Other Views of Suicide

My second husband had died in October, and I was returning to Florida the following summer from visiting my daughters up north. When I realized that I would be driving near the home of a close friend of my husband, I called to stop overnight. We hadn’t ever met, but I remembered that his wife had committed suicide not long before. We sat in a darkened living room with all of the curtains drawn (it was daytime), facing one another. My chair was comfortable, and I felt myself relaxing despite what I wanted to ask. When I said that I wanted to know about his wife, he must have felt my sincerity because he began to pour out details while I quietly absorbed all he was saying. Finally emptied of what, I guessed, he’d been holding onto, we both sat in a new quiet. I learned that she had endured great pain but without calling attention to it, had put into place what her husband and son would need to know (teaching her son how to cook). With empathy I leaned forward and said, “Your wife was a courageous women!”

The following morning the curtains appeared to have been flung open. Calling me to come to her closet, the husband took a dress of hers and handing it to me said, “I’d like you to have this.” My face registered surprised pleasure, which he saw. I left knowing that his sharing and my listening had been a special, momentary bond. He’d been able to take back his courage to live knowing that two of us now understood that it had taken his wife’s courage to take her life.

My spiritual teacher spoke of suicide from this view. Sometimes two souls are so closely linked that when one is in a body and the other in spirit, the one here, having a great longing to be joined again, will leave.

One day, the founder of the spiritual center I belonged to told me that he had recommended me to a man he knew who had made repeated suicide attempts with hospitalizations, but had not been helped. When the man did make an appointment, what he chose to tell me first was that his doctors had told him that this was serious. He seemed, if anything—amused. So putting confidence in my voice, relative to his appearance and tone of voice and my seeing a bit of his personality peeking through, I told him that I thought he had a great sense of humor. I added that I had been to K Mart and had my black top and my black skirt, and I could work with him on this side or on the other. Then I paused. He seemed more alert by this unexpected response. Furthermore, I added, my information is that it is harder on the other side than it is here. My look was pleasant as I repeated that I could work with him on either side. By now he seemed to have caught a sense of something different in me that was more interesting than the psychiatrists’ view. He left smiling saying that he would return. We worked together for several years. One weekend I wasn’t sure if he was still here or up there. But he came to his appointment answering my wondering. He wore a short sleeve shirt that revealed red scars on his arms. Nodding in that direction, I asked, smiling, if he would please find colored Band-Aids with stars. He laughed. He came not only for weekly counseling but to my ten-week inner child group where one night he announced that he had finally figured out he’d been allowing his seventy-year-old mother to control his life and had stopped that. By our final visit, he had been ordained as an Alliance of Divine Love minister, as I was, and was regularly volunteering in the psychiatric wing for children.

Prior to these other views, I had lived for awhile with the suicide hotline number by my bed. I never did dial the number. But I finally admitted myself to a hospital’s psychiatric wing, and traumatized by such a loss of freedom, when I was released I said, “There has to be a better way to live.” God heard me, and set me on a healing journey that has led me to where I am today.

My realization is, “ Suicide is a word with many definitions that are spiritual, religious, and worldly. In a moment of facing a situation of another’s talk or action of suicide, as God is within each of us, reaching into our depths we may find personal words that are helpful to the one facing us.”

(Note: As this is a topic with many “views,” I am including this.) My dictionary says that “people often confuse the words empathy and sympathy. Empathy means ‘the ability to understand and share the feelings of another,’ … whereas sympathy means ‘feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune.’” While pity may be an appropriate word for certain conditions, I prefer to seek God’s presence in all conditions. If I don’t understand the reason, I know that God does.