Suicide Survivors: Handle with Care

A friend of mine lost her father last week. She was completely devastated, but her FB messages since have reflected her feelings of being tremendously loved and supported as she and her family have made their way through the plans, visitation, and funeral. And I've thought a lot about what she's written.

I realize, looking back, that we were given the same sort of generous presence and assistance when Chicago Son died.

I was unaware of the love and care that surrounded us. Oh, I registered it all in the sense that I mostly knew who was were when, and to whom I needed to write thank-you notes.

But emotionally? I did not feel loved or supported. I did not feel the comfort or solace of community.

I felt completely alone.

I think that the shock of a child's suicide is so great that nothing can penetrate it.

For, apparently, at least a couple of years.

What I want to say, to those of you trying to support those of us who have lost children to suicide (or, perhaps, to anything):

This is why we act so weird. We survive by being encased in a tough shell that we don't even know is there. When it cracks, the pain that seeps in is so great that we just grow another layer as fast as possible.

Don't give up on us. We're wedged in there, and if we survive we'll emerge someday. We'll be different, but we will come out.

Christmas Message

I just posted this on my usual blog, but in case someone comes here and needs to read it:


It's three days before Christmas and I've just learned of the suicide this past week of another young man in his early 20s. I just want to say . . . it's hard. So impossibly hard. I am not sure that there is a more searing form of pain in this life. Although I was able to write of hope in my blog tonight, we are leaving town tomorrow for the third Christmas in a row, and I expect to be be scattering ashes into the Atlantic on Christmas Day. I am writing this so that you know, if you are a parent or other loved one reading this because your Christmas season has just been ripped away, along with the rest of your life, that there are others who accompany you. We may grow into hope, and into lives we never expected or wanted, but we remain heartbroken, and we know, as you do, about things no one wants to know. There is a light that the darkness does not overcome, but the darkness is very dark indeed. May you know that the love to which you once gave birth still flows outward and envelops your child, and may you be surrounded by people who will hang onto to you through the darkness.

Year Three: A Space in Which to Watch and Listen

I've realized from a couple of comments and emails that not everyone has made it over to the new place, so I thought I'd cross-post this one (which perhaps should have been posted here originally):

And so . . .

Late yesterday afternoon my son and I drove the few hours to my husband's hometown for his brother's retirement party. We stopped at nearby Chautauqua on the way so that I could purchase a gift for another party today and also the Barbara Brown Taylor CDs from the summer - a Sunday morning service, a Sunday evening Vespers service which has become a traditional time in which the preachers of the week to share some of their personal stories, and five weekday services.

BBT is one of the reasons I have just graduated from seminary. She was "introduced" to me a couple of decades ago by one of my stepsisters who was a parishoner of hers in Clarksville GA, and I've heard her preach several times at Chautauqua. I had planned to go for one of the week-day services in July, but found that that beautiful place, with its memories of summer after summer with our children and of the last time there, taking some ashes down to the lake on Thanksgiving night two years ago, was not yet possible for me. I had hoped to make one drive around the grounds yesterday, but it turns out that Chautauqua is also too much for my son.

Car rides with kids, even 26-year-old kids, are great opportunities for conversation. My son shared some of his feelings about this past week and his fears about the party toward which we were headed. I told him that my brother had called to express apprehension about my attendance at this event on this particular week-end.

As it turned out, Matt spent much of the evening settled into a couch with a cousin and some other young men he doesn't know, watching football on tv. I spent most of it sitting around a table with my husband's sisters and their husbands and one of their daughters, who's just started college. I watched the new babies and their families out of the corner of my eye, and here's what I saw:

The babies are beautiful and peaceful and never at a loss for arms in which to be held ~

The young mothers look very happy, a little tired, and at ease in their new roles ~

The grandmothers and great-grandmother are ecstatic ~

It looks (and I recall that it is) much easier to care for one newborn than two, especially when you are surrounded by extended family ~

No one shared birth stories with me, no one tried to hand babies to me, no one mentioned what it was like when there were two babies in the family 26 years ago.

Which caused me to wonder:

Do I exhibit a terrible stillness that renders me unapproachable? Are they sensitive to my feelings? Or are they just scared of the woman whose own baby grew up only to die?

Probably no one even notices. Perhaps it's only me ~ because I am so aware that if Josh were here, I wouldn't be able to get enough of those babies and their mothers.

And so . . .

I am thinking that two years ago I would not have gone near that party. A year ago I would have gone and been outside in tears within five minutes. Last night I made it through three hours and managed, I think, to appear quite normal. (Perhaps when my husband comes home tonight, he will offer a different impression.)

I see that this is a year in which to watch and listen, to absorb and reflect. I wonder at the randomness of it all ~ how my sister-in-law has a happy marriage, a job she enjoys, a beautiful home, three grown children, and now two beautiful grandchildren, and how she smiles and laughs. I wonder how many times I have been, in my own happiness, oblivious to the concealed pain of others. (I am not commenting on my sister-in-law or anyone else ~ only on myself.

Matt and I spent a lot of our car time talking about how much you share, how much you don't. What does he say to new acquaintances in law school? I am still stunned, he says, that my brother is dead, and by suicide. What do I say to new people, some of whom might become good friends and some not? How do I tell stories about my life?

