“I’m thinking I might end my life. I’m calling because, well, I don’t know really, but I’m calling.” A voice on the phone identifies herself as Barbara and responds to my despair: “I’m here. You’re not alone.” I’ll never forget those words.
My family wants nothing to do with me, save for one aunt, plain-spoken and compassionate. But my parents and siblings don’t return calls or emails or handwritten letters. Who can blame them? I’ve been on the grift for years. The crime that leads to my conviction is well publicized—a grueling experience brought on through no fault of theirs. So I report to the parole and probation office, perform community service three times a week, teach computers at a local community center for the elderly. Life goes on. It’s 2009.
But today despair has taken its toll. I feel helpless, hopeless. One step away. So I call 1-800-273-TALK(8255), known now as 988 Lifeline. Maybe not quite so hopeless after all, I think.
Barbara knows her business. No doubt other professional counselors would listen as patiently, without judgment, understanding, but it is her insight that turns the tide. I tell her I haven’t seen my daughter in two weeks. “I heard something in your voice just then,” Barbara says gently, firmly. “Could you tell me about her?”
So I do. For thirty minutes or so. By the time I hang up, despair is the furthest thing from my mind. Instead, I plan to take Barbara’s tactful suggestion and visit my daughter Jess the next day. Which I also do.
We think of suicide as a coward’s way out. Selfish. Weak. And maybe in that moment I’m all of those things. Yeah, yeah, every ex-con is a hard case, or so the thinking goes. I’m no emo-boy. Long before my arrest I spend years training daily in the Korean martial art hapkido. I teach self-defense courses, work out with boxers and bodybuilders, sweat and cuss with co-workers in blue collar jobs, and don’t change much when I land work as a college instructor. I’m no tough guy, I tell myself, just a regular fella, taking life as it comes.
But many of us have that one day, early or late in life, when we ask ourselves, Why bother with all this? What’s the use?
This is my day. Maybe I can actually end my life, maybe not, who knows? But thanks to Barbara, and my daughter, I rediscover meaning that I thought was lost. Suicide disappears from my thoughts.
Until 2015. Jess dies that year. What on earth is left to talk about on a suicide hot line now? I don’t call. But I read. That’s when I come upon this poem by fellow bereaved father Friedrich Rückert:
My role, I think, is done,
paid in full, this pound of flesh:
exhausted, expelled, expunged,
excluded, expired, lamented.
For in grief all joy must cease;
lead me, I am sated, from the feast.
My reason for living is gone.
Or my grief would be too much.
My heart, I feel, since it took this
harm, breathes through sighs alone.
Rückert gives healthy vent to normal thoughts via a bit of word play that sounds almost like a sigh: exhausted, expelled, expunged, excluded, expired, lamented. Oh, now you’re talkin’, I think as I read the verse aloud. I know how he feels. Fatigue is a recognized aspect of grief, according to Kenneth Doka with The College of New Rochelle. Rückert also questions his reason for living. I’m no different.
Bereaved parents occasionally think of ending their lives, even years after the death. Yet the incidents of suicide are strikingly low. “People get very scared about suicidal talk,” says Delia Battin, chief social worker at Montefiore Hospital’s bereavement project, “but I find now that these are really normal feelings and it is important to help the bereaved to express them.”
The expression of such thoughts seems to be an important factor in healing. Mourners who speak of suicide are often less interested in ending their lives than in finding empathy, love, and compassion. Another difference lies in frequency. Those who intend to end their lives may at first refer to it obsessively before falling into a disturbing silence, the most dangerous period, Battin says.
Nearly all bereaved parents contemplate their own deaths, if not by suicide than with a wish that somehow life would end. This is a desperate, vulnerable, and revealing experience. It is also usually short-lived. It was for Rückert and it was for me. But according to Ronald Knapp (Clemson University), who interviewed some 300 parents, such thoughts often return over many years.
