(Note: A condensed version of this was published in Memoir Magazine. Here’s the full story.)
“Might it not be…that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time?” — Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald
No one mentioned Mike’s name after the funeral. But really, what could we have said that wouldn’t make things worse?
We did what we knew to do. Fifty-five fraternity brothers, sober for once, gathered in the parking lot of our plantation-style house in our identical blue blazers. The life-sized lions flanking the entrance stared ahead with dead plaster eyes as we formed a somber procession. We drove fifty miles, our headlights washed out by the bright spring morning, to a lonely, red-dirt cemetery where Mike's parents waited to bury their only son.
The preacher sidestepped the truth, speaking instead about the mysterious ways of God—the God who, as he put it, sometimes takes the young and the promising to hold them even closer. His words were meant to console, but they fell flat. We already knew the truth. We killed him. We came to bury him. And we would move on—graduate, get jobs, start families. Mike wouldn’t. What else was there to say?
This wasn’t the first death in our fraternity. Tommy Bates, a boy a year ahead of me, still stares out at his brothers from an oil portrait in the TV room—his cherubic face framed in gold, lit by a bulb that pledges never allowed to burn out. Tommy died, not in a protest or in the war raging in Vietnam, but of carbon monoxide poisoning. After a fraternity party, too drunk to drive, he passed out in his car with the engine running.
We romanticized Tommy’s death. Tragic, yes, but devoid of moral weight. We could raise a beer in his honor, nod at the inevitability of death, and move on. Tommy’s passing had no strings attached.
But Mike's was different. We couldn't spin his death into a tragedy we could fathom. It resulted from our actions, our silence. So, we did nothing with his memory. No portrait of Mike hung on the wall. No beers were raised in his name.
It took years to admit my role in his death. For a long time, I blamed the fraternity, the university, Mississippi. I told myself I was principled—I was the sole vote against Mike’s expulsion. But even then, I stayed silent, too afraid that speaking up would condemn me to his fate. My betrayal was the deepest cut. Mike had a right to expect more from me than anyone.
Before Mike, my encounters with both men and women had been furtive—always marred by drunkenness, fear, or disgust. That night with Mike was different. It wasn’t love, but it lived in the same neighborhood. It was just the one time, but it left me with a sliver of hope—for a future better than merely surviving Mississippi.
In 1972, the University of Southern Mississippi was a bleak corner of the South, buried deep in the Bible Belt. Most students went home on weekends to do laundry and go to church. Gay sex wasn’t just taboo; it was illegal. The university president, a rabid segregationist, who hated queers more than he did Black people. He paid or extorted students to turn in others suspected of "aberrant behavior." USM was a miserable place to be, but a great place to leave. An hour’s drive south could take you to the Gulf Coast, where the rules were looser. Another hour, and you were in New Orleans—where there were no rules at all.
If Mississippi’s psyche had an id, it was New Orleans.
After the Hattiesburg bars closed at midnight, someone would shout, "Road trip!" We’d pile into cars and head for the French Quarter. Walking down Bourbon Street with Hurricanes in hand, we mingled with drag queens, boys holding hands, and girls kissing each other. There was a stripper who swung out over our heads on a trapeze in fishnet stockings like a fallen angel. Every Mississippi taboo was put in a sack, shaken hard, and flung like Mardi Gras beads.
But you still had to be careful. I was. Mike wasn’t.
Unsurprisingly, Mike got into trouble after one of those mind-bending trips. In the backseat of a car, drunk with the bold possibility of a different world, he sat too close to a boy he liked. But he wasn’t in New Orleans. He was headed back to Mississippi, where a careless touch between men could ruin—or take—your life. The boy from the car talked.
As soon as the whispers started, Mike feigned illness and fled to his parent's rural home. Some on campus started calling us the "fag fraternity." Rush Week would be a disaster. Someone suggested a show trial to expel Mike. It was swift. He was convicted and banished without ever stepping foot into the room.
