If you and I try to count suicides of family members, relatives and close friends, we soon find ourselves running out of fingers. Suicide is a tough topic to address, and so I will borrow, with permission, from a leading theologian's sympathetic treatment of the subject.
In "Struggling to Understand Suicide" Father Ron Rolheiser says, "Sadly, today, there are many deaths by suicide In the United States alone there are three to four every hour.
"And yet suicide remains widely misunderstood and Among all deaths, suicide perhaps weighs heaviest on those left behind. Why?
"Suicide hits us so hard because it is surrounded with the ultimate taboo. In the popular mind, suicide is generally seen as the ultimate act of despair, the ultimate bad thing a person can do. This shouldn't surprise us since suicide does go against the deepest instinct inside us, our will to live [and] leaves those left behind with a certain amount of shame and a lot of second-guessing
"So what's to be said about suicide? Understanding suicide more compassionately won't take away its sting but our own long-term healing and the redemption of the memory of the one [who] died can be helped by keeping a number of things in mind.
"Suicide, in most cases, is a disease, not something freely-willed. The person who dies in this way dies against his or her will, akin to those who jumped to their deaths from the Twin Towers after terrorist planes had set those buildings on fire... They were jumping to certain death, but only because they were already burning to death where they were standing.
"Death by suicide is analogous to death by cancer, stroke, or heart-attack; except, in the case of suicide, it's a question of emotional-cancer, emotional-stroke, or an emotional-heart attack.
"Moreover, still to be more fully-explored, is the potential role that biochemistry plays in suicide. Since some suicidal depressions are treatable by drugs, clearly then some suicides are caused by biochemical deficiencies, as are many other diseases that kill us.
"The person who dies in this way, almost invariably, is a very sensitive human being. Suicide is rarely done in arrogance, as an act of contempt Generally our own experience with the loved ones that we've lost to suicide was that these persons were anything but arrogant. More accurately described, they were too-bruised to touch and were wounded in some deep way that we couldn't comprehend or help heal
"Finally, we need not worry unduly about the eternal salvation of those who die in this way. God's understanding and compassion infinitely surpass our own. Our lost loved ones are in safer hands than ours. If we, limited as we are, can already reach through this tragedy with some understanding and love, we can rest secure in the fact that, given the width and depth of God's love, the one who dies through suicide meets, on the other side, a compassion that's deeper than our own and a judgment that intuits the deepest motives of their heart."
Father Ron goes on to describe the suicide victim as someone who is "standing inside an oak-like door, shut in because of fear, wound, sickness, or loneliness. Most persons who die by suicide are precisely locked inside this kind of private room by some cancerous wound through which we cannot reach and through which they themselves cannot reach."
We cannot reach them. But we know through Christ's Resurrection that he passes through closed doors to "stand inside the huddle of fear and loneliness, and breathe out peace" (Luke 24:36).
