Remembering Dan

Reflections 6 Months After My 21-Year-Old Brother’s Suicide

You can listen to my audio recording of this piece here.

Update 2025: This entire piece was written (and audio recorded) over the course of 3 weeks in November of 2019. Over the following years, I considered writing a peice called ‘Remembering Libby’ about my own journey back to myself during this time. While that piece never emerged, I decided to embark on sharing bits of my journey 5 years later, through a 5 part piece. You can explore that here.

Nameless, a poem

What we allow to remain nameless

Lingers quietly in our subconscious,

puppeteering our behavior,

weaving unintended consequences

Undetected.

The indefinable left Undefined,

The nameless left Unnamed,

Will leave us gasping for air

From the rope we tied round our own necks.

—LH, 11/5/2019

Disclaimers:

(1) This is not an article, so much as an exposé into the mind of someone freshly processing their brother’s suicide. It’s not a click-bait, quick fix on how to self-care your way to a smiling face, or get more arbitrary work done in a shorter amount of time (though I think those things become more viable when we confront the true wounds we hold.) It is my genuine attempt at scraping my heart clean of the ashes left from a fire I’ve burned alive in the last 6 months. I share these thoughts to be free of them, and to give at least one person an out in a workaholic world that could care less for your emotional recovery. My intention is to shed light on the consequences on ourselves and those we love, when we plunge past heartache, depression, and trauma untreated in the name of “work.”

(2) I’m much less interested in anyone reading my words, and much more interested in one other person taking time out of their busy life, to courageously show up for themselves and the people around them. My words are just an exhausted attempt at making intellectual sense of things that are, ultimately, experiential. And if there is anything I’ve found experientially, to be true, it is this: There is nothing more important in this noisy, over-stimulated, digital age than to honor your time, and there is nothing more beautiful to do with your time than walk away from those who don’t honor it, and learn to share it freely and generously and purposefully with that and those you love. Here are 8 better things to do than read this article: (1) Call someone and share as best as you can, how you are actually doing, and let them be there for you. (2) Tell someone you love deeply how they’ve impacted your life. (3) Reach out to your family, biological or otherwise, and ask them how you can better support them, and truly listen. (4) Forgive the person you’ve been unforgiving of. (5) Care for someone you see daily in a way you’ve never received it. (6) Hug somebody, long enough to feel it. (7) Break the bubble of silence between you and your partner, and choose to see them as bigger than the person they’ve projected to you in this moment. (8) Ask yourself where you are truly in pain, and confront it. And at the very least, look clearly in the eye of a world demanding your attention left and right — demanding it even more than it demands your body, land, labor, and money, and say boldly, “This belongs to me.” You are the sole owner of your attention, and you deserve to place it in the hands of someone who treasures your flourishing. And in this world, there are few. The only benefit to reading my words now, is to provide your brain ample evidence of the consequences and heartache experienced when we miss these opportunities.

(3) I am not a medical professional, but I have tried to live with integrity, and I think that’s a quality our culture greatly overlooks. My name is Libby. I’m 24. I’ve spent the last 2 years living in the houses of young and old, sick and healthy, rich and poor on farms and townships and homes around the world. I often feel lonely in a search for people more interested in pushing the radical capabilities of the human mind, than settling for safety and comfort. I often feel unfulfilled in a search for organizations that prioritize the 100% value of every human being, over growth and effectiveness at their cost. I call myself a “graphic designer” when I want to keep a conversation short, but ultimately aspire to create more integrative, restorative and inter-dependent approaches to human health. My brother’s visions were not distinct from mine, and his death, which came in the midst of my research, devastated, bewildered, and exhausted me on so many levels. He was the one person in my life I didn’t worry about. Sharing this story, feels like my only way of moving forward with my life.

(4) An editor might tell me to scrap all this and go for a “how-to” article, but I think my radical honesty is more interesting for both of us. And though I risk the internet treating me ruthlessly in my vulnerability; my open and reaching hand in the hope that someone else will reach back, more interested in what we don’t know, what we can’t see, and what hasn’t been done, than all that is and which we operate on in our default settings, feels like the only worthwhile action left to take now.

(5) My interest in any readership of this, is purely selfish. I share with you not because I have answers that deserve uplifting, but because I yearn for relationship with people willing to face this life with a greater sense of openness, patience, and the genuine sense of humor and faith it takes to persist in anything as difficult as living from love. We already have to accept the inevitability of death, must we also live life like it is unpredictable too?

1 | Reflections on Powerlessness/Agency

There’s a moment between waking and sleeping where, in the mental silencing of your distanced alarm, the nauseating hum of your belly, and the emotional disconnect from reality, you lie there, barely feeling that your body’s yours and wonder — do I have to wake from this?

Anyone who’s experienced unemployment, heartbreak, or both at the same time, knows the way that moment extends into the better half of their day. After someone you love dies (although I should preface that person for me was 2 ½ years younger than me, my brother, 21 and died from suicide), that small moment becomes a flash of terror. A moment where the world closes in on itself like the snapping shut of a good book, and you beg the ending not to be true.

When it had just happened, I told my boss: “It’s been a week, I think I’m ready to go back to work.”And under some strange conception of time, and disconnected understanding of the human mind, I thought that was true.

