From Your Mourning Executive Editor & Publisher:
“The game of life is hard to play
I’m gonna lose it anyway
The losing card I’ll someday lay
so this is all I have to say.”
You may know that the theme music to the television show, M*A*S*H, was entitled “Suicide is Painless.” You may not be aware, however, that the song, played only as an instrumental during M*A*S*H’s opening credits, has lyrics. The desperate verse above is a portion of the song. The chorus then goes like this:
“Suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.”
And all I can say about the song is that it’s wrong. Suicide is not painless, no matter how it is accomplished—especially for those who remain. I choose to leave it, if I please.
This is scheduled to post at the precise time my family and I will be gathered in Tulsa for a small memorial service for my cousin who ended his own life last weekend. It was a difficult weekend, and the weekdays have been no easier. This is the closest suicide has ever come to me. I know those who have had it happen in their family, or to someone they know, but never has it visited so close to my own front door. It’s a terrible feeling to have it in such proximity.
As much as the debate rages over assisted suicides for the terminally ill, there is something inside all of us that intrinsically rebels at the notion of a seemingly healthy young person, full of life and potential, finding their situation so desperate that they can fathom no answer but the most final of decisions. In my cousin’s case, he had fought depression for fifteen years. And by fought, I don’t mean he had an occasional funk or blue day. I mean depression was his life at times. All the help money and doctors could offer him was never able to defeat his ever-present foe. Several things recently occurred to create what seems to have been an emotional perfect storm that drove him to perform an act that he had both contemplated and researched multiple times. In leaving he left the message that he had never really gotten better, he had simply gotten better at hiding it.
And it leads us to several realizations, some simple and some profound.
For one, it was heartbreaking to learn that there are websites devoted to the mechanics of how to do this deed, in great detail. Like money, the Internet is a tool that borrows its morality from how it is employed. Great good can be accomplished online. We’re able to communicate around the world instantly. It makes WelchOK.com possible. But we all know that there are dark corners in cyberspace that contain and celebrate the worst humans are capable of. Parents, just as you check to see that your kids aren’t into online filth, you also need to make sure they are not into online death.
This situation also causes one to look at his extended family and wonder why we’re not closer—and resolve that it will change.
It also makes you contemplate human nature. For one, there is something inside every person who, upon hearing the news, wants to know how the victim did it. At first I thought it was some gruesome part of our natures. But the more I think about it, I believe it’s rooted in the fact that the act itself is so terribly violent—after all, it’s murder of the self—that we hope it was accomplished peacefully and without disfiguration, especially for the survivors’ sakes. The question, then, is rooted not in the worst part of us but the best.
The other thing I marvel at, and I always have, is the way we feed grief. It takes but a few hours before 9×13-inch casserole pans start arriving at the bereaved family’s home. Friend after friend will pop in just for a minute to bring a plate full of sandwiches or a Gladware container full of Christmas candy. What I observed through this event, especially since I have been limiting my intake of late, is that it really isn’t about the food. When we see people suffer loss, we just want to go to them. And embrace them. And whisper in their ear, “I just couldn’t stay away any longer. I don’t even know what to say while you suffer such loss, but we love you. If there’s anything we can do, please let us know.” And people mean it when they say it. It’s just that the greatest need of the grievers—working through the sorrow surrounding loss—is something no one else can do for them. It’s a mournfully lonesome road. But because we care for those who suffer, we want to go to them, and we feel we cannot come with empty hands. So we grab some of what we have handy, make something to meet the most basic of human needs, and drop it off. But it’s about contact, the pop-in to give the hug, not the food. That human contact meets an even more basic human need than the food. It, also, is the best of human nature.
When I was a pastor, I used to prescribe something to survivors. I would tell them that after all the decisions were made and the funeral was over and the friends said goodbye, the family needed to pile up on the couch, fill up huge plates of all that food, and watch Elizabethtown. If you’ve not seen it—and it was not a critical success, but some of my favorite movies weren’t—it is a beautiful, touching movie about traveling the road of sorrow together as a family and a community—and by yourself, because at its core, loss is a deep, nagging personal matter. And Elizabethtown offers some beautiful things that stick with me in these times, such as the line, “May your loss be met with a hurricane of love.” But the one I always go back to in the midst of loss is this: “I want you to get into the deep beautiful melancholy of everything that’s happened.”
Deep. Beautiful. Melancholy. Yep, that’s it exactly.
Life does not stop these days, except for when life stops. We feel, in the wake of loss, we can legitimately say the office will be closed, I won’t be returning email, my cell phone will go unanswered, enjoy school without me. And as we make arrangements and look at others with wet eyes and stand in memorial services and make the long drive to the cemetery and the longer drive back, we are reminded in no tiny way exactly how small and mortal we are. Someday, we must all travel where the deceased has traveled, regardless of the means. It causes us to consider the connections between this life and that journey after death. It makes us consider the big questions of existence and faith.
I recently spoke with a buddy who lost a friend at a fairly young 51. In his bereavement, he wanted to die, and gladly would have given his life to bring his friend back. But as we talked, we worked out that what he saw as giving his life was, in fact, giving his death, and it had the power to do nothing. Only One death has ever made life possible. And, my friend and I concluded, it really is about giving our lives for our friends and family, and by that, I mean living each day as an investment in the lives of those we hold dear. And so, I hope for those of us who remain, we view this time of loss as a time to hear the charge to live and commit ourselves to doing it with relish. To live for all it’s worth. Attempting great things. Or small things in great ways.
No, suicide is not painless. No death is. But as Claire said in Elizabethtown, “We are intrepid. We carry on.”
Ed.
