A Letter to my friend Andres on Learning of Your Suicide

Dear Andres,

I don’t know if I’m writing this to you, or for you, or about you—or maybe I’m writing it for myself. All I know is that the news broke something open in me, something that had been straining quietly under the weight of regret, sadness, and a kind of cosmic confusion. You, Andres—my friend, my teacher, my irascible, generous, brilliant brother—hung yourself in a tree.

I want to scream that sentence. Not because I’m angry at you, although part of me is, but because I cannot square the image of you—arms outstretched in that forest you loved, that cathedral of chickens and herbs and sky—with the silence that followed. You were so alive. That picture of you returning glory to the setting sun lives in me like scripture. And now—this.

I keep going back through our last conversations, the ones that grew strained. We were building something beautiful together—my website, yes, but more than that. A shared vision, a creative exchange. We bartered. You designed, I brought you small treasures from the States. It was a friendship forged in mutual respect and affection. But then something started to shift. The fire in you, which once lit ovens and built gardens and fueled revolutionary ideas, started to scorch.

Your kindness didn’t vanish—it just became harder to reach. Anger rose up like a tide, washing away the bridges you had once so lovingly constructed.

You stopped answering anything that sounded like love. You replied to tech questions but not to tenderness. You began invoicing me for each interaction. And then came that last message—furious, defiant, refusing to “fix the mistakes of incompetents.” It felt like a slammed door, not just to work but to us.

And I let it close.

I told myself you wanted to be left alone. That you were hurting, and I needed to respect your space. But if I’m honest, I think I just didn’t know what to do with the pain and the anger. I didn't want to impose. And so I did nothing. I waited. I procrastinated. And now it’s too late.

That’s the hard thing to hold. Not just that you're gone, but that we are still here, with all the questions that you took with you.

You were never an easy man, and that was part of your brilliance. A Renaissance soul in a disposable world. You baked pizza with broken machines, protested every inch of corporate greed, railed against injustice with a passion that sometimes frightened me. You hated banks, refused shortcuts, championed honesty with a kind of sacred rage. You were a builder, a father, a husband, a creator. Your compassion was so deep, so raw, that it came out clenched—like the only way to love the world was to fight it tooth and nail.

And maybe that’s what did you in. Maybe the world broke your heart one too many times. Maybe you could no longer bear the gap between what is and what ought to be.

I don’t know if you could have been saved, Andres. I don’t know if anyone could have reached you through the thicket of isolation and anger. But I wish I’d tried. I wish I hadn’t waited for it to get easier. I wish I’d knocked anyway, even if you didn’t answer.

It haunts me that someone so full of fire could burn out so completely. And it humbles me. Because I know there are other Andréses out there—men and women who are hurting, isolating, and refusing help in ways that are themselves a cry for help.

And yet… even in your final act, you left behind order, care. You organized your papers. You made things easier for Pau and the kids. That’s love, too. That’s you, too.

I grieve for you, my friend. And I grieve for the world you saw so clearly, that beautiful and brutal place you tried so hard to fix with your hands and your heart and your words.

You leave behind questions that can’t be answered. But also, strangely, you’ve given me something. A deepened resolve. A call to be more attuned. To say the hard things. To knock anyway. To widen my window of compassion until it catches those who might otherwise fall through.

Maybe we each have a purpose, and you fulfilled yours. Maybe, like Jon Berman did for me, your light carried me part of the way, and now I must carry others. I don’t know.

But I will keep showing up. I will keep writing. And I will keep loving this complicated, heart-wrenching world—for both of us.

With sorrow, with love, with so much missing,

Bob