“I think everyone just doesn’t have a full enough picture of life and death,” I had told my older sister, lying in a hammock in our families backyard reflecting on the lack of tears I had for the situation.

Those first weeks, I felt little other than the intellectual understanding that death is real, and the bubbling anger of loss, a much easier emotion than acknowledging the thousand unaddressed cuts to the soul — unaware of the pain I’d feel when the rush of real life hit them, the true length of time they’d take to heal over and the mark they’d leave; the way they linger and scab when unaddressed, the way I didn’t want to face them because it meant it would be true.

“Do you think you’re numb?” someone had asked me at his visitation 2 days after I had come from a weekend trip to Yosemite, drove straight to my job at a gym, taught some classes, drove over to a mystery-open mic night in the heart of San Francisco, received a phone call that my brother was dead, packed up the apartment I’d lived in the last 7 months, taken an overnight plane to Michigan, walked into the house I’d called home the last 10 years to a gathering of people I’d known at strange and disjointed points in my life, looked into my father’s glistening eyes with a joy to see me and softness so great I was sure he was the one who’d died and here he was back to tell me he loved me, escaped in a car to my little sister’s apartment, taken a shower to rub off the day of crying and the sleepless airport, sat on her bed as the first sunshine poured in the window after 7 days of gray clouds she said, got back in a car to a funeral home where I held the dead face of my favorite person on this earth between my hands, his skin cold, his perfectly good eyes and organs carved out for someone new beneath what was forcefully glued shut, went home to a room we’d gathered 4 mattresses in and shared it with 8 bodies, 8 mourning hearts, held my 11 year old brother as he fell asleep, cried myself to sleep in the arms of my brother’s girlfriend, woke up, put on red lipstick and a black dress and walked into a church open house some more functional family members had put together of his artwork and photographs, and now stood greeting strangers and extended family and people of my past as they apologized for something I could not, did not, would not comprehend though I would continue to stand and put words to as if I did.

…so “was I numb?”

How can you be numb when time has become superficial and you don’t know what’s more real: the light that lingers in the eyes of a still photograph of someone whose physical presence on this earth no longer exists, the image of his young, hollow face with no blood in it stuck in the back of your mind, the childish feeling dancing in your heart of every moment you’ve spent together with them, or the unending, mysterious, unanswerable questions that remain about their pain and their incapability to express it?

Numb was kind of simple.

I’ve struggled to invite people into my anxiety, depression, sadness, and new hope over the last 6 months, but I have continuously tried to, because I genuinely think Dan would still be here if he could have done it too.

But you cannot blame anyone for not having words to express something incomprehensible in themselves, comprehensively to others, especially with hopes that someone whose life hasn’t just got turned upside down, will understand it.

But for the sake of my wordless brother, and for the sake of the extended community I belong to, whose hearts remain broken, I am going to try to express my story. Not in the effort to bring light to my own significance, but to share who my brother Daniel John Hoffman was, and how lucky I am to have had him change my life.

Lastly, so many non-family members have expressed the guilt they feel in stating how upset they are over this, that their pain somehow “isn’t as great,” and “they know ours is worse.”

Why? Because you weren’t related to him by blood? Because you hadn’t seen him in years?

Dan did not view his family as those who had the same blood as him. He looked you in the eye, no matter where you’d come from or where you were going and made you into his brother, his sister, or his friend.

If you had the privilege of sharing one or many of those moments with Dan, your heart understands the loss of his presence on this earth. Your pain is not what anyone else labels it; it is what your body tells you it is. And any heart who’s known true love, will break at its loss.

Let your heart be broken.

To those who didn’t know him as a friend, who didn’t know what it was like to need his presence in your life, to await his insight, to count down the moments until you saw him, to stay up late and wake up early with him: May my words offer remembrance of what that was like, and may we all learn what we can from his example.

2 | Reflections on Loss/Presence

Life already has a strange and shallow heartbreak to it but it’s the presence of one person whose struggle is similar to yours, whose questions are echoed in what keeps you up at night, who finds delight in the strangest and weirdest of observations, that makes it bearable.

It’s that twin soul lingering, sharing the journey with you, journeying in their own way, then there to stroke your hair when a dark night falls and cheer you on in the stumble forward, who makes the days worth living.

It’s one person’s eyes equally aglow for what lights you up, that dims the ache of existential wonder.

American media often labels that ache as a curable loneliness, curable by a sexy love-affair, or the simple verbal acceptance of Christ, or the un-interrogated pursuit of work, success and fame. I’ve never bought that. The only place to remedy that lonely and vast searching for true connection, has been to accept the life-long journey of the search itself, and to share in discovery with those also in it. And I believe Dan felt that way too. We both had lots of friends, jobs, and passions, Dan in a more calculated and focused manner than I. Dan had a steady partner; I dated around. But we always came back to each other, through our complementary seasons of exploration to share new thoughts and beliefs like they were candy brands to be tried and tested.

Over the last 6 years, I’ve started and led multiple organizations. I’ve built friendships with people of all beliefs, backgrounds and cultures. I’ve traveled around the world alone as a woman to places like India, South Africa, Nigeria, and Brazil. People see me as fearless and open, but in reality, I see myself as exerting what energy and love was poured into me… My relationship to Dan through our young adult years that, though anonymous to most of my friends and even family, gave me the courage and wisdom I needed not just to make bold decisions, but be recovered over and over again in my times of defeat.