It wasn’t a trial. It was a hate crime.
I was numb by then. What I’ll never forget are the faces of the four other boys I knew were gay, sitting through the trial, terrified. They were the first to vote for his expulsion.
Mike had survived growing up in a remote Mississippi town in the 1950s—a pretty boy with nervous laughter and a desperate need for approval. But at the university, his wit and charm and refined looks earned him acceptance. He joined the fraternity, dated a sorority girl, got involved in student government. He thought he had found his place in the world.
One mistake, and it all crumbled.
A few weeks before Mike's death, he wrote me a letter. I kept it for over thirty years without showing it to anyone. In the letter, Mike begged for my help. He said I was the only one he could count on. It was all a misunderstanding, Mike said. He asked me to write back, to tell him if things had blown over.
I never wrote.
I was Mike’s last link to that life, and I ignored him. I was too busy fretting over the spring formal and caught up in the dread of another blind date. I still have his letter. On the back, I had scribbled "CORSAGE" as a reminder to ask my date the color of her dress. Remembering to get the right corsage was a priority. Responding to Mike wasn’t.
On the evening of the formal, I put on my rented tux, grabbed the corsage, and drove to the dorm to pick up my date. The lobby was full of boys in tuxes, waiting for their dates to appear on the stairs. I gave the girl at the desk my date’s name and sat down with the others.
When a large girl with a plain, round face appeared at the top of the stairs, I prayed she would call someone else’s name. Sweat broke out on my brow. Of course, she called for me.
I froze. Taking this girl to the formal would be humiliating. My fraternity brothers judged a man by the feminine beauty he could attract. What would this say about my masculinity? I cursed the friend who had set us up. So what if she had bought a new powder blue dress? No way I could live this down.
I sat paralyzed as the girl’s expression shifted from hopeful to puzzled, to hurt, and finally to panic. The other boys smirked. I joined them, even though I was a scalding shade of red. When she finally bolted upstairs, I waited another five minutes before sneaking out the door, my anonymity intact but my cowardice on full display. I tossed the corsage in the garbage bin outside.
Another betrayal. But not the last.
On the day of Mike’s funeral, after the service, his mother approached us. “Did Mike have a friend named Johnny?” she asked. Everyone looked my way. As the sun beat down on the softening asphalt, I could feel my shirt begin to soak under my jacket. The gray-haired woman, dressed in mourning black, came closer. Her eyes were red and raw. She smiled weakly and reached into her purse.
“Mike left this where we found him.” She handed me a sealed envelope. “It’s addressed to you, I believe.”
The others turned to watch as the scene unfolded in the parking lot. I took the envelope and carefully examined it while she waited. I couldn’t meet her eyes. The white paper reflected the glare of the sun. My head throbbed.
The letter was unstamped but otherwise ready to mail. My name and address were written in Mike's elegant hand. I turned it over and studied the blank backside of the envelope, avoiding this woman's gaze, waiting for Mike's mother to give up and go away.
When it became clear I had no intention of opening the letter with her standing there, she said carefully, " If he says anything about why… why he did… would you tell us?” At last, I met her eyes.
She had held on to that letter for days, suspecting that whatever was inside would explain why her son had taken the pills. There was no suicide note. Was this it? What kept her from tearing it open when she found it next to her son’s lifeless body? Respect for his privacy? Or fear of what she might discover?
But, in that moment, I wasn’t concerned with her feelings. I was in Mississippi survival mode, just as I was when I received Mike’s first letter, as I had been with the girl on the stairs, as I had been countless times in my life.
“Yes, ma’am, I will,” I promised, slipping the envelope into my coat pocket. “I’m sorry about Mike,” I added, glancing around. The others quickly looked away.
“You must have been important to Mike,” she said. “Thank you for being his friend.” Then she slowly walked back to join her husband, who stood waiting by the funeral home limo, propped on his cane, wilting in the heat. I felt the familiar nausea of yet another narrow escape.
