“Who’s responsible? You fucking are"…

When walking away was the wrong thing to do.

On February 8th, I attended the funeral service of my friend Daniel Edward Tripp. I wrote of my first reactions two days after his death in December 2020: https://duncanpoundcake.medium.com/here-are-the-young-men-the-weight-on-their-shoulders-25d0ceeb16ea

Dan overdosed on prescription pills and like the vast majority who attempt suicide, he didn’t really mean to kill himself. It was a cry for help, having finally reached the bottom of his own personal abyss. Unfortunately, for Dan, it was the last role of the dice. After years of drinking and cocaine use, he had damaged his heart beyond the point of coping with the latest poisoning and Dan died in hospital.

Dan’s death has left the many people who knew him as a friend, navel gazing and questioning what they could have done to try to stop his terminal destination with a pot of prescription pills. Many of us are left wanting by our inaction.

I cannot escape the fact that I was a poor friend who abandoned him…

I knew that the windfall, from his share of the sale of his family home, just before Covid-19 struck, would end in a haze of drug and drink excess. I had predicted to friends that he would stick it all up…