Into Darkness: Suicide and Grief

A caution about today's episode . It deals with suicide and you may find that the topic is too uncomfortable for you , so I urge caution while listening

. I wanted to share a piece today that I found in my notes from the past . Dismembered . so So . It has been a week . . A work associate committed an act of self-death . I think I made that word up , but I was getting bombarded with people's grief about suicides and that word seemed too harsh for that act .

Suicide" and that word seemed too harsh for that act seems absent of any compassion for the person choosing self-death . Of course it was bound to come up in my grief group but all of a sudden we had two or three folks where before we had had none . Then in Death Cafe , where the manner of people's deaths rarely comes up , had two or three more .

Then this colleague walks in front of a commuter train very near my home ten days ago . While it seems that all death has a sense of dismembering about it , cast as they are from their dear ones , this "dismembering seems especially harsh . Unlike an illness , it rarely has an ounce of pre-grief about it .

So part of the reaction seems to be bound up in the shock both of the event itself and the loss of the person . It gives lie to the sentiment that this person was taken from us . No , this person took themselves . This person took themselves . I wonder where God is in this .

I know he is determinedly in the moment with them all waiting , with his arms wide open , holding them in his sweet embrace . But that does nothing to dispel the darkness we experience when imagining what that person was or had to be thinking about just before .

I know the church gives a technical overview of a person not being in their right mind or having a mental illness to cover the sin aspect , but I don't believe this is enough for the living to do honor to those who make this choice . That's why the idea of the person committing the self-death as one who takes their own dismemberment in hand seems right to me .

I will dismember my life from yours , from the world , from God , if he wishes , I will blink . First O death , first O death . When I have had to offer up words to mourners of those who dismember , I have repeated that belief of mine that they were with God in a most intimate way in the very moment of their death , not abandoned at all but embraced warmly

. I am not sure those words were of any solace to those who remained . I have been going over in my mind trying to reflect on the way I listened to each of those stories . I was at first , on one level , fascinated , as if this would somehow color my response .

I realized I should have been focused on how the person telling the story was reacting , how they were telling the story , what was their affect ? Body language . These all happened in a group setting and in that setting I just let people talk as much as they want .

They almost , to a person , reported that they are unable to talk about the event to friends or loved ones . Giving them a place and a space to do that seems vitally important . But what place do I go with them next ? Do you want to tell the story over and over again until it loses some of its power ? Is that even possible .

I have long believed that people with terminal illnesses should be able to reject treatments that unnecessarily prolong technical living . When my own mother was dying of cancer , I know I would have found the drugs necessary to help her die had she asked that of me , but she didn't .

M uch like the debate on abortion, medical science has intervened to make things possible that not only were not possible before , but highly unlikely . Babies born as early as 22 weeks have survived and people have lived to 119 years .

Each and every day in this country , elderly people with two or more chronic diseases are admitted to ICUs to support a heart or some lungs , until the point where one or more of the chronic diseases will overwhelm the body and there can be no further retreat from death .

The temporal physical body , as it shuts down --organ system by organ system-- , isn't dead until its brain function ceases . Do our souls lie in our brain tissue , in our hearts ? So , hearing about various deaths;

sitting through ethics consults and rehashes with hospital ethics committee; that line of death seems less and less sharp , more like the weaving of two edges together , giving way string by string until there is a rupture , yes , but the entire thing does not unravel simultaneously , nor even on a rigid schedule , just over a period of time that may last (who knows how

many minutes , hours or days) ? I think I have to understand more than this self-death to be of service to anyone , I want to be of real comfort to those who suffer this type of loss . I want them to be assured their loved one is in the warm , loving embrace of one who loves without limits or judgment . This work colleague of mine had two teenage children .

All indications are she was utterly devoted to them and I thought of them the morning I heard the news , knowing they were waking up to the darkest day they will ever have to live in their lives . How could their mother dismember them like this ? I think some darkness sucked her under , a darkness she had no resistance to .

That had nothing to do with her children or her God . We live complicated , nuanced lives in fraught times . Others cannot always support us through the harrows , through the harrows that haunt our minds , some dark imaginings . I am certain she is with God now and He is comforting her . That is the end of

my certainty . That concludes another episode . You can find us every Friday on Amazon , Spotify or Apple Podcasts . I'm always available for spiritual direction while grieving over Zoom , Please contact me at the email in the show notes . Remember be safe; travel with God . Vaya con Dios .