He was a force of resilience and love, a kind of re-connective tissue during seasons of frantic questioning, frustration, fear and doubt.

When I was home for the holidays, Dan was the person I knew to be across the room, lost in deep conversation, knowing full well we’d regroup at the end of the night. He was the person with whom I could gush unfiltered to, get critical feedback and drawing lessons from, reflect openly without charisma or charm, and simply share space, the sound of his guitar or words of a book with. He had none of the drama of my girlfriends, or pressure of my boyfriends; none of the demands of work, or withholding of my peers.

Dan was my sounding board, my safety, my twin-spirit even in a family of twelve, waiting for me at the end of every endeavor, adventure and escapade; the person I could keep secrets from everyone else with, knowing there was one person who would see me in full, who was growing and struggling and learning in tandem and could accept me truly, non-judgmentally for who I was right now. Dan was the person who had appeared to my eyes just 5 months before on a struggling night in San Francisco, when I cried out for a sign of just one person who was walking this road with me — interrogating with every fiber of their being what it meant to be alive.

And he was there, in my mind, when I fell asleep on May 13, 2019, with the chill of my sister’s phone call, telling me he was missing, and I thought, he will think of me… surely… he will think of me. In the darkness of whatever attempt he’s in, he will come loose.

I’ve come to learn that a lot of people felt that way.

In the last 6 months, the collective heartbreak from his loss has come out in everything from the anger of those who didn’t get a last word with him, to the bewilderment of those who did who felt tricked by his own reassurance to everyone around him that he was fine, he’d be okay, he’d come home, to the quest for purpose and hope that has broken out in all of us between the ages of 11–24 who saw him as our leader.

It’s easy to imagine someone deeply depressed as capable of being swayed by rationality or love, when your healthy brain has been a dance between the two, as if depression is something to be conquered by will and not more like the heavy onset of sleeplessness after being awake for hours, a desperate attempt to keep your eyes open against a pressure you can’t control…

I’m not saying my brother’s condition wasn’t curable, but I’m saying it’s easy to hope, when you love.

It’s easy to see the best when that’s what someone presents. It’s easy to feel courage for someone who is so good at showing it. It’s hard to hear through facades people can’t tell they’re putting up.

It’s hard to hear through vacant promises, when they come from someone who’s kept true ones. It’s hard to hear screaming from a voice so gently saying, “I’m okay.”

In some ways, I feel I’ve come to understand Dan more than ever since he’s died.

• It took 3 weeks for my body to finally react to things I wasn’t allowing my mind to, and it showed up in dizziness and nausea on public buses and planes. I was sleepless and afraid to wake up to be hit by the attacks. It was the fact that he died by suicide and suppression of his own pain that gave me the knowledge to text a group of my friends: “I don’t know what I need, but I know I can’t do this alone.”
• There’s still a polarized way in which I engage with myself in the silence of a bed, head heavy, the hours of echoing silence, internal wrestling, and writing until I feel functional enough to present to others with grace and love, and their unquestioning belief that I’m okay.
• It has taken work, in every conversation, to try to respond honestly. To say, “I don’t know,” and “I can’t explain it,” and “It’s really hard,” but many times I still walk around the topic and talk about work and friends with people because it’s simpler and I don’t want to burden them with life or death questions they might not yet have interrogated themselves.
• I feel endangered at times by my own ability to carry out conversations on seemingly vulnerable subjects that still don’t get at the heart of the confusion or loneliness I feel. Parts of me desire to be asked how I truly am, and at the same time totally fear what would happen if someone did, knowing my own incapability to describe it.
• “My sense of reality just cracked in half,” sounds a bit over-dramatic. “It’s been strange,” sounds overly vague.
• The loudness of the world around me, paired with the loudness in my own head from the heightened sensitivity of unmet emotional needs and the naive blindness in ignoring them, leaves me desperately wondering if anyone is going to pause long enough to acknowledge any of this dimension of living or if we’ll just settle for youtube news and food blogs, forever avoiding the question of what it takes to have the true empathy, care, concern for and deep connection with one another we require, ignoring the real consequences showing up all around us in a world with a persistent inability to even ask the question.
• Most moments are rarely a single moment: I’m both sitting at the table looking at you and in a memory of the past and hanging from the tree he died on all at the same time. Work can be me excitedly responding to my client and turning my eyes to wipe away my tears the next second. Spending time with someone can be both incomparably real and joyful, and followed up with an in-explainable feeling of distance and heartbreak, knowing that new connection comes at the cost of Dan’s life. Most days are ones where I’m both more alive than I’ve ever felt and devastated by the reality that he’ll never share another one with me.

