Comments for International Survivors of Suicide Day

I am not Clint Eastwood.  I just want to make sure we are clear on that.  My task this morning is to consider briefly the Chronicle of Higher Education article “The Suddenly Empty Chair,” not to talk to an actually empty chair.  

Having clarified that, allow me to begin by sharing a poem.

‘Heavy’ from Thirst by Mary Oliver

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had His hand in this,

as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry

but how you carry it –
books, bricks, grief –
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled –
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?

At Marsh Chapel we commissioned a global, cross-cultural study of mortality rates, and we discovered something very startling.  Around the world and across all cultures, mortality rates are stunningly consistent.  In fact, it turns out that mortality rates are universally 100%.  Believe it or not, everybody dies.

The thing of it is, and as I argued in a sermon a few years ago, spiritual life is neither about nouns, the stuff of life, nor about verbs, the activity of life, but rather about adverbs.  Spiritual life is life lived adverbially: it is not who we are or what we do but rather how we are who we are and how we do what we do.  If there is to be a capstone experience in life, it must certainly be death, but the question for spiritual life is not whether or not we die, or even the method by which our death comes about, but rather how we die.

My mother is a hospice nurse.  In fact, in October she celebrated thirty years with Montgomery Hospice in Montgomery County, Maryland.  With a mother in such a profession, you can imagine that dinner table conversation growing up was somewhat unusual.  “What did you do today?”  “Well, I had to make a death call, but by the time I got to the home the body was already in rigor and it was all we could do to get his arm back down so that the funeral home could get him in the hearse!”  It is only now, having endured many years of theological training and spiritual formation, that I can look back on my mother’s career and understand how her work of accompanying people so that they may die with dignity, may die well, in their homes and amidst family and friends, is truly a vocation.

My senior year of college, my friend from high school, Linda, was finishing her undergraduate degree at Johns Hopkins University in biomedical engineering.  Like me, she was looking forward to graduate school and a career in service to the least, the last, and the lost as she worked toward medical technology solutions to some of the most vexing health problems of her native Vietnam.  And then one day, just before noon, my friend Cory called to tell me that Linda had been brutally sexually assaulted and murdered in her Baltimore apartment.  I was so shocked that I did not realize how shocked I was.  I went into my noon meeting, and partway through abruptly stood up, hurled the Gatorade bottle I was holding against the wall, and fled the room.

Now, we here in Massachusetts narrowly voted down last week a ballot initiative to allow a form of physician assisted suicide.  Certainly the ethics of such a measure are highly fraught, but it is at least arguable that physician assisted suicide can enable someone who suffers from a terminal sickness or condition to die with dignity, to die well.  That, at least, is the intent of the authors of such initiatives.  For those of us gathered here this morning, however, this type of dignified suicide at the end of life as a means of ending suffering is not the experience that drew us together.

Neither are we here, I would venture to guess, in the wake of a suicide like that of Socrates, who dutifully accepted his sentence in the face of a judicial decision plagued by misunderstanding.  The same might be said of Jesus as well, whose divinity surely would have enabled him to escape the cross, and so whose death, merely by permitting the sentence to be carried out, must have been a form of suicide. These so-called dignified deaths are not what call us out to be here today.

Our experiences of suicide are nevertheless diverse, but I would suspect are closer to the end of the spectrum of deaths at which Linda’s death might be categorized.  Violent.  Sudden.  Shocking.  Perhaps unexpected.  Certainly incomprehensible.  You see, suicide is actually more like murder than anything else, except that suicide is worse because the victim and the perpetrator are one and the same.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant pointed out that there is something about the human mind that seeks to categorize things according to time, space, and causality.  In the wake of any death, one of the most common first questions people ask is “why?”  In many cases, the “why?” question is a petition for an explanation of causality.  Of course, most people are not looking for a cause in the medical sense, but rather in the existential sense.  Answering, “well, the Tylenol poisoned her liver,” is not going to be satisfactory.  Instead, people seem to want to know how this event fits into a larger, wider, cosmic picture.

In the case of suicide, however, the issue of causality is particularly daunting.  In the case of a murder, at least there is the perpetrator on whom to focus all of our fury at the cosmic injustice of it all.  But in the case of a suicide, the victim is the perpetrator, and we all know that blaming the victim is morally anathema.  All too often, survivors of suicide end up focusing their fury on themselves or on other loved ones.  “Did I do something to cause her to do this?”  “Should I have done something so that he would not have done this?”  “Why didn’t you do something so that she would not have done this?”  It is little wonder that so many families fall apart in the wake of experiencing a suicide.

The world’s religious traditions have struggled mightily to come to grips with suicide, sometimes more successfully than others.  In some traditions, suicide is taken to be sinful, and grounds for denying burial in holy ground.  I, for one, do not believe this is the case.  There is nothing sinful about a person suffering so greatly that they resort to taking their own life.  There is nothing sinful about that person.  It may be the case, however, that there is something desperately sinful about the community, society, and culture that fails to alleviate their suffering and allows their agony to consume them.

I come bearing good news this morning.  There is redemption for survivors of suicide, if we choose it.  When a chair in our classroom, in our congregation, in our living room, suddenly becomes empty, and after we have survived the process of grieving, we have a choice to make.  What will this tragedy inspire in us?  Will it cause us to change?  Will it motivate us to alleviate suffering wherever we find it?  Will it ignite a spark of compassion in us?  Or will we simply go on as before, only now perhaps with an extra twinge of sadness?  Will we allow ourselves to be caught up again in the frenetic business of our lives as if nothing happened?  How will we carry our grief, our pain, our loss?  What will we do with the suddenly empty chair?  Remember, spiritual life is life lived adverbially.  It’s not even so much how they died, but how we will live hereafter.

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had His hand in this,

as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry

but how you carry it –
books, bricks, grief –
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled –
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?