Back at the fraternity house, alone in my room, I opened the envelope. The letter was dated the day before his suicide, May 9, 1972, my twenty-first birthday. Ironically, the day I became a man.
The tone of the letter was disturbingly upbeat. Mike assured me he was doing better, apologizing for being so depressing in his last note. He was afraid he had scared me off. "Things are going to be okay," he wrote. He talked about starting fresh, maybe even at a different college.
“Please don’t write me off, Johnny. I want us to be friends. I could sure use one! Ha!”
He signed off with “Phi Alpha,” our secret fraternity salutation: "Out of darkness, light."
But there was no light. Only darkness and self-hatred. I bought a cheap bottle of wine and drove to New Orleans in search of comfort from strangers.
I drifted away from the fraternity. No dramatic exit, no grand gesture. I just blamed them for everything and disappeared. I put Mike's letters away and didn't speak of him for years.
Eventually, through sobriety, my anesthetized feelings began to stir, signaling there was something important that had been put away for later. Guilt, shame, and heartbreak can be deferred—but not forever. I started visiting that country cemetery. I'd place flowers and stand at Mike's grave in silence or mutter words of regret, hoping to feel something, anything, besides the horrible emptiness. One year, I found his father lying beside him. I swore I'd see his mother before it was too late. I found her number and carried it in my pocket. But when I returned next, her grave was freshly dug.
Mike had been their only child. Now, there was no one left to tell.
Over the years, I tried bringing Mike’s name up with old fraternity brothers, hoping to stir their memories, maybe even resurrect some part of him. But their recollections were always vague. Yes, there was a boy named Mike. Yes, he killed himself. And that’s where the conversation ended.
Younger friends are shocked when I share Mike's letters. They can’t imagine someone killing themselves over being gay. I tell them people still do. Like Mike, they reach out, hoping for connection. And like Mike, they are often met with silence.
When I tell this story, people try to console me. They say, "It was a different time," “You did what you had to, to survive,” "You can’t take responsibility for another person’s choices." But they miss the point. What haunts me isn’t grief. It’s the emptiness where those feelings should be. I felt little back then, except relief that I hadn’t been implicated. And that hollow space remains.
Perhaps that’s why I keep Mike’s letters. Not because I need them to remember him—how could I forget? —but because they’re the only thing tethering me to a truth I’ve spent decades avoiding. They remind me of the power of what I didn’t do, what I didn’t say. How my silences reverberate through my life.
Peter denied Christ three times before the cock crowed. I shudder to think how many denials have been tallied in my own life. But does it matter?
We often hear that a person is the sum of their decisions—the things they respond to with a clear yes or no. Those choices come to define them, give them weight in the world. Maybe that’s true. But what about the decisions we don’t make? The calls we don’t answer. The pleas we leave dangling, unacknowledged, out of shame, fear of exposure, or self-preservation. What about those we leave waiting at the top of the stairs, hoping we’ll rise and say, Here I am. This is where I stand!
Those calls, those moments of silence—they echo long after. Maybe they sound through our lives like sonar from ghost ships, bouncing through the hollow places in our souls, summoning us back to the moments when we sealed ourselves off from our humanity.
Even if those who once called have moved on, forgotten our names, or lie in the grave, their unanswered cries still haunt us. Not because they need an answer, but because we do.
Ultimately, that’s the question Mike, the girl on the stairs, Mike’s mother—all of them—are asking: Who are you? Where do you show up?
No matter how old we get, there are always appointments with the past that we’ve deferred. And I know now that I owe the past a debt—a debt of honesty, of reckoning, of answering those questions truthfully, even with unclean hands.
We leave the past behind us, but it never really goes away. It waits patiently, asking the questions we tried to outrun. And I know now that I must answer them—not for others, but for myself.
If you or any one you know is feeling suicidal call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988
Letters Never Sent