Suicide is Painless? The hell it is.

[captainsblog]

I only have a little to add to my first wrenched-gut reacting, from some news that came by phone to me early this afternoon, so I'll start with those Facebooked words:

I am damn near in shock. My sister just sent me this news from last month's New York Times:

David Oliver Relin, a journalist and adventurer who achieved acclaim as co-author of the best seller “Three Cups of Tea” (2006) and then suffered emotionally and financially as basic facts in the book were called into question, died Nov. 15 in Multnomah County, Ore. He was 49.

His family said Mr. Relin “suffered from depression” and took his own life. The family, speaking through Mr. Relin’s agent, Jin Auh, was unwilling to give further details, but said a police statement would be released this week.

In the 1990s, Mr. Relin established himself as a journalist with an interest in telling “humanitarian” stories about people in need in articles about child soldiers and about his travels in Vietnam....

David Oliver Relin was born on Dec. 12, 1962, in Rochester to Lloyd and Marjorie Relin. His father died when he was young.

I knew David Relin, but knew Lloyd even better. David's father was my first-ever attorney mentor, who died of a heart attack at 47. He later became famed for co-authoring "Three Cups of Tea" with Greg Mortensen. Now David himself has passed at 49, and according to at least one report, it was by his own hand.

David suffered from depression, and the recent controversy over Mortensen's charity engulfed him in the story, as well.

In the picture of David in the photo section of that first book, conveniently tagged with the arrow over his head-




- he is a ringer for his father the way I remember him, whose age David had, by then, almost attained. Now his voice no longer makes the world better, either.

No problem is so big or complicated that we cannot face it together. I am saddened that, in the end, he could not believe that.

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Later, I came across his local obit in the Rochester paper, linking to legacy.com and to some of the things that made him more human:

...David's next book, "Second Suns, Two Doctors and Their Amazing Quest to Restore Sight and Save Lives" is slated to be published by Random House in June, 2013.

David had many passions in addition to writing: travel, skiing, wines, motorcycles, his dog Rueben, orange socks...

In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to David's favorite charities, Mercy Corps and Habitat For Humanity.

The "orange socks" got me all over again, for David had relocated to Portland, Oregon, where one of our dearest friends is a sock fanatic. I've come to associate the town with the silliness and warmth of things you put on your legs, even if they are not your legs.  Once I can find a fitting way to convey my memories of David and his family to those still there, I have already received the blessings of a PDX friend who has promised to do so.

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I also checked the Central Asia Institute site, still going despite the investigation and resignation of Greg Mortensen from its activities.  It has yet to respond to this loss, but it does recount another death within the Three Cups family only two days earlier:

With heavy heart, I regret to inform you that our beloved brother, mentor and dear friend, Sarfraz Khan, passed away peacefully in Islamabad at about 5:30PM Pakistan time on Tuesday evening, 13 November, 2012. When I left him about 48 hours ago, he was relaxed, peaceful, coherent, and said he was waiting for his ‘white horse to pick him up and take him home.’

His departure leaves a deep void in CAI and our hearts, but we should celebrate that Sarfraz was a man ahead of his time, and long ago was making plans that the schools he established were sustainable and enduring, and in his wake he given us a vision to follow, has left two qualified female directors, who are the first women ever to do work like that in Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO), Tajikistan and Wakhan-Pamir, Afghanistan.

However clumsily Greg may have built his schools and told his story, just the fact that he is leaving women as the next generation of those countries' leaderships is proof enough for me that his means were noble and the resulting ends, even nobler.

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Shifting gears, far less noble was the final fallout from the other suicidal story of my past 72 hours: the show indeed did go on in Kansas City, at the original time, playing to a half-empty stadium and a fullness of heavy hearts.  The Bills game was blacked out here, and the related blessing in that was that we got no 1:00 game at all on CBS and, thus, I was spared having to endure their yukkity-yuk pregame show and any in-game coverage of the travesty on the field.  By all accounts, the pregame took five full minutes to promote their own network wares before even mentioning the murder-suicide, and there was no discussion at all of the thinking (if you could call it that) decision to go on with the game.

Don't want to bum out the beer-buying public, after all:P

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