IN THE late Nineteen Eighties, I wrote a biography of G. K. Chesterton — an intensely original and genuinely vital writer and journalist, who, in some ways, is more relevant today than in his lifetime (he died in 1936). But beware heroes. The writer of The Everlasting Man, the Father Brown Stories, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, quite a few biographies, and volumes of compelling journalism didn’t all the time speak wisdom and goodness. Witness, for instance, his occasional dives into anti-Semitism.
He also wrote this: “Not only is suicide a sin, it’s the sin. It is the final word and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a person, kills a person. The man who kills himself, kills all men; so far as he is anxious, he wipes out the world.”
The style is quintessential Chesterton, however the sentiment is historic, outlined in ancient Jewish thought in addition to by the church Fathers. And there was a time, not so way back, when most Churches shared it. Frankly, so did I — until reality and exposure muddied the waters of spiritual certainty, and the sacrament of experience kicked in.
MY FIRST encounter with suicide was when certainly one of my university professors (who, I feel, tried to recruit me into the safety services) took his own life. He was a government adviser, enormously respected, with a loving family and lots of close friends. I wasn’t close enough to the person to know all of the small print, but someone who was told me: “It was a release. Perhaps he could be blissful now.”
Something similar was said about Stephen Godfrey, a number one journalist in Canada, to which I moved in 1987 after marrying a Canadian. Godfrey interviewed me for a newspaper profile, and the conversation was gentle and informed.
Two days later, the humanities editor of the paper phoned me to clarify that my profile would run the next day, but that I should know that Stephen Godfrey’s obituary would also appear. I suppose I used to be certainly one of the last people he spoke to, and that thought has never left me. I used to be told that he had struggled for a very long time, and saw suicide as a victory over the grasping darkness that will never leave him.
FROM 20 years of never knowing of somebody who had ended their life, and in an age when it was certainly one of many taboos not discussed, suicide now appeared to be throughout me: a young man stuffed with promise, and with a robust intellect; a book reviewer, admired by many, who formed a suicide pact together with his wife; and the poor woman who woke from her pill overdose to seek out her dead husband, a successful businessman whom I had last seen in his luxurious home, seemingly so hungry for all times.
Then got here ordination and the repeated funerals — often of the elderly and sick, but not all the time. I’ll always remember the person in his seventies, weeping and blaming himself for the death of his granddaughter. The family had known that the girl was scuffling with depression, and had done all that they may; but what we learn in such cases is that individuals in that grim pit of hopelessness will all the time discover a way. The grandfather couldn’t erase the memory of being stopped by the police on the day that she died.
Or the fit, strong, 35-year-old military veteran who had performed terrifying work within the armed forces. The funeral was filled with family and former comrades, but no person would discuss the reason for death. This macabre but comprehensible pretence made all of it seem so incomplete and unclosed.
CHESTERTON had a degree, but he didn’t draw essentially the most appropriate Christian conclusions. When someone takes their very own life, they do, in a way, wipe out the world — not because they hate or fear it, but because, of their eyes, the world hates and terrifies them. Waking moments are full not of hope or joy, but dread and pain. Would the God of affection and understanding truly reject those that need to wipe out what’s seen as causing them such agony?
It is, thank God, not possible for many of us to understand fully what it have to be prefer to prefer non-existence to existence. Some leaps of empathy should, must, be beyond us. But we’ve got to attempt to expunge the shame around suicidal thoughts, enabling those that have them — and the numbers are hideously high — to share them, and to search for help.
In recent years, I’ve known two individuals who have been near suicide, but were willing to debate it, accepted the assistance of a psychiatrist, and, with a mix of therapy and education, are leading gloriously abnormal lives. “I do know I used to be in that place,” certainly one of them said to me recently, “but now I can’t understand why. It seems thus far away and so way back.”
I AM not qualified to offer a theological and definitely not a medical evaluation of the topic. Any Christian, of whatever denomination, knows that attitudes to many issues have modified, and that certainly one of those issues is suicide; but religious and social stigma still exists. The narrative is twisted by the assisted-dying movement, which, at its ideological centre, often projects a worrying ambivalence concerning the dignity of life, in addition to the “normality” of suicide. Combine that with sordid cults, particularly amongst teenagers, and the plague of loneliness, and the issue is acute and immediate.
Listen to people, ask questions, pay attention to signs and signals: if a friend or relative seems “a bit low”, don’t just assume that it’s an “off” day. Educate yourself (there are many helpful web sites and organisations) and be available.
And to those seeing the curtains close ever more tightly, and the sunshine so difficult to feel, I’d say: Know that you just’re not alone, and that assistance is on the market. And God be with you.
The Revd Michael Coren is a priest within the Anglican Church of Canada and a journalist.
