This week, as we wait in expectation for the hope and light of the world, I am thinking, nearly nonstop, about a dear friend who just lost her husband to suicide. I think of her with such a profound sadness in my heart that it almost feels like a betrayal—because it is nothing compared to what she must be feeling in these days after. Walking about her home that is now empty. Remembering. Grasping for understanding. Raging. Hardening. Weeping. Hardening again.
It can feel nearly impossible to understand a thing as complex as suicide, and the world doesn’t make it easy on us, with its glib “suicide is a sin” and “suicide is a choice” and “suicide is cowardly.”
There are people who say they’ve battled depression all their lives, but they made it through by choosing joy and faith and the great big God we serve. There are people who say they have never, ever, not in the least little bit, felt like sticking a gun down their throat and pulling the trigger, even in the worst of their depressive episodes. There are people who don’t believe depression has varying degrees, sometimes keeping a person chained in bed, sometimes sending them raging out into the world, sometimes chasing them right to a ledge where tying a rope around their necks and dangling from a ceiling looks better than trying to wade through another day.
These people have never known this depression.
They have never been down so deep inside the dark that they can’t see the light that could lift them back up. They have never wondered whether the world might be a better place without their depressing self taking up unnecessary space and ruining the lives of all those around them. They have never heard the convincing lies depression can whisper.
There is no simple answer to this kind of depression.
People say that depression is a spiritual battle, a torment of faith or lack of faith, and yes, maybe it’s true. I have, after all, read the journals of Mother Teresa, full of her own walk in the dark, and I’ve read Julian of Norwich’s mystical messages on trying to find love in the deepest of sadness. They wrestled with the dark, too. But to say that the Bible or Jesus or faith and joy in a great big God are the best ways we can heal this kind of depression is to be sadly mistaken.
Depression is a disease we did not choose, and it wraps its poison around us, and it sucks all the air right out of a room and summons its most convincing lies.
This world has nothing left for you, it says.
They would be better off without you, it says.
You’ll never beat this, it says.
You are worthless, it says.
There’s a gun, it says.
You’ll feel better, it says.
Just do it, it says.
And if depression whispers those lies often enough, we start to believe them. We start to become them. We start to lose who we are, beneath all the black. And no “God works all things for good” or “We can do all things through Christ” or Come to Me all who are weary and heavy-laden” will pull us back from that ledge.
Suicide is not a choice. It’s the only thing left for those who can’t find their way back up and out and through.
I was just a girl, 14 years old, when I got off the school bus on a Tuesday. There were eight of us who got off the bus that day, and when the last footfall touched the gravel road leading to my house and two others, we heard the phantom gun shot.
It wasn’t really a gun shot. It had happened hours before, but the noise of it, the stench of it, the pain of it still hung in the air, still clung to all the trees and the weeds and even the sun that day. None of us heard it, but we all heard it.
I was in the middle of slicing cheddar chunks for my saltine cracker snack when I heard the neighbor girl screaming down the road. She was flying, or at least that’s what it looked like, her red hair whipping out behind her, feet bare on all those rocks like she couldn’t even feel them.
“Help!” she was screaming. “Help!”
My brother and sister and I came out of our house, and her cousins, who lived just beside us, came out of theirs, and we pieced together enough information so when her cousin dialed 9-1-1 we could state our emergency. Her brother, just 13, had found their dad in the backyard, the back of his head blown off by a shotgun he still held in his hands.
In the days after, the story started to make sense, but, then again, not really. He’d been on anti-depressants. He’d changed doctors. The new doctor thought he was fine without those anti-depressants, because God was enough and he could beat this with enough joy or whatever, and took him off, cold turkey. In the confusion of withdrawal and a raging depression that clamped chains around him faster than he could think, their dad pulled a trigger on the rest of his life.
Why on earth would he do a thing like that? Why would he leave four children and a wife he loved? Why would he choose to die rather than live? Those were the questions people whispered in the days after.
Even at 14, I knew we were asking the wrong questions. Because a depression like this doesn’t choose to die. A depression like this becomes the killer. This kind of depression kills a mind and a heart and a soul, and it is what pulled the trigger. There was no choice anywhere near that shotgun or his head.
I say this because I knew him, a man who loved his family more than anything else in his life. I say this because I have known more than just him. I say this because people I love have tried to jump out of moving cars on busy highways and take whole bottles of pills and slit their wrists, and some of them just didn’t cut deep enough.
Life hurts. It can wring us dry of hope and grind us into dust and blast us into bits. Sometimes we get back up. Sometimes we stay down for a really, really, really long time. Sometimes we don’t have the strength to rise again. Sometimes the dark swallows us whole. Sometimes the only way out is a way out forever.
So the real question we should be asking about this kind of depression is this: How can I make life hurt a little less for the broken ones? How can I be a conduit of hope? How can I pull someone back from the ledge or up from the ground or out of the pit?
The way we pull people back or up or out is not by misrepresenting what they’re dealing with; and it’s not by claiming we know what they feel and were just smart enough to make a different choice; and it’s not by sending them into shameful hiding with our seemingly easy answers: choose joy to be healed. Choose God to find hope. Choose life instead of death.
We pull people back or up or out by listening to their truth with compassionate understanding, giving them permission to break in our hands and stay broken for a time, heaping on them our love (without judgment) so thick and wide and warm that they can feel the hope of its relief.
This is how we walk each other home.