I tell him that I have no idea. I tell him that one of my best friends is a woman I met on the first day of law school all those years ago, and that she became a person who immediately flew back from California when his brother died and accompanied me to the crematorium. But how would I have predicted any of that when we were young women studying law together? I tell him that some years ago she told me that she remembers in great detail the moment when we were getting to know each other over our morning cookie snack, a few weeks into school, and I told her that my mother had died when I was a child. It was a simple statement of fact for me, a stunning revelation for her. I don't remember the conversation at all; it is burned into her mind. What effect do our words have on people? I am a preacher: I should know the answer to that one. I find that I have no idea.

I tell him that I do not know what to tell, what not.

(This blog, form instance, is probably too much sharing. But in truth it reveals little of the depth of this experience.)

And so . . . watching and listening, and trying to figure out how to live. What to share because it helps me. What to offer because it might help others. What to keep to myself.

Year Three begins.

Suicide and Faith (Part III)

I think that it would be fair to say that one of the basic threads of discussion which I have pursued with my spiritual director for the past two years goes something like this:

Where was God?

Not exactly an original question in the wake of catastrophe. But then, originality is not a requirement.

My daughter is driving from North Carolina to Ohio as I write this. I have spent the past 26 years waging a battle against terror whenever any of my children are out of my sight. Having lost a mother, brother, stepmother, and aunt all to sudden deaths at young ages, I have no particular sense of assurance about human safety or well-being. Actually, I have none at all. But I did pretty well for 24 years, and managed to conceal most of my fears and not convey them to my children. And then one night something I wasn't even afraid of came true.

So where was God? I have asked tearfully and furiously and tiredly, over and over and over. Not with respect to myself. I couldn't have cared less about that. With respect to my child.

After about a year, I had reached the point at which I could at least acknowledge the promise Jesus makes in Matthew 28:20: "Lo, I am with you always." And hope that it might be true.

And then it was completely ruined for me by a sermon preached at seminary. It happens that that verse is preceded by one in which Jesus says "Go and make disciples of all people." The sermon was an energetic call to mission, and an argument that making disciples of all people is a predicatory requirement for Jesus' continued presence with us. "No 'Lo' without the 'Go!' " said the pastor,

I was completely devastated. I had just barely, gingerly, come to a tentative and fragile confidence that Jesus might have been with and fully present to my son when he died, and this preacher essentially told me: No.

It was months before I set foot in the seminary chapel again.

Now another year has gone by.

And I have slowly and tentatively reached the point at which I can barely grasp the hope that the Jesus who is always present to people at their lowest and most helpless was surely with my child; that the Jesus who always extends healing and wholeness to the sick and broken did the same for him.

I am able to say that largely out of my own experience, out of my gradual waking to the recognition that Jesus has been present to me in so many ways through other people since Josh died. And I am not nearly as broken as Josh was. So my only conclusion can be that Jesus is even more interested in him.

**********

I know that some folks are wondering why I am writing this. I sometimes wonder myself. Shouldn't I, as a spiritual director and almost-pastor, be offering emphatic assurance in the hope of the Resurrected Christ?

I think it's important, even if only in this little-read blog, to witness to the genuine experience of the most horrific kinds of loss. The path to a renewed and confident faith is a steep and rocky one, with many slides backward over rough gravel and gnarly roots. Pretending otherwise is of no help to anyone.

Suicide and Faith (Part II)

Part II because you have to read the post below to get this one fully.

My argument is that suicide is in a realm of its own when it comes to the survival of the religious faith of those left behind. I would not presume to suggest comparisons in other ways to other losses, particularly where children are concerned.

The challenge emerges out of what suicide is ~ a decision (not, I would say, a choice) against life, against one's OWN gift of life. If you are are Jewish or Christian, your Scriptures are replete with the exhortation to "Choose life!" If you have spent any time at all with someone who is dying, or whose illness or injury makes dying a very real possibility, you know that the impulse to choose life ~ this life, the earthly one ~ is difficult indeed to counteract. Most people, regardless of their beliefs about whatever comes next, will undergo tremendous suffering for the purpose of hanging onto this life. Their reasons are varied, but underneath them all lies a fundamental conviction that life is of value, and a deep, deep desire to continue to participate in it.

Not so for the person who dies by suicide. At least not in that last irreversible moment.

Many years after my mother and brother died, probably when I was in my twenties, my surviving brother told me that our grandmother, our father's mother, had once told him that after that car accident she was finished with God. She wanted nothing whatever to do with a God who would let such a thing happen. "But the Holocaust?" I said ~ by which I meant: the world is full of suffering and death, much of it on a vast scale. And yet the Jewish people are among God's biggest champions. "I dunno," shrugged my brother. "That's what she said."

My grandmother's response has not been mine. Although, like my brother, I grew up in a family in which the general theological stance was Too Much Senseless Suffering = No God, I came out in a different place. And I have been extraordinarily graced by God in many ways in the past two years. I have, after all, had an entire Presbyterian seminary at my disposal, and I have had the friendship and help of Catholic priests who are able to hear anything and everything with complete aplomb, and I have had the companionship of friends of every religious persuasion and non-persuasion.

But the question remains.

What about my child?

Like any halfway decent parent, I would without a glance backward trade every gift I have been given for him to enjoy them instead of me.

It is all one of the greatest of conundrums, and one of the greatest challenges to a parent's faith.

Suicide (Not for the Faint of Heart)

I could be wrong (wouldn't THAT be surprising?) but I have about concluded that the suicide of a child is the ultimate challenge to any understanding of faith. As is the suicide of a sibling or parent, although the reasons would be somewhat different.

