention.
The root of that was not just grief, guilt, or frustration, but fear. This starts in childhood, when grownups suddenly begin whispering about some person or event, and even a child can see that there is more going on than they have been told, and that that more will make a lie of stories they have trusted to be true. My family and town kept their small powers in secrets, like bonds. Once when I was a kid, a neighbor’s son, who had been in Vietnam, was also found in the garage, as the euphemism goes. For a few seconds I did not understand the puzzling innuendo of loss or transgression. Had he gone somewhere he was not meant to go? Later I heard “with a belt,” but had to ask to be sure it meant what I thought it did. When I look up the incident online now, I see the young man was only 24, was married, and had children. I had no idea then, so I think: I have not remembered well enough.
Long after I left the army myself, I met a former officer named Jeff at a reunion. We were the same age and had been in the same field but had never served together. We had a lively few hours with friends and went to our homes across the country. Later, to my surprise, he started calling me to talk, often when I was trying to do something else, such as watch my son’s Little League games. He did all the talking, compulsively, at great length. In the war he had been put in charge of a group of Iraqi soldiers. They got wiped out, and he blamed himself, though others said he bore no responsibility. Eventually he stopped calling, then he died by his own hand, as they say. (Having survived the war and become a recluse on an isolated farm, who else’s hand would it be?) For a time the voice said: I could have been a better friend by being more present.
I think more, now that I am older, about what else in my social life I should see, ask, remember, and do, while there is time, even when I can do little. Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald: Relationships are the brutality that sustains.
