A Field Guide To Losing Your Friends | Tyler Dunning | TEDxTeen

Chances are you've never been told this in

your

lives, but it's still kind of the foundation of life itself, so take comfort in what I'm about to tell you, don't worry, it's okay to die. I'm not talking about this. I'm going to kill myself, kind of a mentality that's a different story we'll get to. What I'm talking about is this alternative to the death narrative that we've been given, which is that death is an adversary and that it steals the meaning of our existence is the punctuation of a point in these complex, compound sentences that we call our lives and from these fears emerge these sublime ways in which we try to subdue death, whether by having children or embodying our egos in art. or apply synthetic cosmetics to our bioorganic bodies, but I'm here to tell you that it's okay to die, so clearly I obsess over dark things.

Welcome to the next 15 minutes of

your

lives. But I swear this is a love story, no. All love stories are simple and easy, so who am I to say such a thing? It's okay to die. I mean, entire religions have been written and created to contradict those four words. Let me start by saying that I am 33 years old and have an embarrassing bank account, someone who lives in the back of this makeshift furniture store as a way of trying to financially compensate for this literary lifestyle. I've been chasing someone who has a history of scavenging for food in dumpsters, someone who still does it occasionally.

I'm just your typical run-of-the-mill death expert, as such, our Grim story begins about seven years ago, while I was volunteering for this social justice non-profit organization that had me traveling back and forth across the United States. another living in this van. giving presentations at high schools and universities raising awareness and advocating in hopes of mitigating the use of child soldiers in East Central Africa and when you live in a van with people and your coworkers you start to develop really strong bonds with them, especially when you are dealing with such a gut-wrenching, gut-wrenching job one of these people became your best friend um Nate and this goofy, charismatic, uplifting guy sometimes we were on the same team together sometimes we were moved around the country but we always stayed in touch by texting or calling each other and it brought some shine back to those long, tiring days and I guess that's why one conversation in particular really stood out because Nate was less cheerful, less optimistic, a little more somber, more melancholy, had called and said Tyler, yo.

I just got the news that one of my childhood

friends

was killed while deployed to the Middle East and then he went on to say, as I remember, that this was his fourth or fifth friend that he had lost at a young age and I didn't know what say because they never really teach us how to deal with grief, right, they don't teach us that in school, unless maybe you're doing a graduate program or a PhD, and I think we just hope that the empathic response will activate. when necessary, so I'm sure I probably said what I was supposed to tell him at the time, which was that I was sorry for his loss.

I'm sure I told anecdotes and platitudes from my own experiences up to that point. that it was a friend in high school who drowned in a bridge jumping accident or my aunt Janice contracted the rare lung disease Hunter virus and I'm not sure if my words helped the next time I saw Nate, we went back to our childish antics of professional practice. fighting moves between us and convenient store parking lots we were idiots um, but the last thing he said in that conversation I'll never forget, Tyler said, I'm tired of my

friends

dying, those words stay so resolute in my mind because It wasn't but three Months after Nate himself died, I had gone to Uganda to see firsthand the groundwork that we had so fervently championed and I was there visiting friends watching the men's FIFA World Championship boat match and it was during this game in which a series of explosions went off in Kalala terrorist attacks orchestrated by a Somali militant group 74 innocent people were killed that day one of them now with some shrapnel in his chest was Nate 4 days later I coincidentally started this new job in Colorado working at a wedding chatau on the outskirts of Rocky Mountain National Park.

I arrived as an infected wound like a single cell to our species now poisoned with pain, confusion and anger and soon, if left untreated, will metastasize into that cancer of hate that I planned to go to with friends. bowling or watching a movie, were overshadowed by Solitude on the river or unaccompanied trips to the woods. I just couldn't shake this strange new paradigm of Darkness that was imposed on me by Enlightening this ancient truth that life was only possible with loss and loss only has meaning through love. I began to distance myself from people far from the Friends Community family, but the further I got, the more I explored, and the more I learned about nature, the more I learned about myself.

I was on those trails at that National. I shelved any chance I had because I was clinging to any shred of hope that could bring purpose back to this pain because what should have been a summer paradise had turned into a turbulent test of character, but it was the mountains that drew me in. again and that's why by the end of that summer I had set a goal of hiking to the highest point of that Park Long's Peak at 14,259 FT. The Guardian of the Rocky Crown I set this goal because perhaps naively and metaphorically I thought that if I could overcome that mountain maybe I could somehow overcome my loss, so I went to this place where people die every year in the hope of feeling I live again.

I wanted to sweat out my sufferings. I wanted to erase all the disturbing memories from my mind, so I woke up early and drove. to the trailhead and I walked for hours and made it to the last mile and a half of this mountain, but there were a series of missteps that caused me to take a wrong turn. I almost fell off a cliff and faced a mountain lion, that's all. To say that I did not reach the top of that Summit and I went home defeated, shaken by these scares and now I hoped that there would be another time for Longs, perhaps when my heart, like that of that mountain, would be more willing to forgive.

Out of all of this, though this failure came a different goal: to visit all 59 US national parks because what I had found in Rocky Mountain National Park was incredible and I was still grieving and wanted to use it as a coping mechanism. coping for what was going on, so initially these parks started coming in very quickly and they were amazing. I went to the Grand Tetons yede next to Canyon Capitol Reef and saw some of the most magnificent things on our planet. I was looking at the biggest ones. The trees, the tallest trees, the oldest trees, the clearest water, the longest cave systems, and through it all, I felt my spirit regenerate and I was having so much fun that I was swimming naked in the Islands of the Canal, illegally camping on the side of the road and still eating. dumpsters, but this time with those deceptive bear looks on them, uh, and the parks in all their majesty, they kept coming, but so did the deaths.

