Ride

By Claudia Dimuro

When I was a kid, maybe around middle school, my dad and I started taking rides.

We’d get in the car, drive around for hours and talk about everything and anything. Soon, rides became Rides, its own grown, recognized proper noun. Throughout high school and even for a period of time when I was home from college, my dad would poke his head into my room and ask: “Want to take a Ride?”

These Rides had a soundtrack, basically whatever I was listening to at the time: My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Evanescence (make whatever assumptions you’d like about me based on that musical taste, and, honestly, you’d probably be right). But dad’s favorite — a band he’d start to ask me to play again and again — was Linkin Park.

Dad was actually how I learned Chester Bennington had passed away.

 “Why didn’t you tell me our favorite singer died?” he asked as soon as I picked up his call.

Chester’s death was something discussed on later Rides: At 41, he was the first older person I had heard of committing suicide (or at least the one that stuck the most). While tragic no matter the age, to me, there was something so much more potently sad about someone in their 40s taking their own life.

“It’s, like, you made it,” I’d tell my dad. “You made it through all the bullshit and uncertainty of your 20s and 30s, you came out on the other side. You got to the solid half.”

He, a former homicide detective, would talk about all the cops he knew that killed themselves: Just one bad night, too many drinks, a fight with your wife, and there it was — a readily available gun and an idea that looks good at the time.

“Just remember: nothing is ever that bad,” he’d say. “There’s nothing in life that’s so bad for that to be an option.”

On a sunny day in August 2025, my dad told my mom he was going to clean the pool. He put on his bathing suit, went into the shed, and shot himself through the heart. He would’ve been 72 in December, decades into that supposed “solid half” of his life.

It’s still shocking, over a year later, to know that someone my dad’s age is a suicide statistic. What’s even more shocking is that he’s far from a rarity: I later learned that older adults have the highest rates of suicide out of any demographic (and the fewest preventative resources available to them).

According to the CDC, between 2001 and 2021, suicide rates jumped the most of any demographic amongst men between 55 and 64; the leading method was use of a firearm.

As for reasons, the CDC and others cite feelings that often plague the elderly: the loss of a longtime spouse, illness, loneliness, a feeling of uselessness and that the world has passed them by.

It’s this latter reason that stuck with me. My dad never had a history of recorded mental illness, and, ironically, longevity runs on his side of the family. When people asked if, maybe, he had a diagnosis he had no desire to battle his way through, the answer was no way — he was healthy as a horse, practically a medical anomaly for doctors.

But feeling useless? Like the world was changing too drastically, too fast? That’s something my dad, in so many words, would admit to in conversation.

Still, I never thought he’d do what he did; no one did. The sentiment “he was the last person we’d think would do this” was repeated again and again at his funeral and wake, by multiple people. The idea that someone so lively, so loud, so God damn funny — who loved fully and ate food like it was running away from him — would die so violently, alone in a shed, all but confirms that life is chaos and rarely makes sense.

And yet, I couldn’t help but wonder at how beautiful life was after his death. The way people showed up for our family in the days, weeks, months after he died was one of the most awesome things to behold. Complete and total strangers would stop me as I walked our family dog, Max (my dad’s buddy, whom we sadly had to put down a couple months after his suicide), to tell me how they’d shoot the shit with my dad as he strolled around the block, and how sorry they were to hear what happened. I picked up his cellphone to break the news to his heart doctor, who softly replied, “He was such a lovely man.”

Heck, the mailman and the guy who did my dad’s taxes —– two things my dad was almost maniacally obsessed with, up to the point he’d ask, “You get your W2?” instead of saying “Happy New Year” every Jan. 1 — showed up to the wake. If that doesn’t fully encapsulate “Each man’s life touches so many other lives,” then I don’t know what does.

I’m not entirely sure what I’m trying to say with this article. Maybe it’s to say that you should make sure to check up on how people are feeling, even if you think they’d be “the last person” to kill themselves. Maybe it’s that, given the current political divide that’s strongly, in part, demographically driven, it might help to pause and realize that the old are just as unsure of the future as the young. Just as frightened by it.

There is no “solid half” of life. Right now, from where I’m sitting in my 30s, it seems to generally be a road that’s sometimes smooth, sometimes riddled with massive potholes. The bumps every passing mile brings aren’t made any easier for the ones in the rearview.

And in this world where the Battle of the Demographics rages on — where “ok, Boomer”s are flung with dismissive acerbity, where the word “Millennials” still invokes images of lazy hipsters that want their college loans forgiven but who pay exorbitant prices for avocado toast — we might do well to stop and take a moment and ignore all the headlines to recognize that fear is a universal experience. No matter the age.

And blast some Linkin Park while you’re at it.

Claudia Dimuro is a trending reporter for Advance Local (which includes Al.com, PennLive.com, MassLive.com, and others), and formerly the host of the now-defunct “Today in PA” podcast. You can find her on her couch, mindlessly eating trail mix while watching horror movies (and trying her best, but failing, not to fall asleep before 11 PM).