By Deborah Jeanne Sergeant
I once had a neighbor I’ll refer to as “Reggie” for the sake of his family’s privacy. He took his life on an otherwise quiet weekday.
Reggie lived by himself in a small, drab house near ours. Most people wouldn’t remember seeing his place driving by. He had no flowerbeds, flag, bench or other personal touches outside his home. Frankly, it looked abandoned. The only reason passersby would realize someone even lived there was his car in the driveway.
Reggie rarely stepped outside his home except to go to work and return. He wasn’t the type of neighbor to hang out in the yard grilling or sprucing up his landscaping. I felt awkward walking over and knocking on his door for no reason. There was no easy way to reach out to him and cultivate an acquaintanceship. As a woman, I felt inhibited connecting with a single man living alone, even under the respectable motivation of neighborliness.
As with all the other neighbors, Reggie received from us a homemade treat and card at Christmas. Most years, he wasn’t home or perhaps was home and did not wish to answer the door, so we hung a bag of treats on his doorknob.
I don’t really know what day Reggie died. We returned home from grocery shopping one day to find yellow police tape cordoning off Reggie’s house and law enforcement vehicles parked nearby.
According to the police at the scene, Reggie had failed to show up at work and did not answer his phone for a couple of days, so his employer asked the police for a welfare check-in. They found that he had ended his life inside his home.
We later learned that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive type of cancer. Having no wife or children or other relatives who lived nearby, he would have no support while undergoing treatments.
His modest income and minimal health insurance plan would likely not cover extensive rounds of treatments. Perhaps the suffering he would soon endure — between both the cancer treatments and the disease itself — also painted in his mind a bleak picture. It’s likely all of these factors pushed Reggie to the tragic conclusion that ending his own life represented his only option.
I wish we had made additional effort to get to know Reggie. It’s hard to say whether reaching out to him more often would have resulted in a friendly relationship that could have saved his life. It certainly wouldn’t have made things worse for him.
Isolation, lack or purpose and hope are all risk factors for death by suicide.
It is difficult to know what’s really going on behind your neighbors’ doors. Abuse, neglect, marital strife or in Reggie’s case, the news of a terrible diagnosis. If he had felt a sense of community, perhaps it would have made a difference. Community members can share information and resources and foster hope in the face of challenges.
Reggie probably would have died from cancer. Not many people receiving the best of care survive aggressive forms of cancer like his. Unfortunately, he believed he had to die alone. I won’t ever forget that.
People considering ending their lives should reach out for help from their healthcare providers or in an emergency, call 988 for the National Suicide Hotline, which is staffed 24/7 by trained counselors. In Rochester, reach out to Partners for Suicide Prevention (https://suicidepreventioncoalition.org) or Monroe County Lifeline at 585-275-5151.