Misconceptions about Suicide
by Fr Ron Rolheiser
2003-07-27
Margaret Atwood once wrote that sometimes
things need to be said, and said, and said, until they don't need to be said any
more. Each year I write a column on suicide because, given the misconceptions
about it, some things need to be said over and over again.
What are our misconceptions about suicide? What must be reiterated over and over
again:
First, that suicide is not an act of despair. We are, too slowly,
emerging from a mindset that understands suicide as the ultimate act of despair
- culpable, irrevocable, and unforgivable. To commit suicide, it is too commonly
believed, puts one under the judgement once pronounced on Judas Iscariot:
"Better to not have been born." Until recently, victims of suicide were often
not even buried in church cemeteries.
What we didn't understand when we thought these things is that the propensity
for suicide is, in most cases, an illness, pure and simple. We are made up
of body and soul, either can snap. We can die of cancer, high blood pressure,
heart attacks, aneurysms. These are physical sicknesses. But we can suffer these
too in the soul, not just the body. There are malignancies and aneurysms too of
the heart, mortal wounds from which the soul cannot recover. In most cases,
suicide, like any terminal illness, takes a person out of life against his or
her will. The death is not freely chosen, but is an illness, far from an act of
free will. In most instances, suicide is a desperate attempt to end unendurable
pain, much like a woman who throws herself through a window because her clothing
has caught fire. That's a tragedy, not an act of despair.
If this is true, and it is, then we should also give up the notion that
suicide puts a person outside the mercy of God. God's mercy is equal even to
suicide. After the resurrection, we see how Christ, more than once, goes
through locked doors and breathes forgiveness, love, and peace into hearts that
are unable to open up because of fear and hurt. God's mercy and peace can go
through walls where we can't. As we all know, this side of heaven, sometimes all
the love, stretched-out hands, and professional help in the world can no longer
reach through to a heart paralysed by fear and illness.
But, where we stand helpless, God's compassion can still reach through. God's
love can descend into hell itself (as we state in our creed) and breathe peace
and reconciliation right into wound, anger, and fear. God's hands are gentler
than ours, God's compassion is wider than ours, and God's understanding
infinitely surpasses our own. Our wounded loved ones who fall victim to suicide
are safe in God's hands, safer by far than they are in the judgements that issue
from our own limited understanding. God is not stymied by locked doors as we
are.
When suicide victims wake on the other side, they are met by a gentle Christ who
stands right inside of their huddled fear and says: "Peace be with you!" As we
see in the post-resurrection appearances of Christ, God can go through locked
doors, breathe out peace in places where we cannot get in, and write straight
with even the most crooked of lines.
Finally, too, there is a misunderstanding about suicide that expresses itself
in second-guessing: If only I had done more! If only I had been more attentive
this could have been prevented.
Rarely is this the case. Most of the time, we weren't there when our loved one
departed for the very reason that this person didn't want us to be there. He or
she picked the time and place precisely with our absence in mind. Suicide is a
disease that picks its victim precisely in such a way so as to exclude others
and their attentiveness. That's part of the anatomy of the disease.
This, of course, may never be an excuse for insensitivity to those around us who
are suffering from depression, but it's a healthy check against false guilt and
anxious second-guessing. Many of us have stood at the bedside of someone who is
dying and experienced a frustrating helplessness because there was nothing we
could do to prevent our loved one from dying. That person died, despite our
attentiveness, prayers, and efforts to be helpful. So too, at least generally,
with those who die of suicide. Our love, attentiveness, and presence could
not stop them from dying - despite our will and effort to the contrary.
The Christian response to suicide should not be horror, fear for the person's
eternal salvation, and anxious self-examination about what we did or didn't do.
Suicide is indeed a horrible way to die, but we must understand it for what it
is, a sickness, and stop being anxious about both that person's eternal
salvation and our less-than-perfect response to his or her illness.
God redeems everything and, in the end, all manner of being will be well, even
beyond suicide.