Prologue:

I had accomplished nothing in my life except failure.

Nothing was worthy of textbook praise, nothing was satisfying even on a personal scale. Life seemed to be a waste, a dream – here, then gone, faster than one could react. There had been no time to lose, yet somehow it had slipped away unchallenged, unnoticed.

Now missed dearly.

My life was not one marred by extravagant suffering. It was merely yellowed by melancholy – bland and stale like everyone else’s. My dreams had rusted at a young age, the youthful enthusiasm fueling those aspirations choked out of existence by cruel reality.

At some point in my past, I probably desired more than anything to be a hero, or simply someone different. Maybe because my father had been different in so many ways, or maybe because he hadn’t in so many more.

Whatever the reason, regret and depression weighed heavily on me like the rope that binds the bird to the falconer’s hand. How ironic that my amicable mother had coined the expression, “live with no regrets”, and I had adopted the slogan at a young age, determined to live like so.

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Jimmy had never been like me. He was always happy, always successful. His great ambition in life had been to make a difference – not simply to be different, and maybe that was what kept him head and shoulders above me.

Jimmy was not necessarily a rich somebody just because he was successful. He entertained modest dreams that he was never far from achieving, kept a simple job that paid well and gave him a firm foothold, and seemed to simply cruise through life. In his personal endeavors, he remained well advanced and always seemed so happy to me.

He had something I didn’t – something that had nothing to do with money, success, or friendship. It wasn’t even religion – it was just contentment; peace with one’s self. He was confident, but not to the point of pride; happy, but not to the point of wasteful expenditure.

We had been friends as children and become neighbors as adults, a bond perhaps somewhat stronger than friendship. We harbored no secrets; he knew I had been generally unhappy through life, and I knew he couldn’t understand why. I offered no explanations, and he offered no remedies – only consolation, which I had no use for anyway. I didn’t deserve consolation any more than I deserved the right to pity myself.

But Jimmy was just that way. There was just something that drove him to love people – to give to those undeserving. Call it generosity, call it whatever you would like.

That was Jimmy.

We had barbeques every other Saturday in the summertime, invaded each other’s homes to watch the football games on Sundays, and when our kids had been growing up, Jimmy had hosted pool parties for the neighborhood in his backyard.

Jimmy had been like a favorite uncle to my son – only closer. Sometimes I wondered if Jimmy had taught my boy more than I had, but it had always been me who had stood at his side during the times when it really mattered. My boy had always loved me like a son should, and I had more or less given him the love a son deserves.

But maybe Jimmy had given him something more. Jimmy had given him a friend.

Jimmy was the last person to give anyone trouble. He worked longer and harder than anyone, traded kindness for kindness, gentle rebuttal for harsh words. He was the last person anyone would ever suspect of unhappiness to any degree: he had a loving wife, a beautiful daughter who was still living at home, and an impeccably straight line of hedges that marked the edge of his property from the edge of mine.

All this taken into account, it was the greatest shock of my life to learn, on the morning of April the 21st that Jimmy was dead, and that he had committed suicide.