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Dead men tell no tales.

In the morning her alarm would go off, but it wouldn’t stop. Her mom would hear it, down in the kitchen where she would be preparing lunches for the family. She would grumble about how her daughter should have done her homework earlier, rather than waiting until the last minute to keep herself out of bed. She would stomp up the stairs, not bothering to move quietly, with the intentions of opening the door and waking her daughter for the upcoming day of school.

Except this was a slumber that didn’t allow the sleeper to wake.

An average of 12 teenagers to young adults commit suicide every day, according to the statistics gather by the Second Wind Fund of Colorado (http://www.thesecondwindfund.org). The reasons vary, the causes change, but the effects are always the same: devastating.

With teenagers being the supreme actors of the world, able to lie to friends and family about one thing or another, it’s hard to know who’s eyeing the bottle of pills a little too much and who’s not. Sometimes the reasons are as simple as a breakup, a divorce, a death in the family, or a terminal illness. Sometimes—most of the time—it’s harder to spot, a snowball effect that leads to a rut that can’t be climbed out of without the assistance of a noose. This chain of reactions can begin with something as small as a “Hot and Not” list at school. Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why explores the life of a troubled teen and the thirteen events that pushed her over the edge; the thirteen events that no one else bothered to notice. “When you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re messing with their entire life. Everything. . . affects everything," he writes, leading up to how a playful joke lead to sexual harassment, then emotion distress, and finally a planned overdose. Despite his book being fiction, the story can be all too real.

Teens, adults, and even children take their own lives because they can’t find a reason to live anymore, want to spite someone, or just want the attention. In a household where no cares or notices, in a school that mocks and teases and taunts, in a world of depressions, struggles, and tragedies, it’s easier to find reasons to leave than to find reasons to stay. Help can often come too late or too soon. And lives often end before they’ve finished the race.

For those left behind, the death of a loved one can sometimes lead to a second suicide. Death by natural causes, an accident, or even something as vile as homicide, can be overcome to a point with time, but a suicide takes longer. A suicide is more personal, more impactful. Knowing that someone couldn’t find a reason to stay hurts more than anything; you didn’t mean enough to give them hope. Friends and family blame themselves, as they ought to, for not seeing the signs, for not reaching out, for not pushing harder. Suicides can be prevented more so than accidents and other events, and yet they kills almost as many people. Suicides are the third largest killer of males, right below accidents and homicide. It’s a scary thought to know that a man is his own worst enemy.

Suicide is a demon with many faces, multiple tendrils of darkness and sadness in the past and the future. Things that seem innocent and things that seem malicious can kill if put into play at just the right moment with just the right player. Some people don’t have anything to live for, and only have one thing left to hope for: peace in death. The tales of the departed are so rarely recorded, and no one fully knows what drove their loved one over the edge. All they know is the despair that they are feeling in the moment that they lower the casket into the ground, place the picture on the mantle, and live every day after without that person there by their side.

Rest in peace.