sometimes, the monsters win
9.28.26
Since the spring of 1911, the University of Colorado has published an alumni magazine: The Coloradan. Today, the university publishes three times a year, each installment seventy-some pages of the goings-on in and around Boulder, reminding me of that pretty campus I took for granted all those years back. Silly as it sounds, the magazine helps me feel connected to the town where I was born, raised, and higher-edumecated. I hope they publish the magazine for another century. Go Buffs.
An “In Memoriam” section rounds out the end of each TC issue. Organized by graduating years, the names are of those Colorado University alumni who have recently departed, listed alphabetically. Not surprisingly, there are more names the further back you go. This summer’s edition included nearly two dozen names from each the ‘50s and ‘60s. While it’s sad to think the friends and family of these people may have lost someone close, it’s typically not a great tragedy to die late in life. We should all be so lucky, you know. But as the years listed in the section get nearer to present day, the more unsettling it is to read the attached names and think of the lives cut short. I typically scan the more recent graduating years to check if there are any names I recognize. I’ve never known anyone personally, but sometimes I remember a name if the death made the news, like this year when Buffs quarterback Dominiq Ponder (‘27) had died in a car accident a few months earlier.
It was Ponder who caused me to pause and reread the other names listed in the 2020s. The name Daniel H. Potochnik (Comm ‘25) stood out to me. I don’t know why. I didn’t know Daniel and I don’t know anyone who shares his last name. But there it was, Daniel’s name, sixteen letters in all, a communication major who graduated just last year. Daniel would have walked the same sidewalks that I did, entered the same buildings as my friends and I once had; he would have considered the same trees and surely been annoyed, as I was, of cars on Broadway screaming through red lights long after they were red.
I looked up Daniel online. I wanted to know what happened. I immediately found his obituary, published earlier this year. The obit’s first full sentence:
“Our beloved Danny took his own life on his 30th birthday, March 16, 2026.”
What a terribly tragic, yet somehow beautiful way to honor Daniel, I thought. No bullshit, no vagueness, no flowery prose that tends to, more often than not, suffocate obituary writing. And, the further I read, the more I suspected Daniel would have appreciated the approach. His life jumped off the page. Daniel, it went, “was off-the-charts coordinated from the get-go … His natural athleticism showed up first in skateboarding, which he really loved, and later in snowboarding. In the last several years, he’d become an avid fly fisherman.” Daniel, the obit said, had walked at nine months. I had walked at nine months, too, and my mom always liked to brag about it. I bet his mom did too.
Daniel was troubled. The obit said Daniel’s family, after an intervention in February, knew he was “still suicidal but lacked the skill or forcefulness to get him appropriate care. We certainly tried. In retrospect, he was beyond determined to end things.” In a letter Daniel wrote to his family, he said that “incessant overthinking, worrying, restlessness, and doubt have plagued me my entire life. I just don’t want to do it anymore.”
I cannot imagine what Daniel was going through and I cannot imagine what his family and friends, and especially parents, are going through now and will go through forever. Maybe I don’t have the capability to or maybe I just don’t want to. Probably both. Daniel, who grew up in New England and rooted for the Patriots, ended his note to his family quoting his favorite author, Stephen King: “Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us and sometimes, they win.”
Just three sentences, an entire novel itself. And that comma before the final two words. You might have your definition of genius. I have mine, and it’s when an author can stop my whole afternoon with a single mark of punctuation. I wonder if Daniel noticed that comma and its genius as I did. I’d like to think so.
I never would have come across that quote had it not been for Daniel’s obituary, and for that I am indebted to him and to his family. My life is richer because of Daniel’s life. I hope he also knew that, while sometimes the monsters do win because they’re stronger than us, it doesn’t mean we weren’t strong, too.