If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. I’ll post a follow-up piece that I’ve written called “Is Suicide Ever Rational?”
By David Brooks
My friendship with Peter Marks was created around play. Starting at age 11, we played basketball, softball, capture the flag, rugby. We teased each other, pulled pranks, made fun of each other’s dance moves and pretty much everything else. We could turn eating a burger into a form of play, with elaborate smacking of lips and operatic exclamations about the excellence of the cheese. We kept it up for five decades.
My wife has a phrase that got Pete just right — a rare combo of normal and extraordinary: masculine in the way you’re supposed to be masculine, with great strength and great gentleness. A father in the way you’re supposed to be a father, with great devotion, fun and pride. A husband the way you are supposed to be a husband, going home at night grateful because the person in the whole world you want to talk with the most is going to be sitting right there across the dinner table.
Over the years, Pete and I often spoke about the stresses he was enduring over the management of his medical practice, but I didn’t see the depths of what he was going through until we spent a weekend with him in the spring of 2019. My wife noticed a change immediately. A light had gone out; there was an uncharacteristic flatness in his voice and a stillness in his eyes. One bright June afternoon, he pulled us aside and told us he wasn’t himself. He was doing what he loved most — playing basketball, swimming in the lake — but he couldn’t enjoy anything. He was worried for his family and himself and asked for our continued friendship and support. It was the first time I had seen such pain in him — what turned out to be severe depression. I was confronted with a question for which I had no preparation: How do you serve a friend who is hit with this illness?
I tried the best I could, but Pete succumbed to suicide last April. This article flows from what I learned from those agonizing three years and that senseless tragedy. It reflects a hard education with no panaceas.
First, I need to tell you more about Pete. We met as kids at Incarnation Camp in Connecticut. We were campers and counselors together for a decade and remained close for life. At camp, Pete was handsome, strong, athletic and kind. There was an exuberant goofballism about him.
I remember once, in a fit of high silliness, he started skipping around the dining hall, singing, and leaping higher and higher with each skip. He tried to skip right out of the room, but there was a doorframe, probably about seven feet tall, and Pete slammed into the top of the frame and fell flat on his back. The rest of us, being 16-year-old junior counselors, found this utterly hilarious. Pete, also being 16, found this utterly hilarious, too. I remember him lying there in a fit of giggles, with a doorframe-shaped bruise forming on his brow.
One summer, Pete and I led a team of 12- and 13-year-olds in a softball game against a team of 14- and 15-year-olds. Our team miraculously won. In the celebration afterward, Pete, the boys and I piled on one another on the mound in a great wriggling heap of disproportionate ecstasy. We hugged and screamed and high-fived. I think our celebration lasted longer than the game — a volcano-like pile of male self-approval that is lodged in my memory as one of life’s moments of pure joy.
As the years went by, Pete did well in college, joined the Navy, went to medical school and became an eye surgeon. On evenings before surgery, Pete took great care of himself, didn’t stay out, made sure he had enough sleep to do the job that he loved. On evenings after surgery, he’d call his patients to see how they were feeling. His wife, Jen, a dear friend who was also at camp with us, used to linger around just to hear the gentleness of his tone on those calls, the reassuring kindness of his manner.
He seemed, outwardly, like the person in my circle least likely to be afflicted by a devastating depression, with a cheerful disposition, a happy marriage, a rewarding career and two truly wonderful sons, Owen and James. But he was carrying more childhood trauma than I knew, and depression eventually overwhelmed him. (continued)
Thank you for sharing the useful words and lessons that helped David Brooke to grieve the loss of his friend, Pete. There is wisdom in his learning and sharing his experience, as well as his friend who eventually committed suicide.
As someone who has struggled against clinical depression for over 50 years, I must say, this article is accurate and insightful. It would be read by anyone who wants to support a loved one suffering with depression. After William Styron’s “Darkness Visible”, this article is the most useful and practical piece written that I have seen to date.