A quick note before you read: this one gets into suicidal ideation, a hospital stay, and grief. If any of that is heavy for you right now, take care of yourself first—the 988 Lifeline (call or text) is there any time, day or night.
I just finished Hacks. I can’t say I loved it—not really my cup of tea—but it certainly left an impression. Chock-full of memorable lines, one of which has stuck with me since I first heard it.
Season 4, Episode 6: Ava angrily quits her job and walks down to the beach at night. Deborah tracks her down, mistakes another redhead in the ocean for her, and swims out fully clothed to rescue the wrong woman. When Deborah turns around and screams, “I thought you were drowning yourself!”, Ava sighs and replies, “Yeah, I’m not suicidal. I just want to die.”
One morning, a few months after losing my wife, I found myself in the hospital. The whole incident is kind of a fog-induced blur—I just know that I was scared. The official diagnosis was severe depression with suicidal ideation. When I heard the word suicide, years of repressed Baptist guilt came rushing to the surface, and I suddenly felt like I was doing something wrong, as if there were a right way to grieve. I didn’t know how to unpack the word, or what it meant to—or for—me.
I’m not suicidal. I just want to die.
People hear “I just want to die” and think it’s about ending something. It isn’t. It’s about the fact that something has already ended.
When you lose the person you built your future around, you don’t just lose them—you lose the future itself. Every plan that had her in it. Every version of getting older that assumed her name would still be there. That future didn’t fade or change shape. It died the same day she did.
So when I say I don’t want to be here, I’m not talking about here as in alive. I’m talking about here as in this version of the world; the one where I’m asked to build a new future out of a life I never chose and never wanted. Nobody gave me a say in it. I just woke up one day and the future I’d been living toward was gone, and everyone expected me to want a different one instead.
That’s not a death wish. That’s grief refusing to pretend the math still works.
And Now She is Gone 
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