When Someone Dies and the Snapping of That Single Thread Weakens the Weave of the Whole

When someone dies and the snapping of that single thread weakens the weave of the whole, then, properly, all parts join to heal us one and all.

The whole community by sympathy and ceremony, by wakes and words and food and funerals, frees us to grieve. Even as it bears the dead away it bears the living up. Communal solace is spontaneous: “We” do it from the most basic instincts in the “us-ness” of us.

Likewise, faith soon initiates healing. Faith whispers that the invisible God is not stopped by the finality of this event; that God, who stood before our birthing, stands beyond our dying too and will surely receive the one we’ve lost. By faith we peer through the walls of this present reality to that greater reality that is unimpressed by death.

Likewise, we ourselves struggle toward healing by means of the private, intense emotion. Anger, for example—anger grave and vengeful—seeks its object in something responsible for this hurt. It flares, argues, curses, accuses and weeps. And though there be no logic to the thing, we are relieved. A certain order has been restored. At the same time, love—love deep and yearning—seeks its object in the memory of the one we’ve lost. Love becomes a re-creating force, breathing life again into some memorable thing of the dead, and we love him still by loving the dear thing left behind: memorial! So anger names an evil and love a good, and each is distinguished and we can make our way again.

Likewise, our intellect helps, together with the human instinct for beauty, reverence and commemoration. By music, song, laughter, stories and images, we elaborate the character of the dead and fix it again within the living community—and so, in time we heal.

Forgive my swiftness. I’ve only sketched a complex process. But I do so in order to ask: What if the death is a suicide? This produces a different sorrow, a sharper pain too often unattended. And since my friend has lost her friend to such an act, I wish to attend to the difference.

Sweet griever, this is the difference: Suicide blunts the very instruments of your healing.

Too soon your community leaves you alone. Community is confused by suicide. It lacks ceremony for your particular grief. It can’t act unconsciously, out of the comfortable instinct of “us-ness.” Why? Because suicide implies accusation: “None of you helped me. I remove myself from you!” At most the community’s charged with murder, at the least with helplessness. If it admits fault, it is ashamed; if not, it is indignant. In either case it’s painfully self-conscious and divided from the dead—dividing itself from your and from your grief. You’re on your own.

And faith? Well, you’ve been taught (wrongly!) that suicide is an unforgivable sin, being unrepentable. If God said, “Don’t kill,” how would God accept the one who comes by killing himself? The suicide seems to scorn both the will of God and the authority the Creator keeps over all life, human life and his life. Your faith is afraid to stare this pain straight in the eye, and for the moment it cannot whisper hope into your heart.

And your private emotions are perplexed, causing chaos instead of order. When anger goes forth to seek an object, it seizes the very same object love had found—the one who died. And if you cannot separate the two, if you hate and love the same one at once, then neither emotion is fulfilled, good and evil are not distinguished, your wound widens and you are torn apart internally.

Memorabilia? At first each thing you choose to remember seems half a lie since his most daring act, you are striving to forget. You cannot separate the ending from the life, and so his whole life (with whatever goodness adorned it) your sad spirit damns.

How long, how uncomprehendingly must you grieve the suicide because you lack the common ministers of healing?

Dear friend, let this be your faith: God does not turn aside from the sinner who dies while sinning! If so, then a farmer I know who had a hearty faith—but who died in the midst of a howling, purple curse word—would, for that single sin, now be plowing in perdition. He isn’t. That faithful farmer is in heaven.

Hearty, too, may be the faith of a suicide, despite his weakness in the world. Not the sin, but the faithlessness damns us. Not a pristine righteousness, not an acceptable mode of dying, but faith saves us. And one’s ending does not necessarily reveal the state of one’s faith. One’s life does. Take it whole. Remember whole the life of your beloved!

And this: Faith never sprang from personal strength or overweening self-esteem. No, out of personal weakness faith reaches to a God of strength, out of failure and need and self-doubt. And dying is our sign of all these things. The suicide is different from other deaths in this, that he agreed and consciously participated in them all. O friend of a friend, the suicide may have offended the world by his show of impotence, and his self-destruction, destroying you, gives you every right to an anger most bloody furious. But before God there was never a sharper cry of craving than this, not a more dramatic motive of faith.

He who has cried “I can’t” might better than others hear the Almighty murmur, “But I can.” Let your healing begin with that God.