By 9 or so I was very worried. This wasn’t like him. He hadn’t old me that he had any evening meetings or other plans. I started calling the Highway Patrol to see if there had been an accident. Then it dawned on me to call his roommate to see if she knew his whereabouts. While he had his own apartment, he almost never stayed there anymore - he always stayed at my house. His roommate picked up.

"Have you heard from Alan,?" I asked her. “Yah, he’s here in his room asleep,” she replied.

“That’s strange behavior. Why would he be there? He comes home here every night and I haven’t heard from him all evening. How long’s he been home?”

“A while. I don’t know. I just saw his car parked in his space when I got home and his door is closed. He called me this afternoon to say he wasn’t feeling well. Do you want me to wake him up for you?”

“No, no. If he’s not feeling good I don’t want to wake him up, but it’s awfully strange behavior.”

We hung up. I felt very relieved to know at least where he was and that he was OK. Fifteen minutes later the phone rang. It was his roommate again: “Danny, Alan has hurt himself very, very badly. The paramedics are here. I’ll call you as soon as I know what hospital we are going to.”

“What do you mean hurt himself? Is he alive?”

I’ll call you as soon as I know something – as soon as I know what hospital we are going to.”

Five minutes later the phone rang again. It was Alan’s roommate once more: “Danny, I have some bad news. We’re not going to the hospital. Alan’s passed away.”

“What? What? What? What?”

A friend drove me over to Alan’s apartment. There were EMTs and police there. I was in a state of total shock. I didn’t go into Alan’s room. They explained to me that he had suffocated himself. He came home, made some popcorn, took some of his anti-depressants and maybe a little alcohol to go with them, and suffocated himself.
As I saw them roll the gurney in to take Alan’s body away I just started yelling, “I don’t want to see him in a bag, I don’t want to see him in a bag.” I went into another room and closed the door. I could hear the banging of the folding legs of the gurney – those violent sounds that you’ve never heard before that the machinery of death makes and that intrude without a second thought on a numbness the likes of which you’ve never known before. I heard the wheel squeaking as they rolled Alan past the door of the room I was in. It made me sick.

I stayed at a friend’s house that night. I couldn’t sleep. By 5 am I was up calling people in Boston to let them know, then my other friends. The next few days were a blur. My parents and sister flew out to be with me.
The next morning I went home to find the front door of my home kicked in. Somehow EMTs got a call from Alan’s law firm that there was a suicide attempt. The only address they had for him was my home, so they showed up there, and, when no one answered, they broke in the door. A fitting metaphor for the kind of violation of my and Alan’s life that I was feeling.

People kept sending flowers. The sweet smell was making me nauseous. Every time there was a knock on the door with more flower deliveries I got sicker to my stomach. I didn’t go to the wake. I didn’t want to see Alan embalmed. I didn’t want to see that beautiful face with make-up caked all over it.

I went in and out of fits of rage, screaming at him – “How could you have done this to me?” “I had no say in this – this was a one-way conversation, you selfish son of a bitch.” He had never even told me he was on anti-depressants. I felt lied to. Then I kept wondering what I could have done to prevent it. The I would go into fits of deep, deep sorrow and longing.

The first week was hell. Hours seemed to take months to pass. All I had any motivation to do was calculate the math for the time I had left on earth to endure the pain: “I’m 39 years old. I just made it through a week. If I live to be eighty I need to do this 2,132 more times. I guess I can do that. I never want to be with anyone again. There will never be anyone like Alan ever again. My life is over. I lost my future.” Friends sent me books about suicide. I began reading the overwhelming statistics. Started to recognize behaviors in the books as behaviors I’d seen in Alan. These things helped. “Night Falls Fast,” by Kay Jamison, was especially helpful.