There are no hard and fast rules, but certain behaviors are suggestive. For example, some mourners find it difficult to function in society, develop relationships, accept the reality of a loss, or make allowance for feelings of mourning and pain. These reactions are expected in small doses, but those who find themselves mired in these unhealthy feelings may attempt suicide—at least thirteen percent, writes Katalin Szanto (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) in the professional journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior. They might also suffer from depression, have functional impairment, and poor social support.
This last point deserves careful attention, suggests theologian Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. He notes that God himself says in the second chapter of Genesis that it is not good for us to be alone: “Sometimes staying within the self is not a cure but the problem itself.” When we comfort others and allow ourselves to be comforted, he says, we may discover through community an oasis in the desert of a lonely crowd. “The therapy comes in the knowledge that the sufferer is not alone.”
Yet many who grieve feel alone.
The bereaved often mention loneliness as the biggest challenge of daily life, says psychologist Anneke Vedder (Utrecht University). This feeling is closely aligned with a sense of emptiness and disconnection. It can be powerful and devastating, but society frequently judges loneliness as a matter of choice or personal weakness. This is why it often remains hidden, says psychiatric nurse Roslyn Kovarsky. Her study of fifty-two parents who lost a child to an unexpected death by illness, accident, or suicide found that grief and loneliness tend to rise over time.
“For many parents, although typically occurring with less ferocity as time passes, the sense of yearning and sadness at a great loss will never quite go away,” observe psychologists Richard Tedeschi (University of North Carolina School of Medicine) and Lawrence Calhoun (University of North Carolina). “To paraphrase the ancient Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, Rachel cannot be comforted, because her children are no more.”
Many passages in the Holy Bible express similar emotions. Another bereaved father, Job, loses all ten of his children in a single day. “If I had died at birth, had there been no knees to receive me or breasts for me to suck,” he cries, “then I would be lying still and in peace, I would have slept and been at rest.” King David echoes this deep yearning for peace when he learns that his adult child has died: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!” David’s laments comprise one third of the Psalter.
Job and David step outside themselves to entrust their grief with a God who understands. In this way voices ancient and modern may echo our own yearnings.
Old Testament authority Walter Brueggemann notes that Job and David step outside themselves to entrust their grief with a God who understands. In this way voices ancient and modern may echo our own yearnings. “Where is the soul in my very being?” cries Mother Teresa to her consoler Father Joseph Neuner in April of 1961:
This terrible sense of loss—this untold darkness—this loneliness—this continual longing for God—which gives me that pain deep down in my heart.—Darkness is such that I really do not see—neither with my mind nor with my reason.—The place of God in my soul is blank.—There is no God in me.—When the pain of longing is so great—
Later, on March 6, 1962, she confides to Father Neuner that she wants to be named a saint of shadow: “I will continually be absent from Heaven—to light the light of those in darkness on earth.” Her heartfelt lament may sound like despair, and in a way it is, save for a crucial difference. Mother Teresa and Rückert write not because they have no hope, but rather because they are searching for a hope that seems elusive, just out of reach. Against all reason they continue to hope for hope.
I suffer from long COVID, my health is unpredictable, my parents dead, my daughter no longer in this physical world. So sure, of course, I won’t mind dying when the time comes. I look forward to holding Jess in my arms again. I miss her, but not in despair. We had twenty-six years together. Memories, good and bad, sustain my hope for our reunion the other side of death. I can wait.
“In the worst moments, when life overwhelms us with pain and sorrow and separation, we know and recall that there were good times,” writes hospital chaplain Rabbi Pesach Krauss, “and have faith that they will return as we go through the darkness of the valley of the shadow.”
Despair is part of life, but not all of life.
Trees grow in our yard. Some old, others young. On bad days, cane in hand, I step outside and stand among them, place a hand on a trunk. Tomorrow a hurricane may blow one down. So life goes. But today they breathe. And look there, a spider, a butterfly, the neighbor’s dog loping by, glancing my way, familiar companions.
Image Credit: Edvard Munch, “Despair” (1892) via rawpixel
