When Divinity Doesn't Intervene
or can't reach them...and they die
I just finished reading a book where the narrator told a story of his mentor. The mentor had had a rough childhood and had decided that he was going to end his life. He went out into the woods with a rifle, intent to end his existence.
But a voice, a song, Divinity, intervened.
And so he stopped.
I have read similar accounts, like in—She’s Not There: a Life In Two Genders, by Jenny Boylan, comes to mind.
In both stories, there is some intervention, call it God or coincidence, happenstance, some instance that causes the characters to stop. To not go through with it.
I know that this happens. I have read people’s stories that also disclose interventions from when they were close to the edge, proverbially or literally, and instead chose to climb, to not go through with it.
Here, though, is where my father and my brother’s lives do not appear as a book, a movie. Their lives did end.
I find myself wondering—why no intervention for them?
Perhaps there was. And they just chose not to hear it, to go through with it, anyway.
I can’t help though but wonder—why.
I have often wondered about my dad’s and my brother’s last moments:
What went through their minds? What or who did they think about? Did they hear God? Feel God? Especially my brother, the pastor.
I have faith to believe that God was there for them, easing them in their painful last moments of life, in their self-inflicted death, and transition to the afterlife. That helps. I think of them as no longer in pain.
But I do wonder about those moments, their stories, their very last moments. Their mental images in their last breath. Dying alone, it just sounds so terribly lonely. Dying alone and at your own hand, it sounds heartbreaking. Devastating. Like despair, which—I’m sure—is what they felt to go through with it.
I firmly believe in not flattening their stories to be all about their manner of death. Even suicide. Even though it’s hard to bear and shocking—
They are more than their cause of death.
We are all more than how we came into this world, as well as how we left it. Even when it is self inflicted.
I often times think that it is not just the manner of self-harm to cause death but the lack of clarity, the absence of a note, the unanswered questions, the untold stories.
My brother was very unwell. In the last few months of his life, he was manic—very big highs and lows—and in the last few conversations we had via text, as he lashed out in anger or dissolved in despair, I urged him to get some help, because he was clearly not well, mentally.
He did not.
My brother was often impulsive, rash, in his decisions, and often, through life. My father had a flair for dramatic gestures and threats of “wrapping himself around a tree.”
These stories are not ones where there were intervening voices, interceptors.
Like much of life, there isn’t a happy ending.
However, I also don’t think of it their stories as sad endings. At least not always. On their behalf, anyway.
True, I struggle with being left behind, the one in pain, who has to live the life and make sense of it.
But for them—I don’t believe it a tragic—nor a happy—ending for either one of them. I believe they were tortured, mentally; I believe they felt despair in their souls. And I believe them to be free from that, at peace now.
Often times, we don’t want to think along these lines, since none of us is certain about the afterlife, and we don’t want to advocate for suicide for all, when someone is experiencing a depressive episode and mental anguish.
However, the haunting truth is also this—
I think sometimes certain people who are on the brink are unable or unwilling to hear the voice trying to pull them back. Or, these people are unable to make huge life changes, to go and receive the help that they so desperately need.
And the harsh truth is that sometimes—when you can only see a mentally unwell family member continuing on in this self-destructive spiral, a wheel of toxic dysfunction and harm to others….
Their self-inflicted end, though heart-wrenchingly painful, can also be a relief. The worst has happened. You can finally stop living on the edge of your seat, walking on eggshells, because the other bomb has finally dropped. It may have been atomic, but there can’t be anymore surprises for how destructive they can and who they will hurt as they wreak that havoc.
It is never just a relief, nor just pain. It is not simplistic enough to just be one of them.
Maybe their intervening voices knew this about them.
I don’t know. I try not to dwell in the whys and unanswered and bits and pieces that I cannot know.
Still, sometimes it is hard not to do so.
Sometimes our minds take us to some very dark and scary places. I know. I have been there, points of darkness and despair, where I didn’t recognize myself. Where I heard voices and could have listened to them too. I do not judge them.
We, humans, we are all capable of indescribable darkness and also magnificent light and goodness.
We are complex beings. Life and minds are complicated. So too is the mystery of why some live and others die.