Maybe I'll start thinking about how to articulate that. For now all I can do is mumble something along the lines of: no matter what the articulation of faith in the face of suffering -- like this for instance -- my brilliant comeback is always, "Yes, but . . .".

The suicide of a child is in its own category.

Let me try this:

I went to the eye doctor several months ago. She has cared for all of my children all of their lives. In the context of our conversation about Josh, she told me about another patient family in which the son died last year in a motorcyle crash on the day he graduated from college. The mother and daughter have become speakers promoting organ donation. Brave, heroic women. No question about it.

Do you see the problem?

Suicide: No organ donation. No heroics ~ which is to say, no salvific sense of purposefulness in courage or in helping others ~ not for the person who has died and not for the survivors. Death, brutal and violent - and alone. The knowledge that someone you loved far more than your own life suffered so terribly, and that one aspect of that suffering was an inability to seek help. No good-byes. No conversation at all. And an action that so violates every tenet of life, an action taken by someone whose own life was a process and product of your own love, at conception and for every moment thereafter. Even if you are confident, as I am, that suicide in most cases (including this one) is not the act of a rational person (which is another conclusion that causes only anguish), it is still different than, say, being run over by a train, or cornered by an illness.

The summer right before Josh died, I spent 11 weeks doing my clinical pastoral education in a hopsital in which almost all of the patients are critically ill. Dozens of my patients died. I poured my very being into offering spiritual care to all of those people and their families, most of them complete strangers to me. I could not do that for my own child.

On Sunday I will be preaching on God's all-encompassing love. That's what I believe in; that's all I can believe in.

But some days it's a real stretch to find any point of contact between faith and experience.

Social Challenges

I would very much like to hear how others of you manage these things.

Example: My daughter and I attended a baby shower ~ which for me was pure agony, for a number of reasons beyond the usual. It seems to have meant a lot to the young mothers-to-be that we went, and I survived, but not without some damage.

Example: My husband and I are skipping a wedding this week-end. To do the whole thing would entail 24-plus hours away from home engaged in nonstop celebration. We have attended two weddings since Josh died, and I think we have sworn them off for awhile. But people are Not Happy with us.

Example: A conflict has emerged over a moms' week-end away and an 8-day retreat I have planned. I do need to spend time with my friends, but I also need this time away with a spiritual director who has particular gifts and training applicable to the situation in which I find myself. I think I am at a pretty critical turning point, and I would like to navigate something well rather than badly for a change.

How I see it: People have, of course, gone on with their own lives. I WANT my friends to enjoy each other and their children and grandchildren. I cannot expect them to know that, much as I want to see and talk with them, the usual, run-of-the-mill social events are painful for me and I do much better with one-on-one conversations over coffee. I have tried to hint at that, but apparently I need to wear a sign. Interestingly, I am doing much better these days at keeping up with friends who are not part of my usual "group," precisely because we do get together only occasionally and usually only in pairs.

More challenge: My husband, who was already an Introvert of the Highest Order, lost his son and father in one 18-month period. I am trying to be supportive of his needs as well as my own and our children's, and often we don't mesh. I read somewhere that a family in grief is a like a family in a pool or lake ~ when one person comes up for air, she looks around and see no one, because everyone is popping up on different timetables. It requires a whole new level of resiliency and commitment to stay in the water.

The kicker: I am no different from anyone else. I, too, find it difficult to remain attentive to and considerate of friends who have suffered big losses.

I wish that I were a brilliant conversationalist and moved with ease in the world, someone of whom people could say, "She's so strong and courageous!"

I wish that I lived all by myself in a cottage on the edge of the sea, someone whom only migrating birds would see, and of whom people could say, "Well, she just vanished."

Real life is a good deal more ~ um ~ mushy.

Blogging Survivors of Suicide II

Connections are good.

Of course, it's mostly confidential.

But as one woman, four months in, raised that issue with which we all struggle, that someone we loved could have suffered so much in the last moments of life, another woman, four years in, said that she has read that people who survive suicide attempts often say that they have no memory at all of the minutes just before. Complete dissociation.

As with most things related to this subject, I think that we all wondered whether that is or is not comforting news.

As with most things, we have no way of knowing.

And I said, in connection with a wedding we are not attending this month, that I live at a generally high level of psychic pain and that, when I anticipate it spiking toward 90-100%, I feel no obligation to inflict that degree of injury upon myself.

And everyone nodded in complete agreement and understanding.

Blogging Survivors of Suicide I

I'm going to a meeting tonight. I haven't been in over a year: I've mostly been out of town on Thursdays. I tried to go two weeks ago, but it was canceled, so . . . maybe tonight.

I'm in a very different place than I was a year ago. It's been about a year since the Hebrew verb "to kill" became a central feature of one of our three-hour classes (to kill, to be killed, to have killed, to kill oneself), at the end of which I dissolved into very public tears. A few nights ago I was at a meeting at which someone eagerly shared with us the "dry bones" verses from Ezekiel, telling us that it's one of the most important passages with which she prays on her annual retreat, a time each summer during which she seeks re-creation. That's one of the passages of which I now steer clear, being as how dead bones and sinews are not, in fact, ever put back together, but I found that I had no need to say anything. I just let her have the pleasure of sharing a piece of Scripture that has life-giving meaning for her. No commentary from me required or desired.

