The Struggle To Understand Suicide
by Fr Ron Rolheiser
2005-07-17
Every year I write a column on suicide
because, among all forms of death, it's still the one we struggle with the most.
How can suicide happen? What makes a person take his or her own life?
Suicide, no doubt, is the most misunderstood of all deaths and leaves behind
a residue of questions, guilt, anger, second-guessing, and anxiety which, at
least initially, is almost impossible to digest. Even though we know better,
we're still haunted by the feeling that suicide is the ultimate act of despair,
a deed that somehow puts one outside the family of humanity, the mercy of God,
and (in the past) the church's burial grounds.
When someone close to us commits suicide we feel both pain and shame. That's why
suicides are often not reported publicly. An obituary is more likely to say that
this person "died suddenly", without specifying the cause of death. This
reticence to admit how our loved one died speaks deeply about both the pain and
shame that we are left with after the suicide of a loved one. To lose a loved
one to death is painful, to lose a loved one to suicide is also disorienting.
What needs to be said about suicide? A number of things need to be re-iterated
over and over again:
First, that suicide, at least in most cases, is a sickness, a disease,
a terminal illness that takes a person out of life, as does any terminal
illness, against his or her will. In essence, suicide is death through emotional
cancer, emotional heart attack, emotional stroke. That's why it's apt to say
that someone is "a victim of suicide". Suicide is a desperate, if misguided,
attempt to end unendurable pain at any cost, akin to throwing oneself through a
window and falling to one's death because one's clothing is on fire. Suicide is
an illness, not a sin.
Next, those left behind when a loved one commits suicide should
not unduly second-guess themselves, anxiously examining over and over again what
they might have done differently, why they weren't more present, or how they
somehow failed the one who committed suicide. Part of the anatomy of the
disease is precisely the pathology of distancing oneself from one's loved ones
so that they cannot be present to the illness. When a loved one commits suicide
we can't help but ask ourselves: "If only I had been there! Why was I absent
just on that morning?" But we weren't there precisely because the person
committing suicide did not what us to be there and picked the moment, the venue,
and the means precisely with that in mind.
Besides, we're human beings, not God. People die from accidents and illnesses
every day and all the love and attentiveness in the world sometimes cannot not
prevent someone we love from dying. Suicide is a sickness and, like cancer,
sometimes cannot be cured by any amount of love and care. Knowing this isn't an
excuse to rationalize our failures, but it can give us some consolation in
knowing that it wasn't our neglect or inattentiveness on a given day that led
someone we love to suicide.
Finally, we should not have undue worry and anxiety over the eternal
fate of our loved ones who commit suicide. Why not?
First, in most cases, as we know, suicide victims have cancerous problems
precisely because they are over-sensitive, wounded, too-bruised to be touched,
and too raw to have the normal resiliency needed to deal with life. Their
problem is not one of pride and strength, but rather of shame and weakness.
What drives them to do this act is not the arrogance of a Hitler, but the
weakness of an illness.
That's why we can make a distinction between "falling victim to suicide" and
"killing oneself". The former is done out of illness, the latter is done out of
pride. On the surface they might look the same, but there's an infinite moral
distance between being too bruised to continue to touch life and being too
arrogant to continue to take one's place within it.
And God, more than anyone else, understands this. God's understanding and
compassion are much deeper than ours and God's hands are infinitely gentler than
our own. If we, in our imperfect love and limited understanding, have some grasp
of this, shouldn't we be trusting that God, who is perfect love and
understanding, is up to the task and that our loved ones are safe in God's hands
and God's understanding?
Any faith that connects itself to a God worth believing in doesn't have undue
anxiety as to what will happen when God, finally, face to face, meets a bruised,
gentle, over-sensitive, wounded, ill, struggling soul. Indeed, we have many
scriptural references as to what happens, namely, God, who can descend into any
hell we can create, goes straight through our locked doors, enters into the hell
of our paranoia, illness, and fear, and gently breathes out peace.