I have been confronted by death many times inside as well as outside the ministry in the past, but none has left me more numb as deaths by suicide. Deaths by suicide always leave me with inexplicable pain and unanswered questions.
It was so when a very dear friend apparently killed herself some years back leaving a distraught husband and son. Her death even left me with a tinge of remorse since I thought I should have known better and did something when she appeared to be depressed and hinted of wanting to talk a few days before it happened. I was stunned for many days after that. Why did she do it? Why she of all people? She was such a gentle person she could not even hurt a fly. She was so selfless and always thinking of the other first. She was prayerful having been raised well by her parents and educated in catholic schools all the way. How could she have done it? Was her soul damned because of it?
Similar questions came to my mind when I heard of the more sensational cases of suicide in the not too distant past. There was the case of 12-year old Marianette Amper who hanged herself inside their thatched house in a remote village in Mindanao apparently due to extreme hunger and poverty. It caught national attention and politicians even used it to draw attention to the present state of the poor in the country. Then there was the well-publicized suicide of the wife of a well-known TV news personality. And most recently, the suicide of the son of a famous movie actor.
It was only recently did I realize that perhaps I was asking these questions because I was brought up to look at suicide as a heinous sin, a mortal sin. That it is a sin of despair, like Judas’ sin of hanging himself after he betrayed Jesus. That it is a sin of losing hope and therefore anyone who commits suicide is damned forever. We were even taught that those who died by suicide cannot be given the last rites of the Catholic church and cannot be buried on sacred grounds.
It is refreshing and comforting then to find a well-respected and eminent spirituality writer and preacher, Fr. Ronald Rolheiser, OMI write about suicide and tell us how we have apparently misunderstood it in the past. He has taken it upon himself to write at least one column on suicide every year so that we, specially families of suicide victims, can take comfort in what he has to say.
Fr. Rolheiser writes a regular column in the internet (www.ronrolheiser.com). The following is only one of seven (7) columns on the subject of suicide from 2001 to 2009:
“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 re- iterated 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 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.”
