We Are Not Alone

A few years ago a good friend set up an elaborate plan to commit suicide but stopped before pulling the string on her own trap. It took months for her to recover and as she languished in mental hospitals she was consumed by the illusion she was actually in hell. She had been raised Roman Catholic and thoughts of what she had longed to do filled her with guilt. I was angry that the church’s condemnation of suicide was now forcing her to pay a second price.

But it wasn’t her understanding of church doctrine that made her stop at death’s door, it was the thought of her children finding her. Later, when she was well, it occurred to me that if fear of “going to hell” dissuaded some from suicide, that’s not a bad thing. When one is trying to save someone’s life, anything is fair practice — even lying to them.

In the first centuries of the church many Christians martyred themselves by openly defying the Roman government’s prohibition of their faith. The penalty was death and these Christians eagerly pursued a trip home to be with Jesus. The early Bishops spoke against this practice, and maybe that was the beginning of the church’s injunction against suicide.

Last week a second friend did commit suicide. She said in her farewell note that she was going home to be with God and her father who had died when she was in her mid-20s. I found myself wishing desperately that I’d been given one last chance to talk her out of it. I would gladly have lied and told her she would go straight to hell if that would have stopped her. Of course, what I really believe is that God gladly welcomed her troubled spirit.

My friend’s suicide note also cited her crushing financial position. She was broke, jobless, effectively homeless and facing bankruptcy. She had just turned in her car. She’d been unsuccessfully seeking work for more than a year and wrote that she was “so tired.” I spoke with her bankruptcy attorney, who was saddened by the news. “I’ve seen so much of this lately,” she said. Shouldn’t it be clear that bankruptcy and financial failure are nothing to be ashamed of and suicide is not a logical response? Especially in times like these? Some of the biggest names in the American Parthenon, including Henry Ford, have suffered bankruptcy and started over.

One of the most debilitating mystiques of the American psyche is this belief in individual achievement often called “rugged individualism.” And if achievement is individual, so is failure. Taking failure as a personal fault can trigger suicide. Spurred by the Great Depression, FDR advocated a new vision, a social compact in which we share responsibility for each other, but the cult of the individual has fought it ever since. God also condemned the “I did it all myself” school of braggarts when the Israelites first entered the promised land, warning those inclined to boast that their achievements were not their own but were built on God’s actions and those of the people who worked the land before them.

Of course, remembering we’re not in this life alone is easier said than done when hard times arrive. Europe, we know, is more advanced than America in visioning a culture of shared responsibility, but even in Europe rising unemployment has been shown to increase a sense of isolation and the incidence of suicide. A study released earlier this year by researchers at Oxford University, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of California San Francisco, and other institutions in the UK and Europe proved that Europe is not immune to financial despair.

Between 1970 and 2007, 26 EU countries were assessed, providing more than 550 country-years of data. The observations revealed that for every 1% increase in unemployment level there was a 0.79% rise in the suicide rate among people under 65 years. When the authors looked at the effect of mass unemployment (more than a 3% rise), the increase in suicide rate among those under 65 years was 4.45%. This was potentially 250-3220 excess deaths across the EU. In addition, there was a 28% increase in deaths from alcohol abuse.

I wish I could wrap this up with wisdom to take the sting out of last week’s chilling news of my friend’s departure. We — her friends and family — will never fully understand. We do know she had lost hope, that she feared life more than death, that she was exhausted and wanted to go home to God’s peace. But if I know anything about God’s intentions it’s this: God didn’t create the world as a place of suffering. Our world is meant for joy and pleasure. Making it so should be our social compact. We are not alone. God is with us and we were created as social creatures, meant to live for each other. Let’s learn to step out of our individual skins and give God’s plan a chance.