It’s controversial to say, but there are ways in which life has become better since his death. Old anxieties can’t phase me, time feels too short and unpromised now. My general sobriety, the seeking out of supportive friends and family and actually listening to them, has infused a vulnerability I’d never allowed for before. Finding a counselor I could trust who has been fearless in naming my existential questions, has helped me face my mind and heart honestly. I’ve left jobs and relationships that make me feel less than as I’ve learned to name the good in me I actually want to pursue. The walls of hierarchy that once existed, that surely the adults or medical professionals, or educated people, or my family… know some kind of answer out there… has melted in a most sad, but empowering call to my own agency in the search for honest action. I have learned to appreciate both science and religion, acknowledge their individual limitations, and work to make peace in my lived body — in the way I eat, drink, sleep, make eye contact, share in relationship, and seek out things which build on, not burn out my inherent energy. There is noone to wait on or wait for; there is only exchanging knowledge with, and my felt knowledge is deemed worthy of being listened to. I’m better at caring for others. I’m not prolonging my need to learn from my past. I acknowledge my mistakes. I’m quicker to ask for forgiveness, say what I don’t know, ask for help, and pour the most humbled and raw version of myself into the fight for more beauty in the spaces around me. Money, success and the social pressure of “more for the sake of more,” feel simple and boring, as compared to the pursuit of greater energy within myself and my relationships.

But of course all these understandings and behavioral changes come at the real, aching loss of a truly beloved person, whom I’d much rather have come to learn all these things alongside with:

…whose kids I planned to help raise

…whose artistic style I planned to see evolve even more than I already had

…whose door-hinge I planned to stand at in late hours of the night and get advice from

…whose wisdom I planned to have poured into me in short bursts while we did the dishes

…whose struggles I wanted to listen to

…whose journey I wanted to learn from and watch happen stretched out like a canvas full of color

... whose words I wanted to repeat in my journals and to my friends in all their simple grandeur

…whose music I wanted to be inspired by

...whose body I wanted to have midnight dance parties with

…whose cereal bowl I wanted to lean over and steal from

…whose spectrum of laughter I wanted to know by name from half smile, to boyish giggle, to totally losing it

…whose life I wanted to be warmed by

…whose aged self I wanted to sit beside, on some back porch and wonder at how we’d made it through…

The pain dulls as I come to accept his 21 years as a gift, rather than the 79 more I expected as a loss… but that perspective takes work.

On a good day, and a beautiful sunset I can understand that. On a bad day, watching an equally beautiful sunset, I just want him right there appreciating it with me.

These are my reflections 6 months after losing a child, a man, a silly, wild, crazy friend, a resilient, reflective and wise brother, a brilliant, and philosophizing artist, the one and only, the wise, and the truly, deeply beautiful Daniel John Hoffman.

May you go down in history, Dan, as a light this world didn’t know how to keep alive.

And may we do better, every day, at building new light in the corner of the world that suffers in your absence.

3 | Pictures of Dan

Dan was a guitarist and an artist. He loved to paint and draw and always carried around a notebook full of portraits, abstracts and cartoons he was working on, which he’d detail while talking to you. He played harmonica and sang. He loved the Beatles and Queen, James Taylor, Pink Floyd, and the whole 500 Days of Summer and Into the Wild soundtracks. Chris McCandless, a man who burned his money, sold all he owned and walked out into nature, was one of his biggest influences.

His room was covered in anime, Stephen King novels, human anatomy for drawing (a gift from his art teacher who loved him), autobiographies, collections from his favorite author David Foster Wallace, and books on spiritual literature from all religious views though we grew up Christian. He’d have markers, oil pastels or paint trays lying around vibrantly, and always multiple instruments. When I left for college, he let me borrow a guitar, a gift from a girl friend who’d designed all over it with sharpies.

He had thick crazy, wild blonde hair and switched between sets of old fashioned glasses. Sometimes he looked straight out of the 70s. Other times, he looked like a jock, strutting through the house over-confidently with his perfect six pack and tighty whiteys on. He had a girlfriend of 5 years but was more in touch with his feminine side than any straight guy I knew. When there was an excuse to dress up he wasn’t afraid of something skin tight or glittery. He was just that guy. If Dan did it, it was cool.

Dan didn’t seem to be afraid of anything. He loved crazy challenges and dares; the first to recommend skinny dipping in ice cold water, midnight walks, talking to strangers, or taking up strange habits like daily cold showers or eating ghost peppers whole for the fun of it. He once used my Amazon account to order the hottest peppers in the world. We ate them together and I ran around the house screaming, pulled off my shirt and started downing a gallon of milk. He just sat there, in stillness, barely breaking a sweat.

Dan was fiercely dedicated to whatever new thing he’d attached himself to learning. We’d started teaching ourselves guitar at 10 and 13. I got bored after a couple months. He went hard for the next 10 years and proved what I could be if I actually committed to a thing.

He loved the outdoors. Every year we’d go on family camping trips and every summer we’d travel to our Grandma’s cabin in Northern Michigan. He’d be the one setting up the fire from the time we were young. As we got older, old enough to go alone or with his girlfriend, we’d take walks in the woods together, make up Hunger-Games style adventures, and talk for hours into the night around the fire. We never got bored of each other, and with 1 younger sister and 3 younger brothers we reflected a lot on how to give and pour our love and passion for life into those who looked up to us.

We were tirelessly mindful and would get hooked on different health kicks: running, yoga, pull up contests. Like guitar, I’d give up on the sprints home at the first nudge of pain, he’d always push past his limits. He was fearlessly experimental with nutrition. I could never sacrifice my love of sugar. You’d walk in the kitchen and he’d be there in his short shorts and overgrown blonde flow putting whole carrots and bags of spinach in the blender. “Want a sip?” he’d always offer generously. “No, that’s allll you Dan,” we’d laugh back. He wasn’t pushy about anything he was trying. He simply wanted to learn for the sake of learning, and find out his own limits through discovery.

