It was when I worked as an Assistant Director in the dorms during my junior year in college, that I experienced death for the first time.

I had just checked into duty on Sunday morning and was sitting at my desk digging my way out of a pile of maintenance requests. Not an exotic job, but hey, somebody has to fix the toilets. The front-desk clerk came running into my office and exclaimed “somebody has killed themselves!” The words hung in the air like a cartoon bubble before I jumped up from my desk and flew downstairs to the room in question. I didn’t open the door. I never got the chance. Her roommates were curled in the fetal position, hovering against the wall and each other. They looked as if the Earth had fallen off its axis and if they didn’t cling to each other and that wall they would slide to one end of the hallway. The other students lingered in the hallway looking for somebody, anybody to take charge. The gray, metal door stood there; closed, locked and silent. Nobody needed to open it because we all knew what was behind the door.

What was behind that door was a 19 year old blond college girl who had hung herself from her loft bed in her dorm room. I sat in the Director’s office in silence as the Dean called her mother to tell her that her daughter was dead. I heard the cries of despair and torment. Three days later I stood at her funeral. Four days later I stood in her dorm room and packed up her stuff. A half-finished Diet Coke can, textbooks haphazardly tossed on the ground, dirty laundry that hadn’t gotten finished. The irony to this situation was that she had attended a high-school in the town next to mine. She lived only two stories away from me for two years. Yet, it took her death for us to meet.

I learned something really important about suicide that day – it’s selfish. You see, she hadn’t thought of her parents, or friends, or complete strangers that might still be thinking about her 18 years later. She hadn’t thought about the gut-wrenching discovery her roommates faced when they came back to school that weekend, or the fact that they had to drop out of school because of it. She didn’t realize that the pain she was experiencing had been felt by so many before her. She only thought about her own emotional pain in the moment.

This post was inspired by Post Secret. Frank has asked that if possible we promote Hopeline, a 24-hr suicide line, 1 (800) Suicide, and I am more than willing to do it.

I wish I could tell you that the story is fiction, but it is not. Her name was Colleen and I still think about her. I graduated, but we left Colleen behind.