It has been a heavy couple of days. Yesterday morning we found out that one of our regular social run folks committed suicide and was found near an abandoned nursing home in a drainage ditch. He was 25. I’m honestly surprised that we haven’t had something like this in our running community already, it is a large group and statistics would suggest that we’d have lost members of our community to other things (cancer is a big one right now) and I’m heartened to see our community respond to this loss in the way that I hoped they would; by reaching out to each other and sharing memories of Zach. It is strange but I can even remember his running gait even though we never ran near each other during a social run.

I know that it isn’t something I can fully understand because self-harm and suicide aren’t part of my own tendencies towards depression but I think that creating the space for a conversation about community support is important. My dear friend Courtney shared and article that speaks to this, in a way, because it talked about people living with suicidal ideation as a part of their daily lives. Again, I can’t really imagine living with that on a daily basis, or really at all, but it poses important questions about what our responsibilities as a community are towards people in that situation. I had two friends reach out to me last night to share their own grief about this and I know that this is what we can do.