Unfolding Insight 7: On honouring the loss of a friend
Hello friends,
With three weeks left in the States, time is starting to feel a little tight.
And this week, more than a little heavy, too.
Trigger warning: I’m going to be writing about suicide. If you or anyone you know needs help, click here.
On Monday I learned that my friend Charlie ended his life. Alongside the profound grief of losing someone I love, a feeling far more complex has emerged, something that feels far more dangerous to express.
For context, I’m called to the compassion with which Parker J. Palmer explores depression and suicide in Let Your Life Speak. He says:
Twice in my forties I spent endless months in the snake pit of the soul. Hour by hour, day by day, I wrestled with the desire to die, sometimes so feeble in my resistance that I "practiced" ways of doing myself in. I could feel nothing except the burden of my own life and the exhaustion, the apparent futility, of trying to sustain it.
I understand why some depressed people kill themselves: they need the rest. But I do not understand why others are able to find new life in the midst of a living death, though I am one of them. I can tell you what I did to survive and, eventually, to thrive-but I cannot tell you why I was able to do those things before it was too late.
I’ve come close to the precipice a few times myself, and I’ve always turned around at the last minute and walked back into life. Like Parker, I don’t know why I was able to do so. Also like Parker, I can clearly recall the beyond-the-bone tiredness and pain that took me to the edge in the first place
On my lighter days — with a gallows-humour grunt — I’d imagine checking myself in to a gleaming white clinic somewhere in the Swiss alps. Tom Ford-ian in its elegance and bedecked with yellow striped awnings over the windows for good cheer, it would be staffed with firm but kind women who would tend to me so I didn’t have to haul myself out of bed to make a miserable piece of toast or take a piss. And on my darker days? Well, let’s just say I’m filled with compassion for Charlie and what took him to the edge and over.
For who would want to suffer like that? What sense is there in enduring the pain of existence day after day after damned fucking day if one feels condemned to it?
We’re inclined to argue that things always get better, or you have so much to live for, but how are we to know, and who are we to tell someone these things? How are we not simply avoiding our own discomfort with death in pushing someone to live when they no longer want to? How does our guilt and shame at not being able to save the person we love get in the way of simply being with them for the precious moments that we’re together? And in pitying or getting angry at their decision, how do we reinforce an idea that they may have felt all too keenly: that they could never get anything right?
While there’s an increasing acceptance of people choosing to end their lives when its quality is diminished by cancer or a neurodegenerative disorder, what makes it so that we struggle to offer the same embrace to someone faced with a lifetime of that most extreme kind of pain and debilitation: that which lives in their head?
I’m grateful that — for whatever reason — I’ve turned back from the precipice. I’m also grateful for the various ways in which I’ve been able to heal, that these ways have worked, and that I’ve had the privilege to access them. I will never not advocate for supporting people in their struggles with their mental health and their determination to live. And sometimes, things won’t work out. For some of us, life will become too much to bear.
I don’t have answers here, simply question upon question upon question as I sit with Charlie’s death, and a profound desire to honour not just his life, but his choice to end it, too.