Suicide - The Most Misunderstood Of All Deaths by Rev. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Printed in the Prairie Messenger, the Catholic weekly newspaper for all
the dioceses of Saskatchewan, Canada, August 25, 2004
"Death is always painful, but its pains are compounded considerably if its cause
is suicide. When a suicide occurs, we aren't just left with the loss of a
person, we're also left with a legacy of anger, second-guessing, and fearful
anxiety.
So each year I write a column on suicide, hoping that it might help produce more
understanding around the issue and, in a small way perhaps, offer some
consolation to those who have lost a loved one to this dreadful disease.
Essentially, I say the same things each year because they need to be said. As
Margaret Atwood once put it, some things need to be said and said and said
again, until they don't need to be said any more. That's true of suicide.
What needs to be said, and said again, about it?
First of all that it's a disease and perhaps the most misunderstood of all
diseases.
We tend to think that if a death is self-inflicted it is voluntary in a way that
death through physical illness or accident is not. For most suicides, this isn't
true. A person who falls victim to suicide dies, as the does the victim of a
terminal illness or fatal accident, not by his or her own choice. When people
die from heart attacks, strokes, cancer, AIDS, and accidents, they die against
their will. The same is true suicide, except that in the case of suicide the
breakdown is emotional rather than physical - an emotional stroke, an emotional
cancer, a breakdown of the emotional immune-system, an emotional fatality.
This is not an analogy. The two kinds of heart attacks, strokes, cancers,
breakdowns of the immune-system, and fatal accidents, are identical in that, in
neither case, is the person leaving this world on the basis of a voluntary
decision of his or her own will. In both cases, he or she is taken out of life
against his or her own will. That's why we speak of someone as a "victim" of
suicide.
Given this fact, we should not worry unduly about the eternal salvation of a
suicide victim, believing (as we used to) that suicide is always an act of
ultimate despair. God is infinitely more understanding than we are and God's
hands are infinitely safer and more gentle than our own. Imagine a loving mother
having just given birth, welcoming her child onto her breast for the first time.
That, I believe, is the best image we have available to understand how a suicide
victim (most often an overly sensitive soul) is received into the next life.
Again, this isn't an analogy. God is infinitely more understanding, loving, and
motherly than any mother on earth. We need not worry about the fate of anyone,
no matter the cause of death, who exits this world honest, over-sensitive,
gentle, over-wrought, and emotionally- crushed. God's understanding and
compassion exceed our own.
Knowing all of this however, doesn't necessarily take away our pain (and anger)
at losing someone to suicide. Faith and understanding aren't meant to take our
pain away but to give us hope, vision, and support as we walk within it.
Finally, we should not unduly second-guess when we lose a loved one to suicide:
"What might I have done? Where did I let this person down? If only I had been
there? What if ...?" It can be too easy to be haunted with the thought: "If only
I'd been there at the right time." Rarely would this have made a difference.
Indeed, most of the time, we weren't there for the exact reason that the person
who fell victim to this disease did not want us to be there. He or she picked
the moment, the spot, and the means precisely so that we wouldn't be there.
Perhaps it's more accurate to say that suicide is a disease that picks its
victim precisely in such a way so as to exclude others and their attentiveness.
This should not be an excuse for insensitivity, especially towards those
suffering from dangerous depression, but it should be a healthy check against
false guilt and fruitless second-guessing.
We're human beings, not God. People die of
illness and accidents all the time and all the love and attentiveness in the
world often cannot prevent a loved one from dying. Suicide is an sickness there
are some sicknesses that all the care and love in the world cannot cure.
A proper human and faith response to suicide should not be horror, fear for the
victim's eternal salvation, or guilty second-guessing about how we failed this
person. Suicide is indeed a horrible way to die, but we must understand it (at
least in most cases) as a sickness, a disease, an illness, a tragic breakdown
within the emotional immune-system. And then we must trust, in God's goodness,
God's understanding, God's power to descend into hell, and God's power to redeem
all things, even death, even death by suicide."
Ronald Rolheiser, a Roman Catholic priest and member of the Missionary
Oblates of Mary Immaculate, is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San
Antonio, Texas [on sabbatical in Toronto until August, 2005].
He is a community-builder, lecturer and writer. His books are popular throughout the English-speaking world and his weekly column is carried by more than fifty newspapers worldwide. For most of the 28 years of his priesthood, he taught philosophy at Newman Theological College in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He remains an adjunct faculty member at Seattle University.
For more details about him and his informative articles please visit Ron’s web site at : www.ronrolheiser.com