Lamenting a Self-Inflicted Passing

Lamenting a Self-Inflicted Passing

Thoughts regarding a sad phenomenon

Written by Dan McDonald

 

          We mourn the passing of country singer Mindy McCready this morning.  Most of us, such as I, mourn from a distance never having known the woman.  Some may have liked her music and thus felt connected to her.  Others had heard the name and remembered how personal troubles had apparently afflicted her.  Suicide, according to most Christian perspectives, is a sin.  But suicide, to most of us as human beings, is also a tragedy helplessly recognized as beyond our normal moral categories.  We feel almost forced to confess it as a sin, but we surely lament every self-inflicted death as a tragedy.  We mourn the passing of a human being who lost hope.  As a Christian I mourn the sad end of a life that was, in its humanity, created in the image of God.  What I present in this article is based on words I wrote when a former employee where I work had been found to have died a “self-inflicted death.”  I passed this writing, at that time only to a few friends knowing it to be a sensitive matter.  I now present some of the same thoughts in connection to Mindy McCready’s passing.  Probably no one who knew her will read these words from an unheralded blogger, but if anyone who knew her reads these words I wish to express my condolences in the light of this grievous news and the burden of grief you now bear.  I am not sure how these words will speak to you, but know that I lift your experience to one in the heavens who knows more than I how to encourage the grieving and grant healing to them in their grief.  Remember also it is something of an honor to remember someone loved with your grief, for surely to die with no one feeling grief would be the most horrible of tragedies imaginable to those who are to live on once someone else has departed from this life we have been granted to know and experience.  Here are thoughts that were expressed for the first time long ago and are now updated for the same tragedy with a different human face.

          A rumor began to spread one morning this past week.  The rumor spread that a former employee was found dead.  The cause of death was rumored to be “self-inflicted.”  Unlike so many rumors that people want to believe and spread, those who heard it seemed reluctant to believe it, let alone speak of it.  Those who heard the rumor often picked up the telephone and called someone who perhaps could be trusted as an authority for confirming or debunking the rumor.  Eventually the rumor was confirmed but I never heard the full details.  For me I felt no such need to know.  Was it that I respected another’s privacy or that I simply did not wish to deal with the reality of death, and especially the inexplicable horror of a self-inflicted death?

When someone takes their own life, we usually try to pause and then move on.  We tend to view this self-inflicted death as an isolated event outside of ordinary human behavior.  We don’t imagine there are lessons to be learned or wisdom to be gathered in relationship to this horrific unexplainable event.  So we note someone’s passing and move on.

The reality is that self-inflicted death is a phenomenon that is far more common in human life than we ever wish to imagine.  In our conversations and discussions of the event around the workplace, one man with a good friend who was a paramedic made a comment that perhaps none of us should forget.  The paramedic had told his friend that though we often hear murder statistics, we seldom hear any official statistics regarding self-inflicted deaths and attempted self-inflicted deaths.  The truth is that we hear of murder and violent crime statistics and imagine ways of protecting ourselves.  We get a dog to watch our doors, or buy a weapon to use to defend self and family from the potential intruders we read of in the murder statistics.  But according to the paramedic the number of people who die a self-inflicted death is far greater than the number of people who are killed by a violent criminal.  But there is no weapon to buy to prevent us from destroying ourselves with a self-inflicted death.  There is only perhaps a cultivated prevention of allowing the dangerous temptation a way of entering our souls until the temptation having taken root bears its poisonous fruit and we read or, or we become the statistic of another’ self-inflicted death  The paramedic offered a sobering thought.  Many more die a self-inflicted death than die from another’s violent behavior.