But I am terribly, terribly sad. I am sorting and clearing through our house and it's taking a very long time, because I find things, and memories pour through me and I am immobilized for the next few days. I've actually spent most of today doing the denial thing by reading a very good mystery, after a little meltdown last night. But this evening, as I started to get ready to go out, I found myself imagining early summer evenings in this kind of heat 20 years ago: bringing the kids home from the pool, no one changing out of already-dry swim suits, making sandwiches for dinner, my children running around with those from next door in the waning light, popsicles for all, an hour of stories, settling my daughter into her bed with a cat picture book and listening outside the door as the boys chattered to each other in the dark.

Another person's life?

There's no predicting what will happen at this meeting. But I am feeling the need for some connection.

Transitions

Well. It seems that people are out there. Who knew?

I started wondering a few days ago whether I should re-open and rename this blog: Desert Year and A Summer Later. I suppose that's too much of a hassle; besides, at the moment, I like how the title looks. I think that we can just accept that the first year or so of grief does not much resemble a calendar year.

I have a whole jumble of things to explore over the next whatever time. Maybe some of them, here or there, will be meaningful to someone else. I know that a number of the names I see in the comments to the last post represent people reeling from unfathomable losses. Let's see . . .

Still dealing with the, ummmmm (how can I put this charitably?) . . . oblivious I mean unformed among us:

Those reading my new, non-anonymous blog, know that I took a class on theologian Miroslav Volf this past spring. One evening before our weekly meeting, I emailed my professor, described the specific ways in which the reading assignment for the next day had tormented me, and asked him to please leave me alone if I had nothing to say in class. He responded with a compassionate email of his own. As it happened, the class the next afternoon moved along without incident until about the last twenty minutes. At that point, one of the young men began to talk about the issues to which I had referred in my email the previous night, and proceeded to pontificate about God opening a window whenever God closes a door, and about our obligation to help those who are suffering to focus on the window rather than the door. It was quite a lengthy soliloquy, going on for several minutes. Obviously this young man has not experienced God's slamming, bolting, and gluing a door shut with no window distributor in sight. The professor stole a look a me, but I was absolutely silent ~ mostly because the only response I could think of was to knock the guy out cold. Since our primary class topic was reconciliation, I thought that I should restrain myself.

I am working on this matter of how to teach people to respond appropriately to the pain of others without being too pathetic myself. It's a challenge.

Yet another transition:

This business of having finished my M.Div. is tough. Lots of questions. I have been wondering a lot whether I went back to school too soon. I still think that it will be years before I understand what it might have meant to be in seminary during this period. I continued to pile up the As, but I certainly could not appreciate what I was learning as I might have had I been in another frame of mind. Does that mean I appreciated it differently, and will use it differently, in ways that are meaningful? Or should I just have stayed in bed? That's where I am right now, and it seems like a good place to be.

And now what? Given the Presbyterian call system, no one is pushing me into the next thing. As far as I can tell, despite all of the time, energy, effort, and money that have been invested in my theological education, I could simply drop off the radar screen without anyone uttering a sound. We have committees that are supposed to keep track of us, but the initiative is entirely with those of us moving from one hoop to another. It's a bizarre process and a surreal situation.

The challenge of a child's death by suicide:

I have read and been the recipient of an awful lot of advice to the effect that God is always present, God strengthens you through suffering, God can transform even the worst into . . . something, blah blah blah. I could believe all of that about most things, at least if I were the only person concerned. Although I have at least two good friends who have had cancer whose response, and I believe I am being accurate and precise here, would be, "Bullshit." And even if I am correct, the cost is too high. As I said in one of my classes one day in which the discussion centered on what we gain through suffering, I probably became a far stronger and more independent and resilient person because of the early death of my mother than I would have otherwise. But ~ and leaving my mother's own well-being out of the equation entirely ~ I would be glad to have been able to trade the aforesaid strength and independence and resiliency for the chance to grow up with a mother.

All of the above, however, fades into complete irrelevance when one is faced with the death of a child by suicide. Where was God, or God's strengthening or transforming power? I am actually coming, v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, to some thoughts about that, but they are not obvious or easily digested. We'll see.

Finding meaning anyway (finding God in all things):

Finally ~ sigh ~ perhaps this will be the main topic of the summer. It's a hallmark of Ignatian spirituality, this finding of God in all things. But, as that 80-year-old Jesuit friend of mine says, "First you have to find God in some things." Working on it.

It's that matter of trading, again. (Would it surprise you to know that I once made a good friend cry during a game of Monopoly, when I ruthlessly traded my way up to all hotels on the Boardwalk and Park Place side?) The truth is, I can see God in many things these days. And I would trade almost every single one of them, including relationships which are precious to me, for my son's life. The whole board, all the properties, all the cash, all the houses and hotels ~ you could have every last one of them.

It is very hard to get used to seeing God in things you would willingly trade away and trying to figure out if God is in other things that you cannot see or grasp.

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I wonder how this is done ~ this survival thing. It seems that, 21 months into it, I have no idea at all.

20 Months and 2 Days

No, it doesn't ease.

It changes, that's all.

There are always new events, new encounters, new tasks ~ and each one brings with it a new facet of pain, or sadness, or longing.

This morning I found myself thinking, "OK, it's been long enough; it's time for you to come home so we can get on with our lives."

I will graduate from seminary in a few weeks. (Assuming that I ever finish The Big Huge Paper about which I have no thoughts whatever.) I wish that that particular event could mean to me what I once anticipated it would. I have no idea what it means now, to me or to anyone else, other than yet another milestone which my family is unable to acknowledge or celebrate together.

I imagine my son saying to me, "Mom, I am so sorry. I love you so much and I did not imagine that I would be transferring my pain to you forever."