There was my neighbor Terry, who had been living with chronic pain due to brain aneurysms, and he put a gun to his head. head and pulled the trigger, there was my dear friend John, who had been facing a battle with OCD his entire life, decided to mix up a lethal dose of chemicals while locked inside his Jeep Liberty and just when he thought he was in The peak of That Wave of Recovery broke me because I found myself in the same position Nate had been in and I was saying to myself, "I'm so tired of my friends dying, but these last ones really shook me up, kind of triggered me." because I understood them because I had been on that precipice, I looked at that void, I was on that cliff of life and death and I knew what it was like to make a decision because since I was 14 years old I have been fighting against clinical depression myself and this manifests itself in different ways, destructive ways, self-harm, inability to construct future suicidal ideation and although it was Nate's death that took me on this journey from the beginning, the inciting incident, this was not a man on man conflict. or man vs. nature, it was Man vs.

Me and I had to find a way to save myself from myself, so I was practicing these self-harm survival techniques in hopes that I could stop my own friends from repeating the same refrain as Nate and I. Both had been said all along as I kept myself in perpetual motion, still tormented, still searching and walking silently through my nation, as well as others through the hinterland, of my own curiosity and Consciousness writing and rewriting in my head. the eraser of all my damage in a

field

.

guide

to

losing

my friends I continued my migratory patterns taking me farther and farther to more of these national parks.

I went to the lands of Glacier Canyon, Saro Death Valley and, like a seed in the sun, I could feel myself opening up. I realized I was letting others come back because what I was learning is that as much as I loved these national parks, what I loved most was inviting others to travel with me and, at this point, I think I had been to maybe 45, maybe about 50 of the national parks and I kept going and I was learning that life moves in seasons, that patterns fill the ground and the stars and ourselves, that it is the unknown complexities that make this life Let it be that simple, the middle of nowhere is always the beginning of somewhere, but most importantly, I was learning that humans, despite what they have shown us, are intrinsically good.

I started looking at Aspen trees and how they share this communal root system and how they grow together, or Joshua trees and how they have this unique, strange formation, but it comes from growth and disintegration or the shock and discomfort of growth and the change or of the redwoods and how they are formidable and powerful but they bring life to the entire forest and that when they fall they become mother trunks from which other trees grow. this lasting legacy now returned to the soil I became obsessed with wildflowers people no longer walk with me because it takes too long but I stop and look at the way the leaves grow and the stem and the petals and the path they go to plant and pollinate and to Mulch and Decay, everything back to Earth and what they were giving me was this alternative to the death narrative because what I had discovered in this Era of Time was that everyone was saying your friends are in a better place. or you cannot understand the divine plan at work here.

Western philosophy said to look at the heavens while Eastern philosophy said to turn inward, but I was looking at what was right in front of me, the natural world, and it made sense to me because nature was giving me that courage to face those corners. darkest moments of our existence, I was telling myself: be honest, be bold, explore your demons, I was restoring in me this place of happiness and health that I used to have before the bombs and accidents and rare diseases and self-death. national parks had worked and I had been to almost all 59, but I knew there was one last piece of this puzzle that I needed to get back to Long's Peak. to complete that hike because I needed to put a capstone on that half decade of pain to return a four year curse to the heavens so before I woke up early I drove to the trailhead and started walking but this time I didn't .

I didn't take a wrong path. I didn't almost fall off a cliff and fulfilled that metaphor of death as a mountain and guess what I did. I reached the top, but as twisted as life can be, death still had a lesson in store. for me because on my hike I found a dead body, a man who had fallen from Long's Peak and there was blood and brains scattered across the trail, so there it was, it was wild because death had brought me to this mountain four years ago. and now there I was again facing death so abjectly incarnate but I was ready to face it I was ready to have that dialogue and it was almost as if death was saying, stupid, stupid and foolish, why do you still think you can defeat me?

You think you can outdo me I'm a collaborator on this journey with you through life I'm a part of this and I always will be and there was a beautiful Revelation in that because I was looking at this raw organic version of reality that our society now so desperately seeks that we can't. There was no one there to tell me to keep moving or to look away or to cover the body, it was just me and death and I sat with him, but there was something a little more disconcerting about this too is that Looking at thecircumstances this man had fallen into, I knew something was wrong and I instantly knew what it was.

I knew it was suicide so for the next few weeks I kept checking the internet because I needed to know and it proved it. right just an 18 year old kid from Kansas and I needed well when I think about this kid I cry for him because I knew he brought him up that mountain and I saw him and I knew it could have been me but there was a cliff dividing us and there was One option. I cried for him because I needed him to forgive myself and forgive my depression to move on and move on and let it go because I found my peace and I made it. that Summit, but I simply wish that at some point I could have told you what I am trying to tell all of you, and that is that we are not alone in our woes, that suffering is universal, that the central subatomic particle of this planet is the saying goodbye and that goodbyes are never easy and all that pain we hide inside all those stories that we don't want to tell these are the Love Letters that we need to start sending to each other from one sick heart to another, so please let me be the first to say I see you I hear you I recognize your tiredness and I love you I told you this was a love story but what I really wish I could have told that child is what took me so long to learn and what nature fought so hard for for teaching me and that is that if you treat death as something unnatural as a sin as a failure you will inevitably begin to treat life as something unnatural a sin a failure but death is natural and it is okay to die, but the true beauty of those four words is that if you start to really believe them, you will inevitably start to believe something else: it's okay to live and that's what I would have told this guy that it's okay to live, thank you.