Every year I try to write an article on suicide because it is perhaps the most misunderstood of all deaths and it wreaks a unique havoc among the family and the loved ones left behind.
They are left with a blizzard of ambivalent and conflicting feelings: shame (What a shameful way to die); guilt (Somehow I should have done more); second-guessing (Why wasn't I more attentive?); anger (This was an act of selfishness); and anxiety (How can this person go to heaven?) Moreover, in effect, this ruins the memory the person who died by suicide.
Throughout my articles on suicide and my book (Bruised & Wounded: Struggling to Understand Suicide) I have tried to emphasize that in most cases of suicide:
Margaret Atwood once said that sometimes things need to be said, and said, and said again, until they don't need to be said anymore. These points on suicide still need to be said.
Beyond these assertions, let me add two more perspectives on suicide that I have found helpful.
The first one is a lesson from nature. Here's Elilf Shafak, a botanist, reflecting on the suicide of his friend's mother: "When I was a young botanist, I was asked to diagnose a tree that was not doing well. It seemed to be dying. After many tests, nothing conclusive, I took a shovel and began to dig, and I learned a lesson I have never forgotten, girdling was happening below the surface. The tree was being strangled by its own roots. If the encircling roots are not found on time, they start putting pressure on the tree and it just becomes too much to bear. ... Your mother's death has nothing to do with the absence of love. She was blooming and thriving with your love, and I'd like to believe with mine too, but underneath something was strangling her: the past, the memories, the roots."
Sometimes our own roots (complexity, trauma, confusion, frustration, biology) can be so overpowering that they work at killing the body. As James Hillman writes in his book Suicide and the Soul, sometimes there are deep things inside us that cannot make themselves heard and their frustration eventually works to strangle the body. Our own roots are sometimes such a complex mixture of soul and biology that we begin to asphyxiate.
The second thought comes from Jeffrey Monroe in his book Reading Buechner: Exploring the Work of a Master Memoirist, Novelist, Theologian, and Preacher. Frederick Buechner, a Christian pastor, had to deal with his dad's suicide. As a son, as man of faith, as a pastor trying to help others understand, he searched for answers vis-a-vis his dad's suicide. The answers didn't come easily, or seemingly at all. Eventually, Buechner came to this understanding of his dad's suicide.
The best pastoral answer in the face of inexplicable tragedy (his dad's suicide) isn't an answer at all. It's a presence. On this side of eternity, we won't get all the answers, not least to the question of suicide. Sometimes there is no satisfactory answer in our darkest moments, like when we lose a loved one to suicide. What matters most in those dark moments is that we can trust that God did not abandon our loved one. And what we desire more than answers is God.