That someone chooses to die creates a sense of unease. It’s not the natural order (just ask the church) and increasingly suicide is talked about as preventable.
I often wondered how different my experience of loss might have been if Mottsu had died some other way. Would I have been offered more solace if he had died accidentally rather than quite so deliberately? Could I have talked more (not that I could have talked any less than I did) if he had been taken by some indiscriminate fatal illness?
In many religions killing oneself is as serious a sin as killing another. Apparently only God may take a life.
Apart from what God might or might not condone, there seems to be a deeper existential threat to society at large when someone dies by suicide.
“Affronted and confronted” is the phrase Colin Tatz coined this week to describe our reaction to suicide. He says, “We are, in many senses, as much affronted as confronted by each such event. But this is essentially because we view the individual as belonging to us, to our society. For some religions, life and death belong only to God.”
It’s not easy to understand suicide and I am not sure we try hard enough. The act is shocking and distressing for we who are left to piece together the story and, even so, there could more reflection about why react the way we do.
We could also reflect more about the desperation, the pain, the loneliness and angst that might compel someone to chose not to live.