Everything about Dan glowed: his hair, his eyes, his boyish smile, his delight in the simplest of pleasures, his gentle demeanor, his kind words. As someone 3 grades above him in school, I felt the uniqueness of his presence as it grew and deepened over our teenage and young adult years.

Being around him just felt like a breath of fresh air: silly, light and deep at the same time, hopeful, joyful, courageous, honest.

Everyone I knew felt safe and known in Dan’s presence. He was an incredible listener and a brave conversationalist, unafraid to engage the strangest of topics. I’d get in a lot of fights with my best friend growing up. I avoided relationships altogether, she dove head first into what always seemed like the wrong one. Dan was a kind of safe-guard for her. They never dated, but he listened endlessly to both of us. Once in a rant about how I couldn’t stand watching her cycle from one unloving man to the next, Dan looked up at me from frosting Christmas cookies at our kitchen table, and said, “Libby, you have to consider why someone would be acting that way. They’re hurting, looking for anything to help.”

I only saw him ever get noticeably sassy once. Our huge dinner table was always loud with 4–5 different conversations happening at the same time. Dan would sit back and let everyone else talk. One night, he actually spoke up and I joked about him interrupting me. He turned, looked me in the eye and said, “Oh, because you never interrupt anyone, Libby?” We almost died laughing.

Like all young people, we spent a lot of time trying on different parts of our identities over the years. As we grew, he became more and more philosophical, sometimes frustrating people with his seemingly distant musings, but every piece of wisdom he poured into me flourished. I would wrestle with a conflict for months at college, and one sentence from him could shed light on the path forward.

I was sitting on Dan’s bed mourning one of my first bad breakups, when he reached up and pulled a book off his shelf. “Just read the first paragraph,” he’d said. I finished the book in 2 days. It talked about the isolation of college years, the qualities of building true home with others, and the need for community. He had a way of hearing my deepest needs without my needing to articulate them.

I knew I was actually becoming stronger in life when I could resist crying from a simple hug from his or my Dad’s warms and calming presence.

I was exhausted by the mechanical business mindset I’d adopted after my internship in DC when Dan said: “Libby, there are resources that only grow the more you give them you know — love, hope, patience, courage.” That concept re-framed my work ethic at a time I needed it most.

This past Christmas, we stood in the kitchen doing dishes and I worried aloud about getting bored of and moving on from people too fast. “But Libby, can you ever really meet the same person twice?” he asked, looking up at me to dry the dish I’d just scrubbed clean. I took this sentiment with me when I moved back to San Francisco, and watched my relationships open up from his humble guidance.

Dan’s words were transformational because he was truly living them out, it felt. I had always wondered how he never ran out of questions, how he genuinely seemed to hang on the words of total strangers or find something to ask the very people he’d lived in a house with for years.

Our true comradery had started when I was in college and he still in highschool. My once-close older sisters had boyfriends and adult lives. Dan and my’s youthfulness and singleness kept us close. On this particular night, we decided to climb up a series of fire-escapes, onto the roof of one of the University buildings. Looking out across the campus, we laughed at how similar we’d become over the years, how crazy it was because on the outside we looked so different. People saw us as opposites. Our life experiences were always complementary and yet no matter what we’d gone through, we always came away with the same conclusions. We were totally content on our own and realized it wouldn’t matter to either of us whether we married. “Let’s get a house that anyone can come hang out at, some place that makes everyone feel welcome and happy and safe,” we dreamed. “You can make the money,” Dan laughed. “I’ll play guitar and keep everyone entertained.” It was a deal.

Our energies balanced each other. I am, on the outside, hyper and crazy and extroverted and talkative. He was calm and peaceful and gentle and a listener. We were children 7 and 8 in a family of 12, and despite what people saw of our differences, we found solitude and total joy in each other. There was a knowing between us, that went beyond the years of sharing the same hallway from our rooms to the front door, the same bathroom to brush our teeth in at the end of a long night’s conversation, the same kitchen we’d danced to “Come on Eileen” in, the same basement we’d grown up watching movies together. I remember watching the Titanic for the first time together. He looked over at me sobbing and asked, “Are you crying or laughing? I honestly can’t tell.”

On our Sunday walks home from church over the years, he learned to stop asking what I’d learned and instead ask: “So what were you thinking about during the sermon today?” On those walks, away from our siblings, and meal prep at the house, we’d detail books we’d recently finished, our newest perceptions of love, and weird life-hacks we were trying out. There were times one of us would fall into some philosophical spiral and the other would have to pull them out. We talked about human rights, the lives of people facing inequality, who or what God is and how we should relate to him, politics and polarity, the things our friends fought about and what could transcend divides. Our conversations always turned into what hopeful, and simple actions we could do today.

Dan and I were in many ways each others teachers. He gave me my first drawing lessons when I joined AP Art as a senior in high school. I got him into running his freshmen year. When we’d run together in the off season, we could delight in the simplest of things. We felt we could see the way our friends and family members became frustrated by their own minds, and that we could always find the way out.