Literature certainly confirms that “self-inflicted death” is a far more common phenomenon than we want to contemplate.  Ancient Greek and Latin plays dealt with it.  The Bible has instances of it.  Shakespeare seemed almost obsessed with it, with the most poignant example perhaps coming in Hamlet, in the words “to be or not to be, that is the question.”  For those words were the beginnings of a consideration of a suicide.  Hamlet was perhaps held back by an understanding rooted in Catholic theology.  He had to grapple with the possibility that one does not end his troubles by taking his life on earth but brings them into the future of eternity with him, either to be faced in purgatory or at the final judgment.  What if, when we have lost hope and imagine ourselves to be improving our situation we are only casting ourselves into a future where this course of action must still be confronted?  As Laura Nyro wrote in her song “And When I die” wondering if dying brought peace she also contemplated that though she would “swear their ain’t no heaven”, she also prayed “there ain’t no hell.”  For most of us death seems like the end of everything we treasure, but to a troubled soul it may seem like the only way to that peace that has been spoken of near every grave site.  Every minister needs to consider with care and caution that as he preaches at a grave site full of mourners that care is taken not to picture death as an escape from trial and tribulation.  Yes when the time comes for a person to breathe their last breath there is an end to that course of suffering one may have been called to run.  But that is an assigned end by God or providence and not a self-chosen end.  The dilemma understood by Shakespeare and vaguely if irreverently acknowledged by Nyro was that we couldn’t be sure if dying would bring us the peace we sought or simply add compounded debt for those things for which we will answer beyond the grave.

I have to admit that Laura Nyro was one of my favorite songwriters from the Rock n’ Roll era.  If you haven’t heard of Nyro, it is because we often ignore the songwriter and speak of the artists who perform the songs.  Nyro’s music was sung by such diverse groups as– Blood, Sweat, and Tears; and by other bands such as The Fifth Dimension, and Three Dog Night.  She was a daughter of musicians, one Jewish and one Italian; and it would seem that the skepticism, Judaism, Catholicism, and political progressivism coursing through her veins created a blend from which talent and trouble would emerge almost as a predestined fate for the quiet attractive black haired young song-writer that grew up in the sights and sounds of New York City’s eclectic music offerings.

I would like to consider Nyro's "And when I die" as a beginning point to discuss the thoughts of death as presented by Nyro in her song with my thoughts as a Christian.  Certainly Nyro presents an important truth in our discussions about death.  From an experiential point of view there is a vast difference between our viewpoints of looking at death from the vantage point of either faith or skepticism as compared to what our experience of that ghost before us will bring.  As much as I would like to say, “no, no, the Christian faith is absolute truth and anything that deviates from it is not true”, the reality is that I have to admit that my looking at death no matter from how strong a perspective of faith will not be the same as my experiencing it.  If Laura Nyro were here to talk face to face with me about her song that is what I think we could both agree that there is a lot of truth to the sentiment about death that “only my dying will tell.”  Unfortunately cancer claimed her otherwise I could have counted it a true privilege to discuss these things with her.

There is one line in her song that I think is wonderfully true but also possibly untrue at the same time.  I wish again I could talk with her about this line.  She describes in the very beginning of the song that when she dies there will be one child born in this world to carry on.  There is wonderful truth presented in this line that every Christian should be quick to own as a beautiful sentiment.  The world of humanity does not end with an individual human being’s death.  Human life, created in the image of God is lived both individually and communally.  There is a tradition, a heritage, or perhaps best expressed a force of life that each individual contributes to the whole of humanity as their investment into humanity; and then each of us as individuals draw upon that capital invested by our forefathers in experiencing, understanding, and the guiding of our lives.  Human life can be illustrated in the passing of the baton in a relay race.  We live our lives having been handed a baton of life from those who lived before us and giving it to those who will live life after we have passed.  In that sense it is a beautiful and true thought that when I die there will be one child born in this world to carry on.  I would not be surprised if the Jewish and Catholic girl inside Laura Nyro, as well as the politically progressive woman Laura Nyro became, took this as a sort of article of faith in life.  The human tradition is a collective reality of humankind that nourishes us and into which we invest our lives and this is passed on to the next generation.  That is one of the greatest truths of humanity.  It is one of the great truths which distinguish mankind from the rest of the creatures who roam upon this earth.