But that's only in my imagination.

End of the Year

When I opened this blog, I entitled it Desert Year, not Years.

Did I know, intuitively, that a year would be long enough? Did I hope for some kind of transformation; did I hope that in a year the desert would bloom again?

It's been a good place for me, this blog. Sometimes it's seemed like one long wail ~ against the loss of my beautiful child, against the disappearance of God, against the end of life as I knew it. Sometimes it's been a place in which to digest the trauma of suicide; to come to terms with one of, ironically, life's heaviest and loneliest experiences. Sometimes it's been a place of profoundly moving friendship, as other mothers have generously shared their own sorrows.

But I think it's run its course. I am, surprisingly to me, in a new place, something that's happened in just the last few days. In some ways a harder place ~ I think that I have found my way through an exterior shell of anger and pain and I am going to be left with a deep and pervasive sense of loss. There is not going to be anything to protect me from the reality that my beloved son is truly gone.

A couple of weeks ago I heard a talk by a 60-year-old man, and he mentioned having called his mother over the week-end. Such a casual remark is like a sharp stab into a tender spot for me; when I am 91, there will not be a 60-year-old Josh to give me a call. (Dear God, if I live to be 91, I will have spent 35 years without him, which is ten more than the short 25 we had. I am not hoping for 91.) Those are the moments, and they occur multiple times every day, with which I am going to have to contend without the protective veneer of the past fifteen-plus months.

But God is present to me again, in a way God has not been, and the air has cleared enough for me to recognize that the face of God has been present to me, albeit unrecognized by my grief-stricken heart, in the gifts of my family, of countless friends ~ some of whom I have known for years irl and some for only weeks online, and many in between ~ and most especially through the remarkable men who have persisted as my spiritual directors in incredibly patient and nonintrusive constancy.

I found the following a couple of days ago and posted it on my Advent blog, but I think it serves as a good ending to this one. Of course, total silence is beyond me, and I hope you'll still visit Search the Sea, where the journey will continue, sometimes no doubt loudly, but I think usually quite differently. This blog will stay up for awhile, at least until I decide what I want to do about it.

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The 14th century Dominican mystic, John Tauler, explains the gift of Zechariah's silence like this: “God cannot leave things empty; that would be to contradict his own nature and justice. Therefore, you must be silent. Then the Word of this birth can be spoken in you and you will be able to hear him. But be certain of this: if you try to speak then He must be silent. There is no better way of serving the Word than in being silent and listening. So if you come out of yourself completely, God will wholly enter in; to the degree you come out, to that degree will he enter, neither more nor less.”

Suicide Sadness

When I check my stat counter, I usually find that at least one or two people have come to this blog via searches along the lines of "surviving child's suicide."

Two young men in circles connected to friends of mine have died by suicide in the past week. I doubt that I would have known about either death had it occurred two years ago, but now I am one of the people who people know, as in "I know a woman . . . ," and so I hear about them.

I am dumbfounded by how many young people die by suicide. I had no idea.

Per a request that came to me, I left a message on the funeral home condolence website for one of the young men. It has not been printed online. Was it too raw? I wonder. I commented on what a wonderful person the young man seems to have been, given the memories posted by those who knew him; I offered a listening ear; and I was honest (quite briefly) about what lies ahead. There are, of course, several messages which contain those dreaded words, those "I can't imagine" words. Interesting, if I am correct, that the website censors are more comfortable with words that push away rather than words that acknowledge.

Both young men were Catholic and apparently there have been issues in both cases in addressing the manner of death in funeral services. I am at a loss. We found nothing but openness and offers of help in our Presby church, and I have found 100% the same from my Catholic friends. In fact, some months after our son died, one of my Presby seminary friends commented that I must have found myself wary of discussing my son's death with the Catholics in my life, and I was very surprised. By that time, practically the only people outside my immediate family with whom I was discussing it in detail were Catholic priests.

I am also dumbfounded by how few in the clergy community seem to know how crucial open conversation is to the process of healing or, perhaps, how to initiate or withstand it such engagement. I suppose it is the withstanding that seems so daunting, and so the initiating does not happen.

Apparently there is a website now via which one can end ones' Facebook career via virtual suicide. I learned that from a longstanding blogging friend; from another, commenting on the former's information, I learned about a concert she had attended in which a piece of narration used the simile "falling like winter suicides." I got into a Facebook debate myself a few weeks ago about a writer's use of the word suicide which many people had found . . . meaningful in various ways. I thought their arguments were preposterous. One of them responded with words to the effect that my own language was flat rather than provocative.

Perhaps that is a consequence of a very real acquaintance with suicide. It is no longer (if, indeed it ever was) merely a source for a provocative pushing of the the limits of language and imagination. It is a horror which flattens all which follows.

I was wrong about the condolence guestbook. As I was writing this last night, my note was published. It, and this post, became the source of a lengthy conversation, as Gregarious Son wandered in while I was writing and asked what I was doing.

He shrugged as I read the condolence note to him. "What you said is true," he said.

It's difficult even to remember what life was like before I knew some true things about suicide.

Suicide is Different

I've been thinking about the essay to which I posted a link yesterday.

I've been thinking about the friend whose son shot himself on Christmas Day eight years ago. I had emailed her earlier this week to see if she wanted to get together, and she responded yesterday that her daughter's best friend's young husband had shot himself the night before.

All I could think was that if there was ever someone who should have understood the legacy he was leaving to his family, it should have been that young man.

