I was only 16 when my childhood friend Owen Tabor died by suicide. Owen was 15. 15-years-old, and he felt like there was nowhere left for him to go. 

I will never forget the day he passed. On April 29, 2023, I was in the back of my aunt’s car on the way home from Festival International in Lafayette, sandwiched between my little cousins. I opened Snapchat to find the image of a 33 — Owen’s football jersey number — centered on a black ribbon on my friend Marianna Toney’s story. I remember this slow-creeping dread welling up as I called her, and she answered in screams: 

“Owen is dead. He shot himself.”

From that moment on, it felt as though everything was happening underwater: a slew of rosaries, butterfly releases, gatherings at an all-too-fresh grave, a funeral — and then nothing. It was summertime, and everyone was left alone to sit with what had happened.

Owen and I had been best friends almost immediately after he transferred to my middle school; in high school, however, we were not as close. I loved him all the same. 

When you grow up with someone, you carry pieces of them with you forever. 

And that was certainly true with Owen — I remember his nasally laugh, his indelibly enormous grin, his incredible sense of humor, his self-awareness, how quick he was to kindness and especially the way that he considered me when other people were quick to forget me. 

In a way, it felt as though a piece of my heart had been ripped out. I was grieving, as we all were, and developed severe depression and heightened anxiety. I thought about having to go back to school and pretend as though things were normal. I thought about how everything from that point on would happen without Owen. 

He would never graduate high school, go to college, get married and have kids or get to grow old. 

I became very nihilistic — I just kept wondering what the point of everything was. If someone so young and so bright could feel so hopeless, where did it leave the rest of us? Frankly, I didn’t know. 

I don’t think I was alone in wondering if dying would be easier.

There’s a reason why we so casually joke about killing ourselves. Why we joke about jaywalking and seeing what happens afterward. Why death is such a quick and easy answer to our problems, even if our intention is half-formed. 

As awful as it is, it is not surprising as nearly 42% of Gen Z struggles with depression and a feeling of hopelessness. Additionally, 3.8 million Americans in 2023 “made a plan for suicide.”

It’s not hard to understand why, either. We live in such a fast-paced society. One that has become increasingly focused on efficiency and productivity, particularly in America. One that treats people as replaceable. One that treats people as numbers. One that has set incredibly high stakes for incredibly mentally and emotionally underprepared children.

Children sit in school for eight hours a day for nearly 12 years of our lives, at the end of which we are pushed out into the world and expected to know what to do with the rest of our lives. 

Beginning in third grade, our youth undergo standardized testing that only intensifies each year. By eighth grade, schools are already rolling out career aptitude tests to 14-year-olds. If you are an overachiever or a “gifted” student, you are put in accelerated honors courses and then dual enrollment and AP courses, often with extremely heavy workloads — something I can attest to. 

Additionally, if you are an athlete like Owen was, you have the added pressure of greatness on and off the field, along with further time commitments. Then students are sent home with multi-hour workloads in addition to excessive extracurricular expectations, leaving no time for rest or recovery. 

As children, we watch our parents work ad nauseam and struggle for it, even if they are successful. Nine-to-fives bleed into home life, and suddenly there is no time to understand ourselves or each other. It’s a very bleak reality — “work to live” has essentially become “live to work.” 

However, we live in a time when people are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of mental health, which you would think is a good thing — schools and workplaces have invested heavily in counseling efforts and in preparing mental health seminars and other resources — but these workloads continue to pile up, and providing resource access is now the bare minimum. 

There is a fear of doing the actual legwork of supporting mental health recovery efforts: having conversations and adjusting the systemic issues perpetuating hopelessness instead of simply virtue signaling. 

All of this said, it’s hard not to understand the hopelessness that Owen felt. In an interview with Owen’s father, Jordan Tabor, who is co-founder of the Rain Will Bring Flowers Foundation, and Shelly Mullenix, a senior associate director for health and wellness with LSU Athletics, both affirmed the above sentiment. 

Mullenix insisted that there is an extreme “lack of balance” in the role work plays in the lives of Americans and particularly in the weight put on young people as a result. 

While discussing alternative workloads and workweeks, particularly those Eastern Hemisphere schools and businesses that have adopted low-homework policies with longer day) and shorter workweeks, respectively, Mullenix insisted that the balance “is clearly possible. You can have both. Productivity modification with higher retention and contentment rates [are possible] too.” 

There is, unfortunately, an unwillingness to experiment with these ideas in America for the fear of falling behind in progress compared to the rest of the world.

And so we’ve developed this extremely positive and seemingly forward-facing culture of vulnerability. The now-common phrases of “check on your friends” and “it’s OK not to be OK” are wonderful and necessary, but they also exist in part to relegate the responsibility of tending mental health to an individual level instead of facing the additional problems we face on a systemic level. 

Tabor cites that before Owen’s passing, he “just felt like suicide and mental health were things that never would have impacted [his] family.” 

He likened mental health awareness to “white noise,” something that “wasn’t applicable until it was applicable.” 

This is the tragedy of our culture today: Around one person every 11 minutes dies by suicide in America, and we are still unaware of our proximity to potential tragedy. We are still collectively convinced that it is someone else’s problem until it becomes ours. The pace of our society has made us complacent in the loss of stillness required to understand each other. 

This is the worst symptom of America’s disease, of a culture that prizes efficiency over empathy. The stigma around mental struggle, around suicide in particular, has shifted from fear of hard conversation to fear of change beyond having the hard conversation. 

It’s made the mental health movement a monoculture that fronts awareness  yet lacks real aid — it has become a common good that we all expect each other to handle, but no one is comfortable doing so. 

We have to do better as individuals and as a country — we cannot afford to fear change, especially when it means saving lives.

It is heartbreaking to know that we will never get to speak to Owen face to face while on this earth again, never to say ‘I love you” or “I miss you” except to the sky,.There is an unimaginable pain that his family faces far worse than I or any of our friends, but there is perhaps a light at the end of the tunnel. 

Events like ‘Rain Will Bring Flowers’ third annual “Planting Seeds of Hope” gathering for suicide and mental health awareness, started in Owen’s honor and held this past Tuesday at the PMAC, give me hope that we’ll collectively begin to fight to prevent the very real human cost of mental health struggle. 

All it takes is one conversation to plant the seed of hope — be the person who commits to that conversation and to commit to the change that is required beyond it.

Know that you are not alone, that you are loved and that there is so much joy to be had by continuing to choose life. 

This article is dedicated to O, his family, the St. Michael graduating class of ‘25 and anyone who has struggled with or knows someone who struggles with suicidal ideation. 

​​Riley Sanders is a 19-year-old biology major from Denham Springs, La.