After Suicide

Much like the responses we might have if we were to be harangued by a suicide, this article will be inadequate. What could possibly describe our feelings, and thoughts, and anything, really, having endured the suicide of someone close, other than inadequacy.

Inadequacy must be entirely normal.

Not that we would be inadequate, per se, just inadequate for an active response to it.

And then there is the river of hurt, with lashings of guilt and feelings of comprehensive shame. Not that any of these are deserved. A living hell: that is the experience.

What is the purpose of reading this? Hopefully there is something of the mysterious, eternal, and ever-present voice of God transmitting empathy through the situation into hurting hearts both here and departed.

How To Feel When There Are No Words

No words could possibly even come close to describing the redoubled grief at the appendage of suicide. Such a thing clings as a fact despite our reticence; despite our will to turn back the circumstances of time.

What is ‘now’ other than hope for something of a fresh beginning? But how do we leave things so tremendously impacting and dire? How do we say goodbye when there was no chance to say goodbye? How do we do things up when things are left so interminably undone?

There are so many questions... so many questions with no adequate response.

And any ‘adequate response’ can only be personally determined.

Yet we must cling to some vestige of hope, and faith gets us there, even against the will to give up, for somehow we cannot give up.

No Fault, Just Compassion

In a thing called suicide there is always the inevitable pinhole burn of guilt, as if a pinprick is all it takes for sorrow to leak through, so as to stain our entire existence.

For those who have suicided they will have reckoned themselves toward guilt; but it was not their fault, for they tried their absolute best. For those left behind there is also guilt; it wasn’t and can’t be our fault, for we would do anything to assuage harm.

There can be no condemnation to suicide, surely. Such a sorrowful situation can only bequeath copious offerings of compassion to soothe and somehow heal lives parted.

Compassion must surely be all there is. We cannot imagine a loving God being anything but tremendously saddened by these events for all parties concerned. God is an entirely good God and goodness shall be known for all those who suffer in this life.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.