Which reminded me of the darkness, the terrible and incomprehensible darkness of pain and despair, that must fill the heart of someone about to die by suicide.

And then I thought of the two young men at a nearby college who have died by suicide this fall.

And then I thought: How did this happen, that my mind is filled with images of young people shooting themselves and hanging themselves and filling their bodies with lethal doses of drugs and jumping from buildings? Thoughts which never entered my head two years ago and now there they are, side by side all the other thoughts.

And then I thought again about that essay, in which the writer says that however it occurs (and he includes suicide in his list of possibilities), the death of a child is one of life's worst experiences.

And then I realized that, much as I hate to dwell on it, suicide is different. Even though I do not believe that suicide is a choice in the way that we generally define the word, there is an element of initiative in it that renders it the worst possible kind of death, at least for the survivors.

There. I've said it.

Who is God?
Does God care about anything at all?
Who was this child with whom you were entangled from the moment of his conception?
Is anything that anyone ever says or does reflective of what they actually mean?

Those are the questions.

Suicide is the worst because it is unthinkable and yet: there it is. Completely real. And leaving the rest of us with no choice at all but to contend with it.

Boy Interrupted

I just read about this film, and thought I would post this review for those who might be interested. I don't think I want to watch it during these holiday weeks, which are difficult enough all on their own, but maybe in January.

Sundance Report #4 – Boy Interrupted Review

By John - January 16, 2009 - 23:17 America/Montreal

PROSPECTOR THEATRE, PARK CITY

“Oh my God, we’re at the Sundance Film Festival because my son killed himself.”

These are the words spoken by Dana Perry, director of “Boy Interrupted,” when asked what was going through her head while watching the world premiere of her documentary film. Since leaving Temple Theater about 30 minutes ago, I’ve been searching for the right way to talk about this film – a film directed by the mother of a boy who committed suicide at age 15 after 10 years of battling with diagnosed bipolar disorder. He goes through periods of happiness, then periods of extreme depression. Suicide is a subject all-too-common since the age of 5. All seems to be going well for the first time in years as he moves into his teenage years, but then he’s slowly taken off meds and, without warning, he jumps from his New York apartment bedroom window. It’s a heavy experience, so here’s what I’m going to do – split this two ways:

Emotional: Hard to argue with such a personal story. With both parents of Evan Perry, the subject of the film, intimately involved with the project as director and cinematographer, respectively, it’s nearly impossible to imagine how it must have been to distance themselves enough from the material. Hart, the father, made it clear to the audience during the Q&A that this film was really about sharing the experience of their journey toward trying to make Evan well and not about the extreme grief of losing a child to suicide. However, it’s tough to escape that framing since it underscores so much of the film. Both Dana and Hart entered into the project also hoping it might allow them some closure, but found that not the case in the slightest. Though Evan’s death is now three years in the past, the wounds are clearly still fresh. As Dana said following the film, “that’s the first and last time I’ll have seen this film with an audience.”

Technical: This is not a film that prides itself on production quality. Told mostly through somewhat blurry home video clips and talking-head interviews, it’s not a film that will win awards for cinematography or for editing. At first I was struck by the lower perceived level of quality, but at the end of it all, the quality of the imagery on screen doesn’t really matter. The story is communicated effectively and with a lot of emotion. What more is needed?

Should you see this film? Not if you’re disturbed by teen suicide or the thought of your children killing themselves. But if you’re up for an emotional story about loss and a family’s journey to try and save their son from his own mind, then it’s definitely worth a look.

You can find out more at www.boyinterruptedfilm.com

~Gunther

Reflections on Suicide and the Holocaust

I write this with hesitation, and with apologies to those who may be offended. But there is a sorting process that occurs in grieving, as we try to discern what is true and what is not, what to hold and what to discard, how we might someday embrace life again and where death has caught us in its tangled grasp.

A couple of months ago, the journal published by Spiritual Directors International, Inc. contained a wonderful piece about accompanying suicide survivors in our journeys. The writers have both lost sons to suicide and, between the two of them, three other family members. Their article stresses that this particular path is a very long one, and emphasizes the time and patience demanded of the spiritual directors who venture across its rocky twists and turns with those who have no choice but to walk it. I know a couple of people who can attest to that.

At one point in the article, and here the exact words escape me, they claim that the experience of surviving a child's suicide is akin to that of Holocaust survivors.

Now, I do not believe that we can compare and contrast experiences of loss, or slot them into a hierarchical framework. Mine is worse than yours, and yours than his, and on and on. But I was startled enough by their argument that I gave it a great deal of thought in the ensuing weeks, and now I have returned to it.

I know a number of Holocaust survivors, and many of their children, and many more of their grandchildren ~ my former students and colleagues, their grandparents and parents. I have listened to many stories. A few years ago, one of my high school freshmen, who did not know much about that part of her heritage, opted to write and perform a soliloquy as a history project based on her World War II research. "Ms. Gannet, Ms. Gannet," cried my students as she finished her presentation, "Ms. Gannet, are you all right?"

All I had been able to think about, as she spoke, was that two generations earlier, it would have been them. My beautiful students, murdered in horrific ways, with perhaps a few of the boys surviving the "Left, right, left, right" as they disembarked from the trains as Auschwitz. Most of them, through, would have been gone.

