[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]

Leaving aside holidays, birthdays and anniversaries, there are only a handful of dates on the calendar that evoke, for me, an instant mental connection to a particular event – an automatic association lurking below the level of conscious thought. Not just the date of an event that I’ve memorized, but one so deeply seared into my consciousness that the date is the event, and vice versa, in my mind.

Baby Boomers know what I’m talking about. They, and with them the entire national media and culture that they still dominate, are right now counting down to the 50th anniversary of that horrible moment when November 22 became such a date for their generation. For the Boomers’ parents, of course, December 7 was “that” date – living forever in infamy. For my generation, obviously, it was September 11.

Duh. We all know that. But that’s not what this post is about.

These seared-in-the-consciousness dates can also be very idiosyncratic and personal. And they needn’t be sad or tragic, either. Case in point: October 15, the date of the USC-ND “Bush Push” game in 2005, is, in this one particular respect, right up there with September 11 in my mind, as bizarre as that sounds. Why? I dunno. It doesn’t make any sense. But it’s true. I always, always associate October 15, every year, with that epic game and my epic experience of it, and I’m pretty sure I always will. Every year on October 15, I see the date and I automatically think of that game. The date and the event are inextricably linked.

An even more idiosyncratic example is October 3. Why that date? Well, the O.J. Simpson verdict memorably brought the nation to a standstill (as ridiculous as that sounds in retrospect) on October 3, 1995 – but that’s not the only, or even the primary, reason. In fact, I’m pretty sure the only reason I even know the O.J. verdict’s date at all is because it happened to fall on the one-year anniversary of October 3, 1994, which was the day when I – in middle-school parlance – “asked out” the girl I’d had a crush on for 2 years, and would continue to have a crush on for 2+ more. (She said no, if that wasn’t obvious from context. She was really nice about it, though!)

That coincidence of timing – two consecutive October 3rds with memorable events – guaranteed the date permanent admission into my personal pantheon, my memorable-date hall of fame. Which is funny, because looking back, 18 and 19 years later, neither of those October 3 events are particularly meaningful to me anymore. The O.J. verdict, which back then seemed like the closest thing my generation had to a unifying, universal, November 22-esque “where were you?” moment, was obviously surpassed six years later by a far more significant such moment. And as for the girl? Heh. We became friends, I eventually got over my crush, we graduated high school, we moved far away from one another, and now we’re both happily married with kids. The date when I “asked her out” in eighth grade, less than a month before my 13th birthday, is now nothing more than an amusing memory of retrospectively adorable middle-school pre-teen awkwardness – hardly the sort of thing that I would categorize nowadays as a life-changing moment. And yet, my mental association with the date, October 3, remains fully intact, like a vestigial organ that’s long since outlived its original purpose.

There’s a certain delightful unpredictability to this mental phenomenon. Why did the relatively trivial October 3 and October 15 make my “hall of fame,” while, say, August 14 (blackout) and August 29 (Katrina) and December 14 (Sandy Hook) did not? I’m not sure. This isn’t something that one fully controls. It just sort of happens.

But now I’m rambling, and delaying myself from getting to the ultimate point of this post.

One of my most deeply seared dates is November 18. Each year, whenever the calendar turns over into November, and we get close to the middle of the month, at some point I become aware of the approach of the 18th. It’s not like it haunts or bothers me. It doesn’t make me upset anymore. It’s just this creeping, nagging fact at the edge of my consciousness, or perhaps of my subconsciousness: “It’ll be November 18 soon.” And my brain knows exactly what that means, always, without even having to specifically think it. November 18.

I’m 32. I’ve lived literally half of my life since the events of November 18, 1997. And to be clear, by no means am I still in any kind of active mourning about what happened that day to a kid who was, after all, only a casual friend, not one of my closest buddies or anything like that. There were dozens upon dozens of people at my school who were more deeply affected than I was. Any acute psychological trauma that I experienced was short-lived.

And yet, despite all of that, at this point I think it’s pretty clear that I’ll never, ever stop associating November 18 with the death of Robert M. Aniello, better known as “BoB,” who took his life on that night in 1997. We were juniors in high school. We were 16.

The news of BoB’s death – which, in a monstrously cruel coincidence, was followed by a fatal traffic accident the very next day, killing a freshman girl named Jen who I did not know, but who shared many mutual friends with BoB – shook Newington High School to its core. The entire week was a nightmare. I remember many of its moments vividly. It felt like the end of the world. There were wild rumors of other deaths and tragedies, fears of copycats, and just a sense of total breakdown, of chaos descending. (Remember, this is all through the eyes of a teenager surrounded by other teenagers.)

I never stopped hating the classroom that I was in when, on the morning of Wednesday, November 19, I learned the news, in Dr. Pilotte’s chemistry class, that BoB had shot himself to death the night before. I loved chemistry, and Dr. Pilotte was a good teacher, but I would forevermore hate that damn room, because I would always visually associate the view from my desk with the feelings that I experienced that morning, as I had stared off into space, grappling with shock and emptiness and grief and loss and fear, and other feelings that I really had no context for at age 16.

Yes, yes, they “brought in grief counselors,” as you always hear on the news. Of course they did. I can’t recall for certain whether I went to see one; I don’t think so. But as I said, it felt like the end of the world. A grief counselor can’t undo the end of the world.

The school week ended with BoB’s wake Friday afternoon, which a bunch of us car-pooled to with a conscious sense of sad solidarity. One of my good friends had never seen an open casket before, and just couldn’t handle it. She sobbed uncontrollably outside the funeral home. I can’t recall if she ever actually made it inside.

That night, Friday the 21st, was the funeral. I had originally decided not to attend – figuring the wake was enough, I had paid my respects, and the funeral should be reserved for those closer to BoB – but then I realized, sometime in the early evening, that I “needed to go” to the funeral. The feeling overwhelmed me: just go. So I went, with my parents. It was a searing event. BoB’s favorite song, “Rocky Raccoon,” was played. BoB’s dad pleaded with his friends not to follow him into darkness, thundering through his tears that there was nothing glorious or glamorous about suicide. Audible weeping and wailing filled the room. It was intense.

The whole thing was, I suppose, a swift and stunning loss of childhood innocence, for me and for many of my classmates. I guess that’s probably why, or a big part of the reason why, I remember the date so well – because of what it represented. Much like September 11, 2001 would four years later (during my junior year in college), November 18, 1997 became a dividing line that I used to categorize the events of my high-school experience into “before” and “after” groups.

Anyway, it’s hard to believe that November 18, 1997 was 16 years ago – the same number of years BoB lived on this earth.

R.I.P., BoB. And may today’s 16-year-olds, struggling with illness or addiction or grief or simple despair, find the help and relief and support and treatment that BoB could not, so that their feeling of hopelessness about the future does not become a horrifically self-fulfilling prophesy, as his did (and later, as Sarah’s did, and too, too many others). Lord, hear our prayer: It gets better.

The 16-year-old memorial page is still online, BTW: http://lrt.tripod.com/bob_jen/