But the same sentiment so wonderfully expressed by Nyro can be expressed in a way that is the antitheses of this beautiful sentiment.  From my Christian perspective it would be a mistaken sentiment if in Nyro’s words we saw only that a human life would not be missed when one dies because after all another child will be born in this world to carry on.  I would not doubt that Nyro’s words were meant as well to convey such a possibility of meaning.  She was the voice of the child wanting to believe as well as the skeptic incapable of believing.  There is this sense that we are on this global ship earth, all several billions of us and that we are just one in that number of billions, a face lost in the crowd of strangers with unidentifiable faces.  If I die what is that to the billions?  The moment we begin to think of ourselves as billions of human beings, we begin to feel like our human population is little more than flying swarms of insects countless in numbers, whose individual lives count for next to nothingness.  It was the genius of who Laura Nyro was that she may well have written and sung these words both as the Catholic, Jewish girl with a sense of progressive expectation and the skeptic who wondered in regards to any and every hope if it all wasn’t meaningless for a lonely individual lost in the swarming billions of human beings trying to hustle and bustle their way for their seventy or if due to strength eighty years on this planet.  As a Christian I must say never imagine that your one human life is meaningless.  The one human life, as well as the billions of human beings is most assuredly beloved by our Father who art in heaven.

I move from Nyro’s thoughts to an Anglican minister from long ago, the dean of St. Paul’s when the last great plague struck and killed so many Londoners.  I was a skeptic in high school the first time I saw these words written in a literature book that were passed over in our instruction, but I read anyway even though never assigned in the class.  They were the words of the poet John Donne:

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,	5
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,	10
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

 

I remember the first time, reading Donne’s words and thinking, is this man crazy or inspired?  Is he deluded or insightful?  That is something I think of how so often we perceive the Christian hope that looks at death not as the ultimate enemy that shall take everything we have in life, but as the final enemy to be conquered as we live eternally through the life we are given by God through faith in Christ Jesus forevermore.  Donne sees that what death has done, and when death has been done, that in the mystery of Christ and the promise of Christ we will arise from our tombs at the last day and wake eternally and death, well we can look squarely at death and say “Death, thou shalt die.”  The Christian recognizes but does not really embrace death.  Death is an enemy.  Yes it may lead to a well-earned rest but that is not the promise of death but the promise of one who is greater than death.  So we seek to live, even if in living we suffer, and then in death he who is with us is greater than death and we look forward to resurrection and life forevermore where our enemy death is dead and gone forever, good riddance war, sickness, poison, chance, fate, kings, and desperate men.

The Christian view of death is like a double sided coin.  The first truth is that death is not to be adored or embraced as if death were a friend.  It is an enemy to life.  It is always an enemy to life.  That is the first reality a Christian learns to recite regarding the nature of death.  The second truth on the flip side of the coin is that death is an enemy’s whose powers have been restrained and limited by Christ who overcame both sin and death in his death, burial, and resurrection.  Death has been contained so that for the Christian it becomes the passageway of sleep into a new heavens and earth.  It is not a friend, but simply a conquered beast made to comply to the will of a greater power as we pass beneath its weakening grips on our human race.  Ultimately death is the last power that will be consumed in death’s own fury.  Death will die.

There you have a philosophical and theological consideration of death as I have learned of death by listening to the lyrics of Laura Nyro, by reading the words of John Donne, and by contemplating the Scriptures, the Christian and the human tradition.  But is there something practical I might say.  After all, I can defend myself from intruders by getting a dog or perhaps even a gun, but that is surely a subject and debate for another day, perhaps by another writer.  But what can you or I do to defend ourselves from self-inflicted death?  It turns out that our lives are much more vulnerable to the demented spirit within us losing hope and taking our own lives than for an intruder to enter our house and do us harm.

The first suggestion I would make is our need to remain sober, in the sense of not allowing substances to impair either our minds or dispositions in life.  Alcohol and substance abuse often goes hand in hand with an extremely large number of self-inflicted deaths.  Sometimes pharmaceutically proscribed drugs have for some people a side effect of causing depression and tendencies towards suicide.  Sometimes such drugs are necessary and perhaps sometimes they are questionable, and if you have lived long enough you know of someone who died a self-inflicted death who received such drugs in a battle with a disease.  But even more common is the man or woman who found getting drunk or high with drugs and alcohol to be an enjoyable experience.  Yet these substances used in excess generally tend to weaken our long-term natural abilities to cope with the afflictions, sorrows, and discouragements of life.