One of the grandfathers, on Holocaust Remembrance day, came to an assembly to tell the story of his own experience. As he spoke, I was somewhat baffled; the details of his liberation story sounded so familiar, but I was sure that I had not heard it from him. And then he mentioned that he had been in the same compound as Elie Wiesel, and I understood ~ I had taught the book Night on more than one occasion, and my students and I together had explored not only the events of the Holocaust but the range of human response to the questions of faith that arise in the context of a nightmare life.

And so, when I read the article linking my experience to theirs, I was taken aback. And I thought, No. I have not witnessed the murder of my entire community, have not hidden, trembling, as terrorists burned it to the the ground, its inhabitants trapped within it buildings. I have not had to absorb the discovery that members of my family died in agony as Zyklon-B hissed into their nostrils. I live in a comfortable home and I sleep into a warm bed every night. This is nothing at all like Holocaust survival.

And then I thought: they have a point. It lies in that question of human response. It lies in the questions that seep, unwanted, into our consciousness and settle into every corner of our lives. Questions about who God is and who we are. About what matters to God and about how people treat one another. About what we once took for granted and never can again. About who bears responsibility, and for what, exactly? About how time seems to move forward and about how we long for it to reverse direction. About who or what, if anything, is reliable. Or good. Or graceful.

I stand in the cafeteria line, wrinking my nose at meatball sandwiches or smiling gratefully when linguine with Alfredo sauce comes up, and I ponder those questions. I sit in class, taking notes, and they fill my head and cause me, upon occasion, to write "No" in the margin next to one assertion or another. I take long walks and try, in my prayer, to place my thoughts before a God whose priorities are no longer apparent to me.

One of my colleagues once told me something of what it feels like to live in a world in which the Holocaust happened to your family. I was stunned by what he thinks of the culture in which he makes his way, by what he anticipates people like me might do in circumstances like the one from which his family emerged. Stunned. "It's difficult to hear, isn't it?" he said. And then he added, "This is the first time I've ever discussed these things with someone who isn't Jewish."

"You should do it more often," I told him.

We should all share our stories more often. It is only in sifting through our stories that the answers to those hard, hard questions emerge.

Elie Wiesel was once a devout young boy, eagerly studying Torah with the neighborhood rabbi. He became a hardened adolescent, indifferent to the suffering of his own father he witnessed in the concentration camp to which they were both sent and in which most of his family died. He grew into one of the most wise and compassionate of men, someone whom I described to one of my students who was off to sing in a Carnegie Hall concert at which he would be in attendance, as one of the giants, one of the great heroes, of the past century.

He has somehow, absorbed the living of those questions into his very being. Who is God and who are we? What matters to God, and how do we treat one another? Who bears responsibility? Who takes care? What is reliable? Good? Graceful?

It is these questions which we share in common. Our experiences of a world turned in upon itself, of tumult and catastrophe, weight different scales. But the ultimate question, and the text, we do share, remains. We sink into its regret and anguish and then, perhaps, we will stride forward, changed by its challenge: How then shall we live?

(Image: Ezekiel. Source Unknown.)

Just a Day

Early this morning, just before walking over to a particularly challenging exam for which I've been studying for weeks, I opened my Facebook page to discovered that an internet friend had posted the following quote:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing. ~ Cormac McCarthy

I posted a response, to the effect that that was an awful thing to say, and then forced it out of my mind so that I could focus and write steadily for the next three hours.

After lunch, there was a bit more Facebook discussion, which got a little testy and then, relieved to have put my school quarter behind me, I packed up and drove home.

I spent some time talking to the nurse in my doctor's office ~ not great news, but not terrible either.

I thought about how to respond to an email from someone asking how I am. Since we haven't talked in months, I had to conclude that any attempt at a genuine answer is now way beyond my capacity. A reminder that if we don't keep up with people, we lose them.

I stopped at the bookstore to purchase Kay Jamison's Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide. A psychiatrist who herself suffers from bipolar disorder, she is an elegant and brilliant writer ~ but I've been told that this one is a very difficult read for survivors. I may set it aside for a few more months, but in the bookstore I did flip it open to a section on parents. The lifetime of guilt and sadness that awaits me ~ nothing I hadn't already figured out.

And all this time, I was thinking about that stupid quote on Facebook. When I got home, I read a few more of the comments that had been posted and realized that for the others in the dicussion, it was an intellectual exercise. They had found the quote provocative, while I found it repugnant and self-absorbed.

Last week I had dinner with a friend at school who casually remarked that she supposed that it might be suicidal for her to think of taking Greek from Professor So-and-So. I glanced at her and there was a brief flicker of recognition, and then she went on talking.

I wish it were a matter of intellectual debate. I wish it were a matter of casual slang. I wish I had not seen what I have seen, read what I have read, learned what I have learned. (And, given some of the descriptions of bodies and autopsies on the Parents of Suicides mailing list, I have gotten off easily.)

I wish I could be one of those people who sometimes say to me, Oh, we in our family came awfully close to having to deal with what you are faced with. There is an entire universe, filled with black holes and ricocheting meteorites, between "awfully close" and the reality.

Last week, I took one of those internet stress tests ~ you know the kind, that allocates points to life stress events. Under 150 is a good thing, 150-300 reflects increasing health risks, over 300 is not good. My score was 495 and I feel, on the whole, pretty balanced. As I said in response to that email that I didn't know what to do with, "One adapts."

In our case, to life lived in a very different world from the one inhabited by most of the people we encounter.

And not one in which suicide is something to be romanticized or joked about.

