Ground Control to Major Thom

Listening in on the final transmissions of a friend in orbit.

There are people who serve as ground control, and those who are astronauts. The astronauts drift above us in their orbits, sending down transmissions for us to process and decode. My friend Thom was such a spacefarer. I stood on Earth with a headset, monitoring his unique, elliptical paths, telling me what the future could be, what music to lean into, what books are worth our time, what art is worth puzzling over even when no one understands it yet.

And now he is gone, slipped beyond orbital communications, untethered by his own hand, choosing to end his beautiful journey himself.

And we who knew him — his ground control — continue decoding.

Thom was a Space Oddity himself, orbiting David Bowie, Brian Eno, Talking Heads, the B-52s, DEVO and so many more – music of the past that sounds like the future. In high school, he lent me Remain in Light and said, “This will change your brain chemistry.”

And it did.

He handed me all manner of things that confused me; albums and jokes and ideas that felt like puzzles with pieces missing. But growth came from filling in the spaces.

When David Brooks wrote about his friend Peter’s suicide, he reflected on how depression creates a second person inside the friend you thought you knew – a person you can’t reach with optimism or reminders of how loved they are. Depression isn’t just sorrow, he wrote; it’s a state of consciousness that distorts reality. For those of us on the outside, it’s like watching a friend drift into deep space while we stand helpless at mission control, headset in hand, repeating the same comforting phrases into a one channel after another.

As I learned, when someone is lost in despair, the job isn’t to cheer them up. It’s simply to sit with them there. Not to fix. Not to brighten. To sit. To say: I’m here. Even if they can’t hear you through the static.

Garrison Keillor wrote about his friend Corinne Guntzel, who took her life decades ago:

“She fell into deep despair And put rocks in her pockets one night And weeping got in her canoe Under the full moon And without making a sound Tipped it over and drowned. Now she lies in a quiet grave And I think of what never can be. I am nothing to her She remains the world to me. ”

Even among the famous astronauts – Anthony Bourdain tasting the world, Robin Williams and Freddie Prinze making millions laugh – darkness can eclipse the capsule. Fame and love can’t always keep despair at bay no matter how brightly the sun shines.

I was, and others were, Thom’s ground control for music, humor, and odd bits of cultural knowledge – Bowie’s Berlin years, the moral complexity of Laurie Anderson’s spoken word albums, the layered weirdness of Brian Eno. He taught us that music wasn’t just something to enjoy but a landscape to get lost in, to let rearrange your mind’s furniture.

When people like Thom leave, it’s disorienting. Brooks wrote that losing his friend felt like going to Montana and discovering the mountains had disappeared. Yes, that’s what it feels like. The landscape remains, but the height is gone, and an echo lost.

Ironically, conversations with Thom were always full of laughter and humor, but also a brutal, raw and humorous honesty. He told me of his heartaches and downfalls, his deep love for his daughter, and his intended trajectory through this life, as it bent and sputtered. He shared his fears of aging and career disappointments without varnish, as if laying out pieces of a map he no longer cared that I read. I told him – and I deeply meant it – that he could call me anytime, day or night, for anything at all. I would always answer. I had hoped he would carry that knowledge with him like the Omega Speedmaster that Neil Armstrong wore on his mission to the moon — always there to tell the time back home.

In the end, Thom didn’t call.

He texted.

In the final hours, very late at night for him, and still late for me three time zones behind, he reached out, sending a meme, commenting on the darkness of the world with his familiar wry wit, and we pinged and ponged, back and forth a final time.

And then came the silence. Weeks of it, echoing static where there had always been sideways jokes, and snippets — of music and passing ironies. I kept texting into that void, each message a small flare sent up into the dark sky, hoping for some faint signal in return from space. But he had already drifted out.

The communication came from others, and shock took over – that mechanical numbness your mind deploys to keep the truth from shredding you all at once. There were phone calls, messages, fragments of explanations that didn’t explain anything at all. The grief just sat there, silent, heavy, like a spinning record on the turntable, needle hovering above the groove.

And now, I look up and see the B-52’s will play together with DEVO in a few months, a few miles away from me. It is like a transmission from Thom, whispering, “Go. Go and listen. Go and stand in the noise and let it rearrange your molecules the way music always does for us.”

If there is an instruction here, it is this: Be grateful for your ground controls, and for your astronauts. Listen to what they give you, even if it confuses you. Accept the records they press into your hands. Sit with your friends in their darkness when they have no music left to play. And tell them they matter with their dreams, their art and their vision and passion for discovery of the unknown, and that they are not, in the words of Bernie Taupin’s Rocket Man, burning out their fuse up here alone.

Remember that grief is not about fixing the world back to how it was before; it is about learning to live in a world forever changed by who was once up there.

Ground control to Major Thom. Wherever you may be, I hope the record store never closes, the coffee is strong, and the drum beat is exactly as you want it.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Thom examining Richard Serra’s EQUAL series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City