…. two suicides among its players in the last five years. UD noted the more recent death here.
One of the team captains, Bradford Blackmon, is remarkably eloquent and thoughtful on the matter.
“Time helps things get better, for the most part,” he said, the heartache in his voice still evident over the phone. “You know Owen’s where he wants to be now. This is actually the second time I’ve had to deal with it, one of my cousins when I was 14. You can contemplate the whys all day, but you’ll never know. They made the decision they were going to make. If anyone could have stopped it, they would have let them stop it.
“You take it day-by-day. You don’t really worry about what’s going to happen next. You worry about what’s going on right now. In May, we addressed it to exhaustion, almost like we couldn’t talk about it anymore. After a while, you just sit in silence. But I think it definitely helps to talk to other people. It’s not something you can control internally.”
… “We had unlimited [campus support] resources, if we needed it,” Blackmon said. “That helped me. Ultimately, you learn that you can’t beat yourself up. Any answer you come up with, either you’re not going to be satisfied or you don’t know that that’s the reason. But that’s the natural human reaction. We just talked about how with people, you never know what’s going on, no matter how things seem on the outside. Either they’re not telling someone else or they don’t know themselves.
“You want to tell yourself that you learned something from this, but you still don’t really know.”
UD likes the honest tentativeness of his comments, his sense of the mysteries. After a while, you just sit in silence.