Thoughts on Suicide

I am a member of a circle of moms who have been conversing online for years, and the subject of suicide is one of our topics right now, due to some experiences in addition to my own family's. With some editing to avoid personal exposure, here's some of what I have to say these days:

I don't believe that suicide is a choice, I don't believe in using terminology like "commit suicide," and I find that I probably no longer believe in assisted suicide. That's not to say that I believe in heroic and unwarranted lifesaving methods when a person is close to death, and having observed such situations many times during my CPE experience summer before last, I am in complete sympathy with those who suffer end-of-life indignities and with their desire to put a stop to them. But humanely removing life support systems is quite different from actively ending a life, even if sometimes only in the motivation involved.

I have had plenty of hours (14 months x 24/7) to think about it and I am convinced that suicide is a complication of mental illness. Even a person who seems to have died as he or she lived -- perhaps selfishly and insisting upon control - was suffering from something. Ending one's bodily existence and all of one's connections to people on earth is too extreme a move for me to think of it as anything other than a consequence of serious illness. I doubt that it is even possible for a suicidal person to understand the consequences of his or her actions, to him or herself even moreso than to others. Sometimes I think that our son was selfish for not seeking help somewhere along the way, but then I realize that that behavior is part of the illnesses of depression and of personality disorders. The sufferer has no way of knowing that what s/he is experiencing is out of the ordinary, and most of us have no way of knowing that another person's secret thoughts and terrors are far different and beyond our own.

As far as the methods by which someone dies by suicide: they are all assaults on the human body. Most likely a person is not thinking at all in the way the rest of us do, or perhaps even the way she or she does most of the time, and is not making choices that are designed either to cause or to ease pain for the surviviors. I have gained considerable insight in the last year into how thin the line is between ordinary rationality and something else, into how easy it is to move into a dangerous frame of mind, and into how quickly a person can take an action that is irreversible and produces devastating shock waves that will ripple outward for generations. Our son was was one the kindest, most generous, and most gentle people I have ever encountered; he, more than perhaps anyone, would be horrified by the outcomes, in all aspects, of his death.

I don't mind discussing this subject at all, BTW. I find I am far more comfortable with it than I was before my son died, probably because it is always the foremost thing in my mind and because I have learned so much about it that it is no longer taboo for me. People sometimes tell me that they appreciate my forthrightness and transparency, but those are simply products of my refusal to deny or hide sad experience.

The Work We Can Do

When I was doing my chaplaincy internship at Famous Giant Hospital summer before last, I described my adventures to my father a couple of times during telephone conversations.

"I could never do that," he would say.

"Of course you could," I said. "You just show up."

During this past year, I have acknowledged that there was more to it than just showing up and that, indeed, my father could not do what I did.

Several years ago, my daughter asked me, "How do you know so much about other people?"

"I ask," I said.

I'm not particularly nosy. Today, for instance, I asked someone how her family was doing, since she had said last week that there were problems. I have no idea what the problems are and no need to know. But when someone is in my care -- a legal client, a student, a patient, a parishoner -- I am not afraid to ask.

People want to share who they are. A client wants to tell you how she discovered her husband's infidelity. A student wants someone to know that he is gay. A patient wants to say that she no longer believes in God. A parishoner wants to talk about the wife who died and left him with a small child.

I don't know why it is difficult for some people to hear the stories of others, but I know from my father, and from many others like him, that it is. I don't know why I can hear them, but I can. It doesn't much scare me that life is hard and confusing, that solutions are elusive, that loss is pervasive. (It scares me some.) I don't like any of those realities, but they don't motivate me to pretend that things are not what they are, and they don't intimidate or silence me.

In the past couple of weeks I have had occasion to learn something about the misconceptions that people tend to have about suicide. The people in possession of those misconceptions will soon be pastors. In one case, there is nothing I can do, but in another, there is.

It seems that in addition to hearing stories I will be telling them.

Today we heard a terrific sermon in chapel. The gist of it was that God may ask us to feed people when we have nothing but five loaves and two fishes. Do things for people. Help people. Be present to people.

I do not have five loaves and two fishes. I have more like a soggy crust. I can absorb the things people share with me and I can communicate them to others, perhaps at times and in ways that will on occasion make a difference.

That's it. My soggy crust.

At least I don't have to figure out to how fillet a fish.

Michelle, Karen, Chris

Michelle ~ Point taken about the distinction between hope and comfort. You are brilliant. I think I have angrily and resentfully resisted offerings of hope because I have interpreted them as people wanting to bring comfort. I do not want to be comforted. I do, however, want to hope.

Karen ~ Truthfully (!) I am not particularly honest. I don't write about the darkest times, the blackest thoughts, except in my private journals, and I only share those feelings and experiences with one or two other people. I remember how shocked I was at first by some of the thoughts that other suicide survivors revealed in safe conversations, by what I was hearing when I was still too numb to articulate thoughts of my own. I am so glad that I said nothing, because I came to realize that the sky is not the limit, and that raw expressions of grief and horror have a way of emerging eventually. I don't have the energy to explain or defend that reality, however. And yet, to whatever extent we can move toward helping each other come to terms with our undesirable realities ~ that's a good thing.

Chris ~ I am so aware that tomorrow is your anniversary day. I think of your beautiful Sarah on the beach at home and on the path along the Italian Coast and I want to scream and shake the universe on your behalf. It is SO WRONG ~ but her life was SO RIGHT. Your beautiful, beautiful daughter ~ what a joyous light she was in this world and what a gracefulness of memory she has left even those of us who can know her only through you. Be well this week-end, dear Chris.