He was more patient than I. We were sitting in our basement over Christmas break one year. I was going through a box of my books, pulling out what I thought might be helpful to my older brothers. “They don’t need any books, Libby,” he said. “They know everything in their head, they just need time to see it.”

We were constantly trying to see and make sense of everything around us. We carried around journals and drew and doodled and thought in pictures.

When we did start dating, his girlfriend came to love me, and my boyfriend him. He taught me what it was like to be in a long-term relationship, and I told him about different lovers. There was no off-limit topic for us. One night before I left to travel alone in Asia, we were standing in the kitchen reflecting on our days. He had just met one of his best friends in community college and had a childish grin on his face. We stood there in wonder about how life can bring you the right person at the right time. I was leaving the country in 2 weeks, and Dan was the only person I told I’d be meeting up with a relative stranger.

I don’t remember saying goodbye to him then, but I remember what it was like seeing him when I came home.

I felt depressed getting back to Michigan after 10 months of solo travel. My time across Southeast Asia, India, and South Africa alone after years in conventional education was vibrant and restorative. Back at home, things felt static. I had no credentials, no money, and no trust in the motivations of the traditional workforce. I’d sent home some books when I was travelling, one of which was Malcolm X’s autobiography. On a long walk at the beach that summer, Dan detailed the book and all the parts I hadn’t finished. His intellect inspired me. He understood nuances about power, race and class that took me years of work, study and relationship to fully internalize. “You really should finish it,” he said.

He was in a happier state at that time. He had just transferred from community college to University and everyone in his classes loved him. He didn’t own a phone and would start and end every lecture in conversation with others. “He changed my view on religion,” one of his teachers would tell me months later, in a setting I’d rather not have heard it.

People sought him out to talk to him. He was funny and charismatic. I was genuinely jealous of him at the time. “The world is so lonely and disconnected after college. He doesn’t even know,” I assumed, as if he hadn’t spent years, privately dwelling on this fact.

And then a new season began in our lives. He took on multiple studio art, teaching classes, and side jobs. I moved to California. For the first time in my life, I distanced myself from the intellectual world — diving into business, rock climbing, dance, improv classes and whatever I could to get out of my head. Meanwhile, he drove further into his.

For both of us, the need to connect and find joy, came from a deep sensitivity and pain we carried in our relationship to the world. When we were young, we both had tantrums and screamed. He typically, acting out with others, me with myself. I got into poetry and let out years worth of existential questioning there and in letters to my older siblings… he, eventually… just got through it I had assumed.

I found ways to talk about and share my anger, frustration, and stress over the years. I was never good at hiding my emotions, and I could communicate well, so I talked about it or on multiple occasions, cried about it until someone found me and could pull me out or hold me close. Though I hated my own expressiveness, it kept me safe. But Dan, had never found a mechanism for sharing his emotions with words — the deep, deep polarizing effects of both delight and joy, and also deep sadness, fear, and sense of meaninglessness. So we perceived him in one way — calm.

When he got to University and the thing he’d used to process his whole life — his artwork — became the pressure point and rating system for his success in a schedule he felt he couldn’t handle… he didn’t know how to manage. He was becoming more deeply critical and evaluative of the world and social problems, meanwhile feeling less and less in control of himself.

He didn’t have the tools to understand or express the years worth of bubbling stresses, pains, pressures and internal division that had remained his reality his whole life and now crept up in ways he’d previously kept secret.

A growing anxiety for everything began overtaking him. He wrote me long messages at war with himself about how he actually felt versus how he thought he was supposed to feel. I approached his irrationality, rationally, encouraging him to face his inner dialogue with a sense of openness, to listen to himself without judgement.

We talked on the phone, and found as usual we were in very similar places, this time in our lives confronting the total and complete fragility of life and the reality of death. But for once we were in very different perspective — the realization for me felt light and freeing, and for him terrifying. His peaceful and gentle energy was up against the rat race of culture in a way he’d managed to stay outside of before, and for the first time he could feel how unwelcome a truly sensitive, and gentle heart is in a world that only cares about speed and upward mobility.

I asked him if he felt frustrated that the people around him weren’t considering their lives with as much depth. He replied with a kind of drained humility I’d never witnessed: “On the contrary, I’m realizing how much every single thing takes so much courage,” he said with a genuine admiration for the people around him.

In the last spoken conversation I had with Dan he said, “Libby, I’m just realizing, I can’t be me in this society.” And I responded: “I know, Dan.” I look back on it now, and it was like I validated the reality of his death — if it wasn’t going to be physical, it was going to be emotional and spiritual. “You just have to get your work ethic Dan; it’s all a show in this world. You put on the show when you need to, and then you can fully be you outside of it,” I told him, referencing yogic philosophy we both admired. “It will get easier with time. It’s an exchange of energy. You’ll get better at it.”

We were in a frozen yogurt place in San Francisco when I had that final skype call. I had been coming from work and my phone had died, so I’d ran first into a coffee shop on Polk street to call him, and when that closed, searched for anything open and with wifi. The world was listening into our final thoughts. I didn’t care. I wasn’t worried about him. “It’s just a dark space, life becomes that much brighter and bolder when you get through them,” I thought. “He’s just in college, it’s just a weird time,” I assumed, truly dismissive of his neurological reality and the hole he was spiraling down.

