My Friend Said He Was Ready to End His Life. Then He Made an Extraordinary Request of Me.

“I’m going to end my life by the end of the year,” he said over a call one morning, as casually as if discussing weekend plans. I was sitting on my sofa, the same place I’d been while we shared countless conversations about faith, doubt, and the meaning of it all. But this wasn’t philosophy. It was a declaration. The autumn light suddenly felt colder, as if the season itself had paused to listen.

I waited for the qualifier—the “just kidding.” Instead he added, “Please don’t try to convince me otherwise. Everyone else is. I just need one person who can be with me, without trying to fix me. Someone who can witness this. If you can’t, I understand. But I won’t take this trip with anyone who won’t honor it.”

That was the moment our friendship became something entirely different. No longer a casual back-and-forth about life’s abstractions but a slow walk to the edge—together.

We met the way many modern friendships begin—through a podcast. He interviewed me for his show, and afterward we kept talking. What started as a follow-up message turned into voice notes, late-night calls, and eventually a strange kind of closeness that neither of us expected. Our bond deepened when he became the editor of a podcast I cohosted. Over the course of nearly 300 episodes, he didn’t just edit the show. He infused it with his presence.

He was 56. A former-minister-turned-podcaster, someone who had spent years helping others question and rebuild their faith. When I asked if he was depressed, he said, “No. Everyone thinks that. But I’m not.” He never mentioned any drama, breakdown, or addiction. “It’s not some crisis,” he told me. “It’s just clarity. Or maybe resignation—I don’t know anymore.” He said he’d tried antidepressants, mostly to appease those around him. “Didn’t move the needle,” he said with a shrug.

“The party ended for me years ago,” he said, “and I’ve just been lingering around the punch bowl.”

One morning he called just to say, “You’re still here. Guess we both made it another day.” We laughed. Silence followed. Then, “I’m going to miss you when you’re gone.” He knew the burden this placed on me, and he assumed I would abandon him. He never asked me to be okay with it, only to be with it.

One night, not long after his declaration, we stayed on the phone for nearly two hours. I was pacing my apartment, earbuds in, while he sat on his porch in the dark, the sound of birds behind his voice. The conversation drifted from theology to his latest failed attempt at finding meaning in sex. At one point he asked me, “Will you still talk about me when I am gone?” I told him I didn’t think I could stop. He went quiet for a while, then said, “That’s the kind of thing that makes it harder to go through with it.”

It wasn’t a cry for help but a moment of being seen. And we had many like that. Despite never meeting in person, our friendship had collapsed the distance. In some ways, it was more intimate than most of my in-person relationships. There was no distraction, no performance—just the raw presence of two voices in the dark.

He picked his father’s death date as his own. “Just seems poetic,” he said. I never pressed him on why. Maybe it was a way to turn his death into narrative symmetry. He always believed in story. Life was story. Death too.

When he gave me the date, I needed to make it real somehow—to hold it in my hands. When I put it in my shared calendar, I felt a wave of disbelief. Something about typing it out—suicide date—made it both more surreal and more real. A moment later, my wife called, her voice tight with confusion.

“What is this entry that says, ‘suicide date’?” she asked.

“It’s not mine,” I said.

We laughed, kind of. The kind of laugh that knows it shouldn’t exist but has nowhere else to go.

I had added the date not out of agreement but to remind myself to stay close. To mark it not as a finish line but as a call to presence. It was my own way of staying attuned to the fragility of what we were walking through—of not forgetting, even for a moment, that time was limited and every conversation mattered.

I didn’t want my friend to end his life. But I had to be careful. Anytime I suggested therapy, or mentioned medication, or floated a new idea he might try, he’d withdraw. It was like he could smell hope from a mile away—and he didn’t want it imposed on him.

Still, I tried, gently. I once said, “If you’ve chosen this date and there’s still time between now and then, what about coming to Spain? Stay at my place. Have a new experience. Just something different—you’ve got nothing to lose.”