Sometimes, it may seem to readers that I am being hypocritical to present on a blog site where I say I will write for ribs and ale with a reminder that alcohol and substance abuse is dangerous in that it tends towards weakening the natural human coping skills so necessary in dealing with life’s afflictions, sorrows, and discouragements.  I am a biblical Christian, and from my reading of it the moderate use of alcohol is accepted and spoken of with approval in the pages of the Holy Scriptures.  St. Paul proscribed use of wine for Timothy’s stomach, Jesus spoke of how he drank although John the Baptist did not, the Psalms record that wine was given for the happiness of man, and part of the Jewish tithe was commanded on being spent to provide wine and strong drink for the celebration of Pentecost.  If we may borrow from Aristotle it would seem that the Scriptures while not commanding total abstinence from alcohol does require moderation in the use of alcohol.  Moderation is it would seem sometimes the best enemy of excess as opposed to an opposing excess.  If God has spoken and approved of moderate use of alcohol then I will submit to his word and oppose both excess in the use of alcohol and excess in the judgment of those who moderately consume alcohol.  At the same time the Bible speaks high praise of those who choose not to drink any alcohol, and I will praise such an honorable course also.  But the moment one wishes to look down upon a brother for drinking a glass of Merlot I will drink a toast to the offended brother and give a look at the would-be judge.

My final comments on practical steps by which we might defend ourselves and others from the potential “self-inflicted death" comes from St. Paul’s instruction to the churches of the Galatians.  St. Paul writes in Galatians both that we are to bear one another’s burdens and to bear our own.  We are to watch over our brother in a time of weakness, knowing our own frailties.  The truth about the temptation towards taking one’s own life, is that such a temptation is often a temptation that if it had been given an alternative might have been overcome.  Depression, sorrow, and affliction are heavy but usually temporary grievous experiences that give way to new moods and experiences when given the chance.  We need to learn to watch for others in the grips of these dangerous experiences, for such weaknesses of the spirit can lead to that one moment of desperation wherein a beloved one becomes a statistic.  Watch for your neighbor, friend, co-worker, or acquaintance; for the one who has become listless, lacking a taste for life and life’s ordinary little adventures.  Sometimes a bit of friendship to such a person will deliver them from the depths of bondage to one’s own afflictions and sorrows.  My high school years were spent often in long periods of depression.  I can recall an acquaintance who more or less preached to me to take the high road and not the gloomy road.  He made funny antics as he told me these things.  We weren’t as far as I know, either of us Christians or religious persons.  But we were human beings and he sort of instinctively knew I needed a pep talk and to know that someone cared that I spent most of my days feeling that life was all gloom and doom.  My favorite song at that time was “Paint it Black” by the Rolling Stones.  That seemed to tell it like it was I thought at the time.  This acquaintance may have saved my life for all I know, with his pep talk and funny antics.

The other reality is that we are also St. Paul said needful of bearing our own burdens.  Once we identify an affliction as a burden, then we can understand it as something to be patiently borne until the burden is removed.  For the Christian identifying that we have been given a burden opens our minds to the possibility that this is something to be endured until we receive a reward for our faithful stewardship in carrying our burden without complaint and with faith as one who is a co-laborer in Christ’s sufferings as well as Christ's resurrection.  I would say to the man or woman who is not a Christian that if you suffer under an affliction then let your voice be heard asking for Christ to hear you and to help you with the affliction, to help you bear it until it is taken from you or you are rewarded for carrying it patiently.

I close with one final thought.  A Russian I knew once expressed how she had been going through some dark stripes and figured that white stripes would be ahead.  I had no idea what she was saying until I discovered that this was a common Russian view of life based on a highway’s alternating black and white stripes.  Life is that way, our journey of life passes along black stripes and white stripes.  We are to bear patiently those burdens until we vaguely remember the dark mood of the dark stripe due to our enjoying the pleasant experiences of a patch of the journey dominated by the white stripe.  That life is full of white and black stripes is something to remember.  It will help us feel that an end to affliction is surely coming.  It will also help us to realize that one very near to us may be under the influence of the black stripe.  So instead of taking the white stripe for granted, we will look from our serene side of the highway to another troubled traveler carrying a burden weighing them down near to the breaking point.  So let each of us bear each his own burden as we each likewise seek to help bear one another’s burdens.