There is so much stigma, fear, and pain attached to suicide that many people don’t even say the word.

It’s heartbreaking – not only Flinn’s death, but also the conversation around it. Nobody uses the word “suicide” or “killed himself.” Nobody says he intentionally ended his life.

In a long stream of posts expressing their heartbreak, people lament the pain and suffering that Flinn endured. On Flinn’s public Facebook page, an outpouring of sympathetic posts, one after the other, creates a trail of digital tears. One of them was named Flinn, a classmate of mine in high school. In a week when two celebrities, Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, died by suicide within days of each other, so did hundreds of other people in the U.S.