The Enigma of Suicide

        There is no stronger human instinct than to survive - against any odds, enduring incredible pain, hardship, and mental anguish. It is at our core to desire to have one more day, one more week, one more year, to seize every treasured moment we feel we are entitled to.

        Our favorite stories, both fantasy and real life, are of survival.  Books and movies thrill us and pique our imaginations as they take us through amazing adventures of courage, stamina, and endurance.  Whether it is Dorothy seeking her way back home against the wicked witch, or the human race fighting for survival in Armageddan and Independence Day, or Bruce Willis running through a spray of glass shards and bullets to "save the day", we never seem to tire of living vicariously through our heroes, fighting for survival.

        Even more compelling are the true stories from the collective history of mankind, to daily news reports, that we watch in awe, are inspired by, and want to discuss with our family, friends, and colleagues.  We are enraptured by the lofty spirits who face-down death delivered to them by illness, accident, or the embodiment of evil, other human beings who would deliberately attempt to take another person's life.  I think often of those close to me who fought for every last day they could bargain for against the ravages of cancer, thinking they are as brave as the young man made infamous for cutting off his own arm in order to escape his certain death in the desert, helplessly (or so it seemed), pinned between two rocks in the desert.

        And  perhaps even more inspirational to us, as reminders of all that is the best within our souls, are the stories of one person saving the life of another, even if it might be at the cost of their own.  In the recent tragedy in a Colorado movie theater, we listened in awe as everyday people spoke of someone literally laying down their bodies, their lives, to protect their girlfriends and children from bullets. 

        When facing-down death, we become acutely aware that there is no greater treasure than life.

        How can it be, then, that some of the beautiful human beings of this world lose this instinctual avoidance of death, this innate reflex to keep on living?  How can someone defy that desparate desire to take one more breath, and deliberately, by their own hand, cease to exist, to share this life we love, by performing an action that goes against all that we know and understand.  To take one's own life, for someone to kill themselves, contradicts all that we know and understand, leaving us in a state of shock and confusion, leaving us to reassess all that we know.

        In addition, we ask ourselves, "Why couldn't I save them?  If I loved them, if I would have been willing to throw myself on them to spare them a bullet, how was I not able to save them from this insidious demon called suicide?  How did I not see, not know, not prevent this from happening?  Why wasn't my love, my caring, my support, enough?"

        Suicide is such an aberration, such a departure from the instrinsic value of life itself, that it shakes our souls to the core.  It is an anomaly in the fabric of humanity, a tear in the cloth that holds us together.  It shocks us, devastates us, and may even blur the clarity of our vision of life, of our conviction to go forward and embrace each day.

        When sitting in a movie theater, an audience will watch with morbid curiosity as the bad guys shoot the good guys, or even cheer inside if one of the good guys does something gruesome to the bad guys.  If on the screen there is an image of someone killing themselves, bringing a gun to their head, most people will instinctively look away for a split-second, or at the least, it catches their breath for a moment. 

        It is in our hearts to treasure life, it is almost impossible to grasp that someone would defy that by taking their own lives, leaving us in the abyss of being a suicide survivor.

I tell you this story because  we need to understand that those who die by suicide did not leave us easily.  Whether we knew it or not, they had lost some fundamental battle that was being fought within themselves.  They did not give up easily, they just could not go on anymore...and ultimately it is our legacy to forgive them and ourselves.