Today marks one whole year since the last time I talked to Kody. It definitely doesn’t feel as if it has been that long and at the same time, it feels like countless years have passed since then. Our last conversation was so boring, so uneventful, not meaningful at all outside of the fact that it was the last. I remember it was an extremely sleepy Sunday and I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, not even my best friend. So unknown to me, I wasted that last conversation, delaying my replies to messages. I didn’t even ask how he was doing, too focused on the introvert practice of rebuilding my own energy.

Since that day I have wondered if anything would have been different if that last conversation had gone differently. What if I had actually taken a bit more time to talk to him? What if I had asked more about what was going on with him? That was the same day that he had purchased the gun that he would use in three short days to end his life.

There was no indication that such a monumental thing had happened that day. He didn’t say anything out of place. He didn’t seem upset or down or anything but his usual self. But I suppose, his usual self was depressed. His usual self was suicidal.

If I had known that this would be our last conversation, I would have taken the time to talk more. I would have told him how much I loved him and wanted only the best for him. I would have made it clear that he was so important to the world. It would have been a conversation about how much his niece and nephew loved him and looked up to him and how much they still needed him in their lives. I’d have made him listen to how the world would be bleak without him. But he didn’t want that conversation. He didn’t want to be stopped. And as much as I know that, it still hurts to my core.

At almost a year since he’s been gone, I can’t help wishing that the last conversation had gone differently. I wish he would have let me talk him out of what he was going to do, the way I had tried to in the past. If only I’d had the right words to make him understand how unbearable the world without him was going to be for everyone else in his life. But I didn’t have the right words. I never had the right words. No one seemed to have them. But its still so hard to accept that those words just didn’t exist.