Best Friends Day: Kate Spade & Anthony Bourdain’s Sad Decisions

Your Best Friendships are being celebrated on Best Friends Day. Perhaps you and your Best Friend will hangout today. Laughs and tears and maybe a toast to each other will be lifted. For those of us who are at mid-life, there may be a less celebratory emotion taking place today. Many of us have lost our lifetime “Besties.” They’ve moved on to the next plane of existence, so the raising of glasses to old memories will not be happening for us.

The suicides of both Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain this week leads me back to my own losses. I have lost BOTH of the humans I referred to as my “Best Friends” to suicide.

First there was my dear friend Wendy, whom I met way back in Chicago in the ‘80’s. We were best friends for sixteen years before she made her sad decision. That was on June 12, 2001.

On May 23, 2008, my friend Gerry, whom I’d met in college and was a dear friend for 24 years, made his sad decision to leave this Earth.

Both Wendy and Gerry were my Best Friends. They are both gone now. There has been no other human on Earth that I have met since their passing who I have assigned the title Best Friend to. I’ve faced some lonely Sunday nights wanting to call each of them as the years have passed. But on this Best Friends Day, I, like many of you I am sure, must go on.

I know my dear friends reached a point where life was just too much for them. I accept their sad decision and pray that others will not feel a need to go down that path.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1–800–273–8255