Tragic for reasons no one’s talking about.

The Cincinnati Enquirer shared a story recently on the first anniversary of the suicide of a 17-year-old. His name was Joshua Alcorn. In a suicide note posthumously published on social media, he revealed that he had committed suicide because it was impossible for him to find happiness in life for a host of things that 17-year-olds often worry about: not fitting in, not finding happiness, not finding love and so on. Of tangential importance is that he identified as gay at some point in his youth and, more proximate to his suicide, as transgender, assigning himself a female first name, theretofore unknown to friends and family.

Alcorn’s death was a tragedy because — as in all teen suicides — a young person chose to end his life, denying himself the joy, wonder and potential that was meant for him to explore and discover over a full lifetime. Alcorn’s death is no different from every other teen suicide that responds to temporary challenges with a permanent solution. And it’s no different in that it leaves true friends and family — people who knew and loved Joshua Alcorn throughout his life — devastated by a poor decision.

I didn’t know Joshua Alcorn. I don’t know his family or anyone else who knew him. I don’t know if he went by the name Josh, or Joshua or Jay. I don’t know what he liked to do in his free time, what he wanted to be when he grew up, or what he felt called to do in his life.

Over the course of our lives, we are able to build our legacy. So when we die, people — even our detractors — are forced to respond to what we’ve done with the time we’ve been given. We often lament or criticize a life used poorly. Potential wasted. Alternately, we praise a life of virtue. We’ll even praise a life that is spent mostly poorly, so long as it’s righted before its end. The sad truth about suicide is that it denies us the time we need to create the legacy of our choosing. Rather, it allows others to define us, given the little the know about us, because we’re no longer there to define ourselves. It steals dimension from our being. It reduces us to the facet of that being that suits the ends of those who would talk about us. And this couldn’t be more true than for Joshua Alcorn, who made a bad decision and now has a world of people telling us why he did it and what it all really means.

So why have I called him Joshua this entire post? Anyone even remotely familiar with the story knows him by a different name, a female name. The media have insisted on calling him by that female name. (It’s only fair to recognize that he was the first to use the name in his suicide note.) I call him Joshua because that was the name his parents gave him. For all of the challenges they had with decisions he was making and for all of the controversy around steps they took as parents to provide their son with counseling, it’s hard to argue that they didn’t love him and that they aren’t devastated by the very poor and short-sighted decision that has ripped him out of their lives. I call him Joshua because that’s the name by which his friends and family called him and the name to which he responded nearly all of his life with the exception of the posting of a message, rationalizing a horrible error in judgment. I call him Joshua because the people who choose to call him by another name see him as nothing more than an object. A means to an end. An end that advances professional and political agendas. An end that assuages concerns about how they choose to live their lives. They are craven. They are opportunists. Not all. But many. But more than any other reason, I call him Joshua because I expressly don’t want to define him. I don’t want to tell the world who he really was or who he was meant to be. That privilege was reserved for him, and it was intended to play itself out over a lifetime. God loved Joshua Alcorn specially. From the moment that his soul came into existence, God laid forth a plan for Joshua Alcorn’s life. That plan had an infinite number of paths that could be followed to achieve it. And following just one of those paths was going to bring about more joy in Joshua Alcorn’s life than he could have ever imagined. Would there be sorrows along the way? Sure. That’s life. But the joys outweigh the sorrows and life is always worth living. I guess it’s unfair to expect a 17-year-old child to understand it. “It will get better.” Indeed, it would have. That’s the real tragedy in the suicide of Joshua Alcorn. That’s the story that needs to be told.