I laughed when my brother said he was depressed

Dear Delyara, Five years ago, my younger brother told me he thought he was depressed. I laughed and said everyone our age was tired and miserable. He smiled, changed the subject, and never raised it again. He died by suicide eight months later. I have replayed that conversation so often that I know the exact position of every object in the room: his blue mug, the laundry basket, the cracked screen of my phone. People tell me one conversation did not cause his death. I know that intellectually. Regret does not live in the intellect. It lives in the half-second after his confession when I could have moved closer and instead made a joke. I work for a mental-health charity now. I tell audiences to listen without minimising. They call my talks powerful. Every sentence is built around the answer I should have given my brother. I am helping strangers with words that arrived too late for the person whose silence taught them to me.