For the Suicides

Woe to those who have slain themselves on earth, woe to the suicides! I believe that there can be none more miserable than they. They tell us that it is a sin to pray for them and outwardly the Church, as it were, renounces them, but in my secret heart I believe that we may pray even for them. Love can never be an offence to Christ. For such as those I have prayed inwardly all my life, I confess it, fathers and teachers, and even now I pray for them every day.

~ The Brother’s Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

For someone like me, who has lost three good friends to suicide—two of them in the past two years—there is no question that I must pray for their souls and for their healing. And yet it has become clear to me how rarely suicide is understood, and how often Christians still speak of it as a damnable offense rather than as a human catastrophe.

Having myself suffered with suicidal ideation, I believe I have come to grasp something of its nature. Though suicide is spiritual—the thought itself a logismos, a demonic suggestion—it is also biological and psychological to such an extent that I cannot help but, for the most part, agree with the claim that no one who commits suicide is sane, and that the Church does not damn the insane.

I know that none of my friends who committed suicide were sane at the time of the act.

Johnny jumped in front of a train at sixteen, high out of his mind. His father insisted on an open casket. His head was swollen to twice its size. The mortician attempted to reconstruct his skull, but into a face that was no longer his.

Matthew took ayahuasca for a second time and became manic and delusional. The state persisted for months, until a couple years ago he jumped off a bridge.

Alex, who was bipolar like me, had the cops called on him by a friend. The friend warned them that Alex might attempt suicide by cop. When they arrived, Alex charged the police with a knife, and they shot him to death.

None of them were in their right mind. None of them could be said to have been acting freely.

In my more recent battles with suicidal ideation, I saw the same mechanism at work. I began to think my children would be better off without me—if my wife could marry someone more stable. I even had the rope tied and hanging one time, and I could be gone now had my wife not broken into the room. At the time, I did not care if I would suffer hell for an eternity, if it meant a better life for my kids.

What finally broke the spell was something strangely ordinary. Watching Ted Lasso, of all things, and hearing the main character speak about losing his father to suicide, it suddenly clicked. As my wife said, children of suicides are far more likely to commit suicide themselves. And despite my failures, I was their dad. That fact carried an irrevocable meaning I could no longer deny.

My thinking had become deranged—yes, by a logismos—but also by a bedbound depression in which I could no longer imagine my existence as being of any benefit. I came to believe that suicide would be an act of love.

And with love so easily driven off course by mental illness, how can we judge what Hemingway, David Foster Wallace, or Robin Williams were really thinking in their final moments? And either way—no matter what the Church or others may say about suicide—I will continue to pray for them. I will continue to imagine them finding, perhaps for the first time, a freedom they never knew in life. And I will imagine Christ receiving them into His Kingdom for the same reason Marmeladov gives in Crime and Punishment:

“Because they never believed they were worthy.”