I TRY NOT to imagine my brother hanging from the ledge. Try not to picture him pressed against the balcony, his legs dangling fourteen stories above the concrete sidewalk. Did a couple out for a summer stroll catch a glimpse of him before he let go? Did a family gathered around the dinner table see him plunge past their window? What was he thinking right before he hit the ground? 

That’s the thing about suicide. No matter how much you try to remember how that person lived his life, you can’t forget how he ended it. It’s like driving by a car smashed on the side of the road. You can’t resist craning your neck to take stock of the damage. 

“Will I ever feel again?” 

That was the question my brother asked moments before he let go of the ledge he was hanging from. It didn’t make sense to me at the time. I’d even forgotten he said it until my mother recently reminded me. 

We both had tried to cauterize our pain, push our pasts behind us. If only I could have told him that he wasn’t the only one. I abandoned him long before he abandoned me. I see that now. I could have reached out to him, talked with him, but he didn’t make it easy, and I was a kid, and had myself to worry about. 

Several months before he died, my brother went back to Quitman, Mississippi, back to our father’s hometown. I didn’t know it at the time. I found out only ater his death. I went to his apartment and noticed a roll of ilm he’d never developed. h e pictures were from his trip. My father’s sister Annie Laurie was still living in Quitman at the time. Carter could have gone to visit her. He didn’t. He simply wandered around the town. I realize now that in those last months of his life, he was searching for feeling, but he just couldn’t reach out. 

- Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival by Anderson Cooper