I have written already about the dumb shit that people offer up when someone dies, but now, I want to focus specifically on the crap that people think, say, and how they respond, when the death of your loved one is from suicide.
“How could they be so selfish?”
They weren’t selfish. They were in pain. People who complete suicide still love, but their hurt, their pain, their anguish, isn’t too great. They can’t feel hope. They can’t feel love. They can’t visualize any change to their current hell.
When you are depressed, when you’re thinking about suicide, you obviously are not necessarily thinking clearly.
After all, despite faith and religious beliefs, no one really knows what happens when you die. To not know if you’re going to cease to exist, and to still want that, that escape, that out, is a dire place to be in.
People who have depression, have suicide ideation, and attempt or complete suicide, may not not want to die, per se. They just don’t/can’t live anymore, in this state, position or this pain.
“They are going to Hell.”
This is just so shitty to say, to preach, to proclaim.
Yeah, I get that we don’t want to encourage death at our own hand, but come on.
You take the people who are the survivors, the bereaved, who are in pain, reeling to understand how their loved one could have ended their life. Then, on top of that, you add the agony to their plate with the image of their loved one in Hell, burning, thrown into the fiery lake of eternal damnation?
That, ironically, is just so cold.
And essentially, you’re playing God. How do you know?
I happen to believe in a God or a Divine Creator who has love for us. That kind of agape love can’t comprehend mental illness? The pain and despair of depression and suicidal inclination that leads to that desperation and that act?
No. I don’t buy it.
And even if I give you the benefit of the doubt: maybe you’re right. So what? Still, shut it. We don’t need to hear that, agonizing about our loved one in Hell.
I envision my relatives who completed suicide to be finally at eternal peace, no longer hurting and suffering, finally healed. Surrounded in God’s embrace. If that is not your religion, able to see that God loves them and understood their pain, I don’t want to have to hear about your religious convictions. Keep them to yourself.
After my dad completed suicide, I asked her once what she thought happened after someone dies by suicide.
She said, “I guess they go to hell…”
It became obvious next that that was what she had been taught. From her limited Baptist church education.
It broke my heart to hear that she believed that.
It further adds to the trauma, the deep pain and sadness for those grieving.
And also the overused— “God has a plan”
or
“God never gives us anymore than we can handle…”
We really need to shut down those as well.
Especially when people use these to minimize the pain of grieving and death of a loved one by suicide, simply because they are awkward and terrible about talking about death, comforting each other, and holding space for another’s pain.
It was not God’s plan for my brother and father to die by suicide, gun shot wounds to the head. It was not that my aunt could have handled more from her depression and post-partum struggles and chemical imbalances when she completed suicide with downer drags. It is not her fault. Essentially that is what you’re saying.
Also:
Do. Not. Play God.
Or, assume you understand God’s purpose.
God can be with us—all humankind—and create beauty, divine comfort and magic from unbelievably heart-breaking and tragic circumstances. But it doesn’t mean that He orchestrated them. We have no right to twist that into a sick message that our relatives or weak, or that there is no hope for the victims, or the survivors.
We need to do so much better than this.