A stupid death

Pain was real, and so was sadness. And happiness was a role play in his mind, begins with a smile and ended with a smile. But I don’t think he feel any of those.

“I befriended him for ages. And still, I have absolutely no idea what goes through his mind,” said Jono about Adry.

Adry, the guy who killed himself last week in his boarding house, was said to be the average usual guy, who loves playing trumpet in the park and drinking beer late at nights with his circle of friends.

Toby recalled they were once found themselves in a hangover state in front of a Circle K in one area in Bandung at eleven A.M., because they were too drunk to find their way home the morning before. All they did were buying beers, bottles of beers, until they’re running out of money. He too was spotted at Adry’s funeral.

His mom cried like a wailing wolf. His dad stood silent beside her.

Thomas, another friend, told me that Adry hated his job, a translator in a small firm in Jakarta. At least it pays enough, he recalled, enough to buy comic books and action figures stacked in the walls of his room.

There were no flies, nor insects. When the cop finally found him two days after his time of death in his room, forcing the door open with a big steel block, his body had already bumpy. He slit his left hand artery opened with a cutter. There were no notes, no recorded message found.

His clothes were piling up like they’ve always been there for months, drawn in a pool of blood that was flowing from his open wound. The room was dusty and the closet doors were open. Cigarette butts were stomped in a bowl turned ashtray beside him, and plastic bags were scattering everywhere.

His MP3 player was charged and hooked up to a computer speaker. It continuously played Counting Crow’s Color Blind.

It was apparent that he drugged himself before the effort. A bottle of sleeping pills were found on the side of his bed, empty, with all the pills gone.

He doesn’t seem to have a motive, a simple 26 year old guy with no record of violence, crime or breakdowns who happened to be found dead in his boarding house.

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But after a month of his death a journal was found, with the last pages of it being the saddest thing I’ve ever read.

“I have come to a decision to end my life,” he started.

“There’s nothing wrong with it yet. I know I can find some reasons latter, but the only thing I could think of now is death.”

On the next page was a picture of a T-shirt, written “I chose death” and an edgy illustration of a chopped off head.

“I came across good people like fairytales, helpful people, but in their minds I know they’re insincere. I know they hate their life,” he wrote on a page dated March 25, a week before his death.

“The Ritz is 250 meters tall. Kempinski is quite tall, but the security is tough, though jumping from it would certainly be a gag, or the TVRI tower? What about the boarding house?” he wrote on a page dated March 27, presumably figuring out that the best way to end his life is by jumping from a high building somewhere.

After a space he wrote, “I could try mixing detergent with Wipol, but I guess it would be painful. Drowning sucks, suffocating is definitely not the best way to do it.”

“I feel nothing. I feel like there’s nothing left for me in this world. I don’t feel like flying or escaping. I don’t think that any of those will get me somewhere. I don’t see anything anymore in the mirror. I think this is the end.” He wrote on a page dated March 31.

He got three calls that day, one from his mom who’s apparently a frequent caller, and two from his girlfriend which according to her were smooth calls, with no hints of a depression.

The girlfriend, as Adry once put it, was a mix between a party queen and a bitch. “There’s the possibility that she’s the town’s bike everybody rides, with the only one who didn’t know was me,” he once said, laughing after seven cans of beer.

“For us his friends, it would be a lie to say that she wasn’t a lot of fun. It does seem that she was always there with him every time and they have always had a good laugh, but I guess we didn’t know it that much,” said Toby.

She was present at the funeral.

When Adry finished high school in 2011, he decided to go to Padjajaran University, Bandung, taking Japanese literature. That’s where we met. He’s a smart kid with peculiarly no ambition whatsoever.

His goal was “to get out of this place.”

But he was a lot of fun, and I was in search of something out of the ordinary. I proclaimed myself as the guy who liked to do crazy stuff and he’s got absolutely nothing against it, we were inseparable throughout those four years of torments and hard works.

I left for Japan in 2015 and we lost contact. And now, four years later, I found him dead.

“Would it make any different if the sun was grey, or if everybody else in this world starts to make some sense?” he wrote on the last page of the book, dated April 10.

“I wish I have a point to this end. I’m just a selfish bastard my whole life after all. I wish I’m killing myself for a better good, for a better reason. But I feel them as abstract as the action itself. I refused to be here or there, being forced into a condition without certainty of what to feel, how to react, what to expect. The world is stale and it keeps turning like an idiot.”

“I don’t expect to go to heaven, nor do I fear of going to hell. I don’t expect to see angels taking me with their wings. I do not wish to remember, or to born a new man. I do not wish to know, I really don’t care. Like a bad movie, I want this to end and fall into a deep slumber, the sweet release of death. The sun might shine. The ocean might continue making that sound and the rest of the universe might expand.”

His final words were “live and let die...” They were on the corner page, and there’s nothing afterwards.

I didn’t know why he killed himself even now. Or where did he go every Tuesday night from eight to ten P.M. for two years throughout college. The more I realize it; the more I think that I really don’t know him after all. All I knew was that he was a good friend.

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Several weeks later I received a call telling me that Adry had joined an insurance program four months before his death, a program that says an amount of money will be given to a pre-decided beneficiaries if he died, dead because of whatever cause, including some clausal that indirectly pointed suicide as the cause of death.

Written in his contract, 70 percent of the money will go to his mother, and the rest of it will go to Greenpeace.

To tell the truth, I think that was the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. I wasn’t laughing hearing the news, I thought of laughing my ass off, but I couldn’t. And I wasn’t crying either. It was stupid, but it wasn’t funny either.

It was bitter, it was a waste of life and I feel pity for that guy. A stupid death.