It felt sudden and wrong when he was checked into a mental institute on his 21st birthday after multiple suicide attempts. I was miles away and I genuinely couldn’t make sense of it, so I ignored it. I also ignored the shock of my friends. I was falsely identifying Dan with myself and thought, “We just feel things strongly, he’ll overcome this.” I texted my older siblings and told them to basically calm down.

He was diagnosed with bi-polar, treated for a week, and released back home to live with the family. He temporarily dropped out of college, picked up two jobs, and began taking medication and going to therapy.

We thought we had survived our worst nightmare as a family. Little did we know, it was just beginning.

On the morning he killed himself, Dan had lunch with my mother. “Come home after work today, Dan,” she said. “Don’t scare me like you did this weekend.” He worked a full shift, and then he drove to a tree behind his old apartment, tied a rope around his neck and freed himself from an agony he never found the ability to fully put into words in his short and beautiful life on earth; an agony that went unnamed as he lived a dually artistic, loving and self-sacrificing life to every single person around him.

4 | Reflections on Hopelessness/Courage

The agony of trying to recount every moment leading up to a loved one’s suicide, is a tortuous maze with no exit; a place all too easy to make a life-threatening mental home in. For a long time, I thought the world demanded that I have a workable explanation for his suicide.

But why someone killed themselves, will always be a mystery they die with.

I drove myself mad processing the death with people of all ages and groups, with varied levels of insight into his mind or their own bipolar diagnoses, psychotic episodes and suicidal thoughts. These efforts are not pointless — but they are partial. And I think it’s important to remember that.

“If only he had talked to me from New York.”

“If only he had come lived with me in California.”

“If only I’d been home from New Zealand,” those of us at a distance thought.

But the ones surrounding him had pulled him into their art studios and families, onto walks and into conversation, desperate to try to shake him with their own tactics. He’d remained untouched at the level he required. Even his therapist was shocked when she found out.

When I got home, I poured over his old journals expecting to find someone lost, but there in his notes were so many intellectual answers, a grasping for presence, openness, love, and hope and yet, a torn and divisive incapability to execute on it, a pain he couldn’t free himself from, and an exhausted search for a way out.

The weekend before Dan died, I woke up from a dream during a nap in the middle of the afternoon, crying. I planned to ignore the tears but my friend inquired about them. “For the first time, I had a feeling of total peace,” I disclosed. I am not a peaceful person. I had been struggling for months mentally with how to more healthily and honestly respond to shame and self-doubt and mistrust, in my search for jobs and quest for true identity. That afternoon, the feeling that I would be supported in my endeavors, that the people I needed in my life would be there, that I was enough... washed over me for the next 8 days until I would find out about Dan’s death, ignorant of his final battles. For me there was a scary and also eye-opening internal understanding once he died, of the realities of the power of love and fear. They were so close to one another, and they both could spiral infinitely.

I don’t want to try to explain Dan’s intentions or pretend to know what it was like in his mind in his last days and hours. As my father said, even if he could come back to tell us now, he likely would not be able to say why.

In one fan’s evaluation of why David Foster Wallace committed suicide, the reader quoted him saying life for him felt like “having his insides on his outsides.”

Alert, aware, open, vulnerable, unprotected.

So for the sake of the many, many people who relate to this sentiment in a world whose best response to such a gift is to ignore, label, or medicate, and because I think we can do better at making room for emotional, creative, neurologically diverse people in our society today, I want to disclose some of the things Dan was able to put words to.

What he did share was his extreme sensitivity to the world around him: a brokenness he felt around poverty and environmental destruction, the blind numbness he sensed from the culture he was surrounded by, and the powerlessness he felt in creating any substantial change.

What he did put into words was the pressure of conformity and competitiveness within school and work, his incapability to keep up, and the realization that he would have to minimize or destroy who he felt he really was in order to make it in this society.

What he did put into words was the extreme stress and shame he felt around not being able to properly manage his time, his energy or emotions, or to ever do or be enough.

What he did put into words was the deep desire he had to be present and welcoming and aware with the people around him, but the coinciding deep, unsettling feeling he had in typical, consumerist, touristy, or comfortable situations when homeless people and the realities of inequity surrounded him, his inability to turn off his sensitivity to feel others’ pain, the pressure he felt to summon cheerfulness in the presence of others, and the subsequent guilt he felt for his own incapability to do so.

What he did describe was feeling afraid all the time, of both the realities on earth and the existentialism of life itself.

What he did describe was feeling anxious, and afraid, and imprisoned by his own thoughts, incapable of freeing himself.

“I could never commit suicide,” Dan had told his girlfriend back in high school after the loss of several students. “Why?” she’d asked him. “Because I could never do that to my little brothers, and my nephews.”

In an effort not to put any pressure on others, Dan kept quiet about when his emotional worry, stress and anxiety became entrapment and suicide ideation. And in the effort to spare those he loved, or figure things out on his own, he began looking for possibilities out of his mind… alcohol, drugs… When these only accelerated his mental instability, he became fixated on permanent releases from his pain: pills, suffocation, alcohol poisoning and eventually walked to the edge of a building.

