After the summer of 2002, I went to university to study psychology. It was the only thing I thought I would enjoy, and it turned out to be a pretty good year because I quickly had a group of friends that I hung out with. I recognized a girl from college who had been a year above me. She was now also in her first year of psychology. And on the train I quickly found people to hang out with. Of course I had my eye on several ladies, but I didn’t really make contact with them. I was very preoccupied with myself and couldn’t focus on my studies, which meant I regularly failed my exams. I also found the environment very intimidating. Large lecture halls, very impersonal. With unpredictable professors, who would sometimes just make a fool of people in front of a hall of 200 people. Dry material, where you never knew what they wanted to know on the exam. I attended all lectures, but for a change I didn’t learn much. My problems were simply too great for that. I stopped wearing my glasses because I had become hypersensitive to them. I could feel them on my face all the time and had developed a negative view of them. I constantly felt that I was failing in everything I did. When I had to choose subjects in the seminars to write about, they were usually things like ‘high sensitivity’ and its relation to psychological disorders (which was sometimes called ‘ambitious’), and it became clear to me that I mainly wanted to learn to understand myself, which is not a very good reason for studying psychology.
Sometimes I would meet up with Frank and Chris, who had failed their exams in college and were now repeating their sixth year. We would go into town, eat a burger at McDonald’s and go to the arcade to play air hockey. We had a lot of fun! One afternoon in November, an extra class had been scheduled while I had agreed to meet Chris. He never carried a phone with him, so I couldn’t call him either. So I made the (wrong) choice to go to my extra class, because I was far too afraid that I would miss something. And I made Chris wait. I hoped he would realize what had happened and go home. That evening I called him and explained. He sounded a bit down. I concluded with: “Well, I’ll see you soon!” to which he said: “Maybe!” I didn’t quite understand this, but I assumed that ‘maybe’ meant ‘soon’…
A few days later, one evening, Chris’s mother called me to say that Chris had not come home. I knew that he did not always feel well, and he had talked about it sometimes, so I immediately became worried. The next morning, when I was at the university, I called his mother, and she told me that the police had been to their house with the bad news that Chris had committed suicide. He went walking on the rails from the train station in a nearby village and been hit by a freight train during the night. I was truly stunned and thought back to our last phone call. I told a few people who were there and then went outside to think for a while. When I went back inside, we had just started a sociology lecture, and what was it about? Suicide! I don’t understand how I stayed until the end, but I felt strengthened by my friends there. I also told a girl I always traveled with who came from a neighboring village, albeit in a somewhat harsh way. She had sometimes ridden the bus with Chris and me. So she was also very shocked and immediately burst into tears, whereupon I found a quiet spot and told her what had happened.
It was scary traveling home by train. We met up with some friends from high school in a neighboring village. And we also met up at the high school, where we showed a video with photos and beautiful music. After crying for a long time a few times, I had already processed it all and had my thoughts in order before the funeral, and at the funeral I addressed the audience with the words that I had made my peace with it. The speed of it all was almost surreal. But that was in me, everything went fast and had to go fast. At the funeral, which was held in a large sports hall, several people from our college spoke, in fact everyone from our group of friends. My sister Lauren and I also played a piece of music that Chris, Lauren and I had made. I just hadn’t made a special, reverb-free version for the sports hall. So it echoed in all directions and was difficult to hear. The piece was also unfinished, but that made it all the more impressive. Several people also played pieces of music for him, such as Mrs. Meeren and Johan. Together with the group of friends and some of Chris’s friends from the past, we carried the coffin to the cemetery.
When I think back on it now, years later, I am actually not as at peace with it as I showed at the funeral. Why hadn’t Chris sought help? I still find it unbelievable. And why was no one aware of how deeply depressed he was? Why hadn’t he received proper care? Why didn’t they know what was going on in his head? A teacher wrote in his farewell book that he was angry with Chris. My anger would only come later…
From that time on, we would celebrate his birthday with friends at his parents’ home at the end of November every year. It was a nice way to remember him and look back. We kept doing it for a long time, although it did thin out at a certain point.
I didn’t make it through my first year of study.
