Suicide: Some Things

It's been three years, seven months, and one week.

I was able to celebrate an Easter communion liturgy with genuine joy and hope.  The promise of a bodily resurrection into new and whole and healed life is very real to me.

Josh's death has not stopped me from caring for my family, completing my education, becoming a spiritual director, being ordained to ministry, pastoring a church, and dealing with breast cancer.

But, in case you were wondering:

No, I never stop thinking about him.

No, I am not finished with the the horror, the denial, the anger, the bargaining.  I have no plans to accept this.  I suggest to God every day that I would gratefully trade absolutely everything in my life (other than people) for Josh's.

On Friday, out to pick up some lunch at the bakery, I ran into a professor I know from John Carroll, and his wife, whom I had not met before.  Their fifteen year-old-son died in a ATV accident two and one-half years ago.  Friday was his birthday; we had all just been to the cemetery, apparently only a short distance from one another, before coming to the bakery.  She told me that he would have been eighteen, preparing for college:  What college would he have chosen?  What would he be planning for his life?  

I told her that Josh would be twenty-seven and that I often wonder: would he have stayed in the corporate world; would he have started at Chicago's B-school by now?  Or would he have abandoned that path; would he be at the Art Institute or on the road with his camera?  

She commented that suicide must be particularly difficult.  I agreed, but added that we must both find ourselves thinking about how different our lives would be if only things had gone otherwise in the last five minutes of our children's lives. That we have all been the victims of stupid, stupid actions by impulsive young men. And she agreed with that.

I suppose that if you had seen us in the bakery, you would have had no idea that our conversation was about our dead sons and our dashed hopes.

One of the things I wonder about is: what would it even be like to live through a day without this terrible weight of sorrow?  I've completely forgotten.  I think, though, that life would probably not be quite so difficult.

Today I am presiding over my first funeral as a pastor. I have planned, or helped to plan, several other funerals, but they have all been for close family members or friends.  The lady who died in this case was ninety-one years old.  Her children are devastated. Ninety-one.  I am envious of sixty-seven of those years.  Can't I get them back for him?

I don't think it does much for my ability to pastor, that I am jealous of a grieving family.  

And probably the parents of young children who have died feel the same way about me.  Couldn't we have just had twenty more years, they must wonder.  Is that so much to ask? 

So, if you are wondering what it's like, I'll tell you:  It's terrible.  It changes, but: so what?  It's still terrible. 

A few weeks ago, an 83-year-old parishoner told me the story of her father's death by suicide, when she was a little girl.  As far as I know, she has had a good life: husband, children, community.  But the horror of a father's suicide casts a long shadow.

I think we would all like a do-over.