I heard a minister once say that when we are most broken we are closest to God. One of the things that got me through the days was a paranormal sense of perception. I could see synchronicities that either never existed before or that I never noticed. It seemed like Alan was present – speaking to me. I was walking one day with a friend who was also grieving the loss of his partner. He stopped as we were walking and reached down into the gutter. He picked up a medal that had an angel on one side and an inscription on the other that said, “Angels shall guard thee.” He said I should have it. I wore it around my neck for the next seven years. Not more than a few weeks after he gave it to me I was driving to the marina to meet Alan’s mother who had flown in for a visit. Driving down the 405 a rainbow appeared – the first I had ever seen in twenty years living in Los Angeles. Alan loved rainbows. I told his mother the story of the medallion and showed it to her. Her jaw dropped. She opened her purse and pulled out a medallion identical to it – not close – but identical – that a friend had just given to her.

I began writing songs again. They started pouring out of me. I wrote 14 songs about the experience in six weeks. It used to take me six weeks to write one. I was trying to figure out whether to name the album “The Gift,” or “Spirit.” On a walk one day I said to myself, “I’ll look for a sign.” Less than a minute later a car drove by with the license plate: “TSAGIFT,” as in, “’tis a gift.” I picked out an order for the songs for the album. I e-mailed the song order to the producer. He called me back confused. The song order I sent him was also the order in which the computer had spontaneously ordered the songs. The odds of that are astronomical – imagine 14 x 13 x 12 x 11 x 10, etc.

The day before Alan committed suicide I picked up a copy of a Bible my Uncle Kenneth, who had also committed suicide, had given me years earlier. I hadn’t picked up that Bible since he gave it to me. My uncle’s driver’s license fell out of it. My watch stopped a few days after Alan died. Smoke detectors that had never gone off before and have never gone off since went off spontaneously in the night. Lights would turn on without my involvement. All of these things gave me a real sense of a higher spiritualdimension, and all of it helped.

I began to heal slowly. I let myself have my process, and I let myself heal according to my own schedule, and no one else’s. I didn’t pay attention to people who would say, “Aren’t you ready to move beyond that?” I knew I’d be ready when I was ready and not a moment sooner. I was kind to myself and I gave myself all of the patience in the world.

Two years after Alan died, I decided to launch a huge fundraising event to take suicide out of the closet and put it on the map. I had already invented the AIDSRides and the Breast Cancer 3-Days – events which had raised hundreds of millions of dollars for those causes. The new event was called, “Out of the Darkness,” and it would be a 26-mile walk through the night to raise money for suicide prevention. You had to raise a minimum of $1,000 in order to go. 1,200 people walked and netted $1.3 million for the cause.

The event was heartbreaking. Hundreds and hundreds of people who would never have otherwise met one another, each holding on to some grief over the loss of a loved one, or some shame over their own depression, came together, opened up to one another, saw that they were not alone, and found new friends and new voices. A rainbow appeared at the opening ceremony for the event.

One year after Alan died I met the kindest, sweetest, most gentle man I have ever known. Jimmy and I have been together now for eight and a half years, and six months ago, through the miracle of surrogacy, we had triplets – three beautiful babies – two girls and a boy – Annalisa, Sage, and Rider. I think fondly of Alan, but my heart has healed. The days of thinking my life were over have given way to the knowledge that my life has just begun. My tears have been replaced by Annalisa’s silly little laugh. My nausea has been exchanged for Sage’s hilarious attempts to try and crawl. My despair has been swapped for the joy that comes with watching little Rider spit his strained squash all over the kitchen. And Jimmy is the love of my life. Whenever I look at the journey I made from Alan’s death to this beautiful family I have now that I wouldn’t trade for all the world, I am filled with a sense of one powerful, singular truth, which is, if you just stay here in this world, have patience and have faith, anything is possible – absolutely anything. God’s imagination is infinitely more powerful than our own, and if we just stay here, we will get to watch her play with it, and the most unthinkably beautiful things will unfold in our lives.

Just before our children were born my friend who gave me the medallion that I’d worn around my neck for seven years gave me three beautiful little silver crosses, one for each of our kids. Now I wear that around my neck. Angels still guard me, but Jimmy and I have three little angels to guard of our own.

Dan Pallotta, May, 2008