When he came down, and eventually told his girlfriend, he had not remorse or a re-sparked attention for life, but multiplied self-hatred and a feeling of cowardice, that he couldn’t even follow out with a fate he felt he deserved for his inadequacy.

That was when he was hospitalized, and given medication. After that, there were even less words.

What he did describe though, was numbness and being incapable of feeling, a common side effect of first taking bipolar medication.

What he did describe was feeling like a disappointment and a waste of space after having dropped out of college for the semester and moving home.

What he did describe was feeling guilty for working at diners and restaurants when he knew he had artistic talent and everything before him to attend school and succeed.

What he did describe was fear of being a burden to others, and that he might never feel okay again.

What he did describe was no longer being able to do what he was best at — listening to others and making them feel safe and joyful and alive.

What he did describe was feeling incapable of hearing anyone else when he as trying to listen to them.

What he did describe was feeling okay when he was with others, but horrible when he was alone.

What he did describe was feeling blocked in his attempt to describe his inner landscape in words.

What he did describe was feeling heavy, and incessantly filled with thoughts and images that he couldn’t control or turn off.

What he did describe was feeling incapable of defining, recognizing or receiving love.

“I just want it all to stop,” Dan had written on the last page of his journal.

On May 13, 2019, a hundred hearts broke in half — for him, for us as a family, and for so many people who knew his struggle all too well but made it out.

The confusion and trauma at the suddenness of his 8 month spiral was terrifying for everyone involved, but the spiraling of sensitivity, anxiety, sensed inter-connectedness, pressure to fix, fear, powerlessness, masking, disconnection, guilt, frustration, self hatred, internal division, burdensome-ness to others, internalization, sense of hopelessness, turning to escapism, physical and emotional instability, loss of self, breakdown, powerlessness, medication, isolation, numbness, lovelessness, entrapment, pain, psychosis… is not that distant of a journey many of us have encountered at least parts of, at one time of life or another.

Dan, was in every way, my other half on this earth. He was for so many young people, the person with whom they felt most like themselves. My eyes hurt the day he died from crying and sleeplessness, and they hurt today from crying and sleeplessness. My body hurt from exhaustion, as I packed up my apartment, screaming for a world that didn’t have the conditions to support such a beautiful and sensitive soul, and my body hurts today from exhaustion.

During his visitation, his art teacher brought in 2 long brown murals that stretched the span of the church stage. My friend Lizy, a mechanical engineer, and I unrolled them. The mural was an intricate interconnection of cell-looking circles. “I think these fit together,” she said to me. “No I think they’re just random,” I responded thoughtlessly. “No really,” she insisted, and sure enough with the help of 4 sets of hands we were able to turn the murals around and see how the work fit together. There was momentary awe between us. She told me months later sitting on her couch that the more she studies biology and physics, the more his image comes back to her.

“It just makes me think, if he could take things that complex and recreate them, what else did he understand?”

The loss of Dan’s physical presence on this earth is for me, unnameable, but the work that is left to be done — in the name of every person struggling with expression, and a relationship to things “anxiety,” “depression,” “bipolar,” “psychosis,” or “schizophrenia” could only marginally encapsulate — struggling with the pain of being sensitive in an insensitive world, feeling hopeless, disconnected, and powerless in the expression of their own pain, and in taking any action to relieve it… has yet to really begin.

But this year, in the name of Daniel John Hoffman, we must vow to name the nameless, to loosen the noose, and to search for those things other than just “breath,” which are invisible but literally keep our bodies, our hearts and our minds alive.

With love and courage,

Libby

Candid advice to families who have lost a loved one to suicide:

• Remember their light
• Love one another
• Forgive yourself

Candid advice to parents and siblings struggling to support their loved ones:

• Remember their light
• Love one another
• Forgive yourself
• Accept that the person you are speaking to is not who they are in full, but simply the version of themselves they feel most comfortable expressing to you.
• Admit that you know less about their struggle than you think you do.
• Inform yourself of the neuroscience of their mental health needs.
• Make yourself a home for the sides of themselves they can’t express to others and that they don’t even feel comfortable admitting to themselves.
• Choose to believe they contain multitudes, even if their behaviors reflect only one dimension of themselves.
• Name and be patient with your commitment to their lifelong journey and evolution process.
• Be investigative of their emotional needs, desires and goals, acknowledging they are distinct from yours.
• Be brave in the encountering of silence.
• Be resilient when you are rejected.
• Be fearless in the confrontation of difficult questions.
• Be bold in the boundaries you create for yourself, your self-worth and your well-being.
• Be forgiving of yourself in the limited capacity you have over their actions.
• Be courageous in expressing what you don’t know, and what Deepok Chopra calls “the x factor:” what you don’t know you don’t know.
• Be courageous in your investigation into what humans need deeply, on an emotional, psychological and spiritual level to have stability, and be fearless in the diverse answers you will get to that question.
• Be realistic in the ways you cover up or hide some of the deeper questions this person might actually be facing more head on than you.
• Be creative in your view of the future and how either of you fit into it.
• And always, always, always protect hope that more answers will come with time, because we are foolish to think we know all there is to know right now.

Though this writing is mine, the space for these reflections, and the breadth of insights came from shared learning with so many friends, family members, mentors, my counselor, total strangers, and books and videos I pulled into my life to survive. May it be one small example that we are truly, better off working together in this life.