He didn’t get angry. He just called me the next day and said, “Andy, I know what you’re doing. And I appreciate it. But if I only have a few months left, the question isn’t how to stretch them out. It’s how I want to spend them. And I want to spend them with the people I love. Not starting something new. Not being somewhere unfamiliar. Just ... being where I feel most myself.”

This exchange helped me understand what he wanted from me. Not rescue. Not repair. Just presence. And that, I came to understand, was its own kind of offering. Others had already tried the conventional approaches. Friends, family, therapists—people who loved him had urged him toward treatment, medication, meaning. He had not kept his intentions secret. He was asking for something else entirely: someone willing to walk alongside him without trying to change his direction.

He once posted, “The only thing I care about is intimacy. The only days I look forward to are the ones that might include it. That, and irony. If we’re not conversationally fucking, I’m bored.”

That’s who he was. Witty. Raw. A little dangerous. But always there.

As the chosen date approached, I thought we had settled into a rhythm. Then, in those final weeks, something shifted.

He’d been uninvited from a friend’s party. That friend was also dying, slowly, from ALS, hosting his own “end-of-life celebration.” When my friend was told not to come, something broke. I don’t know why the uninvitation triggered him, but the timing can’t be coincidence.

That night, he ended his life.

This article appeared in the September 2025 issue of Esquiresubscribe

I found out through a text. I was in a car with a business colleague when a mutual acquaintance messaged me, “Sorry to hear about your friend.” My colleague was still talking, unaware, and I remember quietly asking, “Can we just have a moment of silence?” The world didn’t stop, but something inside of me did. I stared out the window, tears welling up in my eyes, watching traffic pass, trying to absorb what I already suspected was coming but still didn’t feel real.

Why did my friend end his life? The reason he gave me over and over again: boredom.

Not the kind we casually complain about, not the scrolling-through-Netflix kind. Existential boredom. The kind that seeps into your bones when the world no longer surprises you. When curiosity dies and nothing new stirs. The feeling he described wasn’t emptiness but a terrible fullness. His life didn’t feel renewable anymore.

“Why can’t boredom be a valid reason to die?” he once asked. “We pretend every life must be redeemed by meaning. But what if I’ve had enough meaning? What if I’m full?”

For my friend, this was a crisis of purpose that seems to strike middle-aged men but rarely gets named directly. When careers wind down, when relationships falter, when the structures that once provided identity begin to crumble, what remains? When the fundamental question shifts from “What do I want to become?” to “What’s the point of continuing?”—we don’t have many places to ask those questions. Especially not as men. Especially not without being told we’re broken for asking them.

I’d hoped our long talks might give him a reason to stay. Maybe he’d find in our friendship the intimacy he so deeply craved. Maybe simply being heard would be enough.

Should I have been more insistent that he seek help? Should I have taken it upon myself to intervene more directly? I asked myself those questions repeatedly after his death. Others had already tried those approaches. What he was asking for was different—not salvation, but companionship. Not answers, but presence.

I chose to believe that being truly seen, even in his darkest intentions, was more loving than forcing hope he couldn’t feel. It was the only gift I knew how to give.

I didn’t feel guilt when he died. But I did feel grief.

The grief was obvious—the sudden absence of a voice I’d come to depend on, the end of conversations that had become essential to my own thinking. What surprised me was what came after. Not relief, not regret, but something harder to name. A sense that I had been trusted with something precious. That our final months together, however painful, had been deeply real.

Sometimes, late at night, I still reach for my phone. I’ll see something ironic and think, He would’ve loved this.

He’d probably be laughing at me for writing this. He didn’t believe in public emotional unpacking—at least not for himself. He thought it was indulgent, sentimental. “Just say it straight,” he’d tell me. “No one needs the tears.”

I still don’t know if I did right by him. I still don’t know if there was something I could have said that might have changed everything. I still don’t know if witnessing someone’s death is love or cowardice.

What I do know is this: He asked for someone to stay with him without trying to fix him, and I stayed. He asked for someone to see him without judgment, and I saw him.

He asked me to witness his death. What I didn’t expect was that he’d teach me how to witness life.

Sometimes that’s enough.

Editor’s Note: If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, contact the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988 or visiting 988lifeline.org.