Justice B. Hill

I still wonder why Jay took his life.

Not that I have a right to know the answer, because Jay and I had be absent from each other’s lives for close to 20 years. Jay and I had built a friendship in my early days as a journalist, and he, at the time we met, was an intern at the newspaper I was working for. We became fast friends, and we stayed friends as his career – and mine — flourished.

The last time I saw Jay was in June 1986 at his wedding, which was the coolest wedding I ever attended. He and his wife got married inside her parents’ home in a Dayton suburban. On their invitations, they told their guests to bring a change of clothing – casual wear.

At the wedding, Jay and his wife took their vows outdoors, sat for the traditional photographs, then rushed inside and swapped tux and wedding gown for casual attire, loosening themselves from the rigid formality that often marks such joyous occasions.

But Jay, a working journalist at that point, wasn’t a man who put on airs. While he came from an upper middle-class family, he was as down-to-earth as a young man could be.

While in college, he worked with inner-city youngsters. He oversaw a basketball league for them at a Catholic church in the city. Jay invited me once to help out, which allowed him to take the court as well: he on one team; me on the other. We shared a few beers along the way.

Our friendship had little to do with the cold beers, though. While he and I grew up in different worlds, we had two things that bonded us: We liked and enjoyed each other’s camaraderie. The years never changed that.

Now and then, he and I would trade phone calls, so I had a sense what had been happening in his life: his personal and his professional life. He was doing well; his family and his marriage seemed strong. Jay gave no hint that living had become harder to than the alternative.

Somewhere between 1998 and 2006, I lost touch with Jay. I would periodically run into a mutual friend, a sportswriter who had worked with Jay at a newspaper in Lafayette, Ind., and he would fill in the details about Jay, who was in sports administration at Purdue University. All was grand in his life, which was great news. It just wasn’t altogether accurate.

At a conference for black journalists in 2007, I ran into a man who worked at Purdue. I was a recruiting interns for a sports website, and he was recruiting black students for Purdue. I walked up to his booth and asked if he knew Jay. I told him I had worked with Jay years ago in Cincinnati and just wanted to pass along a message to him.

His face turned ashen.

“You don’t know, do you?” he said. “Jay committed suicide.”

Suicide? The word, so ugly and unforgiving, took my breath away. It hit me as hard as any blow I have felt in my life, because it came from nowhere – landing flush. I fumbled for the question to ask next. I guess I wanted specifics, the why behind what drove a smart, vibrant man like Jay to seek death over living.

No one but Jay will ever know the specifics, and he took that secret with him to his grave. I’m told he left a cryptic note for his wife, cautioning her, as I remember it now, not to come into the basement of their home but to call 911. I don’t know if she heeded those instructions; I couldn’t dare ask anyone. But I hope she didn’t go into the basement and see the body of the man she loved dangling at the end of a rope.

Why?

That question continues to haunt me. Every time I see somebody with Purdue roots, I think about Jay and his suicide. I wonder to myself if he tried to undo what he had started after he had the noose around his neck. Did he give thought to what his suicide would do to his wife, his children, his family and people who knew him?

Would they be better off with him in their lives than in a grave?

When you’ve been out of a friend’s life for as long as I had been, I suppose I’m owed no answer. For if Jay mattered to me, why wasn’t I around to shield him from his hurt, why didn’t I keep the past that once bound us fresh? What might have happened I had called Jay, maybe providing the soothing words that would have kept his spirits high?

The other day I run into somebody else, a longtime friend who now works at Purdue. He arrived on campus about five or six months before Jay’s suicide. He didn’t know Jay, except through all the glowing tributes he’s heard in the years since the suicide.

I asked him to do me a favor: find out what he could about why Jay took his life.

In unearthing answers, I might come to understand what has been impossible for me to understand: the death of a man who had more to give in living than the agony he left behind in death.