Kadish for a Former Co-Worker
Trigger warning: Suicide.
I’m always reluctant to admit I don’t love Halloween. It scared me as a little kid, and if I’m being honest, the ghoul-related stuff still kind of freaks me out, even though I know it’s all just meant to be fun, and funny.
Most years I do my best to be a good sport, and dress up as something. This year, for possibly the 10th time, I went as a cat, because I had the ears, and some black eyeliner, and it was easy. We were just going out to drinks at Westkill Supply and dinner at Eliza, but I wanted to be in the spirit with everyone else in midtown Kingston.
I wonder whether some of my resistance to the holiday has to do with my strange, ongoing connections with some people who have passed. Like, with their ghosts, for lack of a better term. Sometimes people who have passed visit me in my dreams, and awaken me. These visitations are uncanny; they’re so real that in the midst of them, I sit up, startled in my bed, and need to walk around the house (even in the wee hours) so that I can reacquaint myself with my reality.
I fully believe in this phenomenon. I don’t think it’s magic; I think it’s physics, maybe quantum physics, although I have so little understanding of those fields. Instinctually at least, my sense is it has to do with some sort of collective consciousness, and not-yet-fully-developed parts of our brains that connect to it. While I’m hypothesizing, let me add that I have the sense we remain connected to that collective consciousness after we die, at least for some time.
So far, I’ve always been happy to be visited by the dead. It’s usually people I loved, and their messages to me are friendly and upbeat. Once it was a mean boss. After I started to run away from him in my dream, he told me not to do that—that he was coming around from a place of remorse, to make amends—and it lifted my spirits in a way I hadn’t even realized I needed.
***
Lately I’ve been haunted not in my dreams but in my waking hours, by thoughts of a co-worker who recently died by suicide.
When I learned of her passing, I both was and wasn’t shocked. This was a brilliant, funny, but dark and somewhat anti-social person who I worried about when we worked together, and also afterward. The “afterward” period was marked by her cutting me out of her life entirely, because she didn’t like a decision I’d made. (I’m going to go into it here, but I stand by that decision.) She proceeded to block me everywhere, and then turned a handful of other former co-workers against me.
I’d witnessed her doing this with other people before—both colleagues and friends—and maybe should have known better than to take it personally, or let it get to me. Nonetheless, it hurt terribly to be cast out in that way, by her and the others.
I still cared about her, and worried some. I offered olive branches now and then, complimenting her on her good work, recommending her for gigs. But she was unmoved. Eventually I let go and moved on, although I still read her high-quality writing. A project she worked on with those she’d poisoned against me came to an end, which was unfortunate, because it was good; but it was also a relief to no longer keep encountering it and being reminded of the rift.
***
Although it made a certain amount of sense, news of her suicide startled and disturbed me. It has haunted me deeply, creating a kind of menacing void—actually, it has made real and final an already menacing void.
For a while after learning about her death, I searched my former co-worker’s name again and again for clues. She’d often made “jokes” along the lines of “I’m going to kill myself!” or “Kill me!” What had taken her from crass sarcasm to acting on that impulse? From what I could tell, she’d had some good things ahead on her horizon. Had the dark state of the world overridden her anticipation of those things, and her enthusiasm for them?
Like a revelation, a common theme emerged in the search results. There were several tributes to her by other people who had once been very close to her, whom she had also stopped talking to and cut out of her life. Two were by former best friends of hers; another was by an ex to whom she’d remained close after they broke up; yet another was by a childhood friend. They all wrote of being devastated by their friend’s passing, especially since she died while they were estranged, leaving a painful void.
As I was reading these, I remembered learning from another of our former co-workers that she, too, had been summarily excommunicated.
I should probably feel somewhat relieved and validated by this information. Too often I’ve taken other people’s psychologies personally, and to some degree, this was another instance of that. Now I know it likely wasn’t about me; this is just what that person did.
While there has been some relief and validation, mostly I just still feel the loss. And tremendous sadness. And the lingering pain from her rejection of me, despite the evidence to suggest it was largely just her tendency.
***
RIP, former co-worker and friend. I am sorry about your suffering. I’m still thinking of you, with admiration and compassion. I probably always will.
If you’re having suicidal thoughts, call 988.
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Where to find my other work:
Oldster Magazine—and the New York Times article about it.
© 2026 Sari Botton
189 Smith Ave., Kingston, NY 12401