He sounds like he was fun to have in class with you. Death is never easy to process, even if its the death of a funny classmate from school.

Whenever death happens to someone around us, it forces us to contemplate our own mortality, as a reminder that some day, as Shakespeare wrote, we will "shuffle off this mortal coil" (our troubles will end when we die) in his play Hamlet:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life. (3.1.56-69)

When we think about death -- even our own death -- it's scary. Why? We have to protect our own sense of sense from the thought of life coming to an end.

And suicide is viewed by Western society as a moral violation of the natural world, because it is a break from societal norms (which is to live out one's life until death occurs due to outside forces). And, since suicide is such a taboo subject, people tend to shame and reject the person who expresses a desire to end their natural life.

Whereas, in Asian culture, people tend to embrace the person who feels suicidal, because the Asian culture is connected as a whole whereas Western society promotes social isolation. Does that make sense?

It's not ok, in Western culture, to discuss taboo subjects like suicide. It's the societal norm to blame the victim of suicide for his/her depression, rather than try to just be compassionate and celebrate the person's life instead. It just makes no sense to me at all, the way Western culture treats taboo subjects with kid gloves, which is so counterproductive to our society's socio-cultural development.

It just irritates me how afraid people are in European American culture to discuss suicide out in the open, as if not discussing it, will make it disappear, or make it less shocking to deal with when it does happen.