[beachtaxidriver]

I read your original post and almost every reasonable person would have paused, but then have written it off as dark humor by someone they didn't know that well.

The only reason you might think there were "signs" you should have caught now is because of what happened but no one could have known in advance.

From a total Internet stranger, give yourself some grace. Or what I have also heard: Judge yourself the way you would judge a good friend in the same situation. We often judge ourselves super harshly!!

[tombert]

> The only reason you might think there were "signs" you should have caught now is because of what happened but no one could have known in advance.

Not quite that simple. I remember sitting in my bed that night, wrestling with whether or not I should call the police or something, and I explicitly chose to do nothing because I didn't want him to think I was weird.

Maybe my mind is blowing it up worse than it was, but that's how I remember it.

[IgorPartola]

One thing to also consider: generally speaking you likely had no chance in convincing him or saving him. It’s awful to feel powerless. I recently had a somewhat similar situation with a friend. I knew he was struggling. I was going to reach out to him the day he was found dead. It was under somewhat strange circumstances so it took a couple of months to get the report back on what the authorities thought happened, which turned out to be a spontaneous health issue and not any deliberate act. But when a healthy man in his 20s is found dead you rarely think “brain aneurysm” so I and other people in his life struggled to make sense of what happened.

One of the more helpful things I was told was that there is nothing you can do if someone is determined to end their life. No intervention, no amount of reaching out, nothing. And that is a powerless place to be but it also means that you not calling the police the night your acquaintance died is likely not the deciding factor in this case.

Find a way to forgive yourself. Talk about your experience. To friends, to strangers, to a therapist. EMDR is great, from what I hear but even talk therapy is a really good place to start processing. I hope you find a way out of this, one internet stranger to another.

[danparsonson]

> Maybe my mind is blowing it up worse than it was, but that's how I remember it.

This is important actually - human memory is much more fragile than most people realise; we can and regularly do invent entire episodes in our heads, to retroactively explain some fact we have later come to know, or to fit some other thing that we have misremembered.

It's entirely possible that it didn't go down exactly as you remember, but rather your feelings are sharpening the memory and exaggerating your perceived misstep.