I may be mistaken, though it is not really the sort of thing that makes me care much for accuracy anyway. But I believe suicide has come close to my household in each of the past four Decembers. And then there was the accidental suicide two years ago on Thanksgiving.
I have written about last December's suicide in three Contratimes' essays, "When The Phone Rings Late At Night," "In Memoriam," and, "Staggering Still." That story remains a difficult one for me; there has not been even a few hours in which I have not thought of my college friend, M.
Yesterday, I attended the funeral service for a local friend, another man named M. This man was not a close friend; he was just a friend and a good guy, someone I liked, someone who laughed with me when we bumped into each other at the store, or when we discussed our various hikes or experiences in the wild. We had met when I was 14 and he 20, some 31 years ago. We had more than a few things in common that had to do with the outdoors, but there were others: I had been friends with his ex-wife, and friends with some of his friends; his sister is one of my neighbors. And we had gone to the same high school though he, 6 years my senior, graduated with my sister (now deceased) when I was in junior high.
On Tuesday, M.'s elderly mother died at a nearby nursing home. She had been a loving and lovely woman, mother, grandmother. She had cared for her five children in some of life's most difficult circumstances. And she was adored by all. But her death struck her one son particularly hard: by the end of the day M. would also be dead, his body found in his mother's empty house a couple of miles from where his mom had died, mere hours separating their times of death.
Last year, I grieved a man who died in Colorado. The year before I grieved for Timmy, an old schoolmate, whose alcoholism the two of us often battled together, with me praying for him with all due fervor. He even spent Christmas week seeking sobriety in my house one year, with me and my family making room for him, trying to deny him his love of big bottles of rum. And the year before Timmy died, I grieved my cousin Tom, who hung himself in a bathtub in some Florida apartment while visiting friends. Tom had recently come to New Hampshire to rekindle relations with my mother; the two were thrilled to renew acquaintances after too many years of sorrows and great distance; my mother giddy that someone on her side of the family would want to get close in her waning years. Little did she know how cruelly Tom's heart was tormented. And then there was little, sweet Roland, a learning disabled boy and my nephew's best friend, who accidently drank himself to death during Thanksgiving week two (or was it three?) years ago.
But yesterday's sorrow was not really mine. M. and I were just close enough to like each other, to share those kinds of moments when you wonder aloud why you aren't closer friends. But the tragedy of his death will reach deep, very deep, into the hearts of those he left behind: siblings, nephews, nieces, childhood pals. I cannot know their grief; I cannot really carry it. I can only know my own sorrow at not being able to help those who so carefully conceal their need for help. I can only know my own anger and sorrow in the wake of deaths that have struck closer to my heart than M.'s did yesterday, or today, or even tomorrow. I can only know the emptiness I feel, hiking in the same great woods M. hiked, wandering about in silence, outside in the cold distance, hearing a single report to the heart.
In the autumn of 1978, during the first half of my senior year in high school, I would sit next to a quiet boy named Russell Holt. We were in Contemporary Issues together; he was bright as a star, a stand-out cross-country runner, a kid with long and somewhat greasy hair; he was gentle as a lamb. How could I have ever known that one particular morning would be our last together in our seats in Room 115B? How could I know that he would put a shotgun in his mouth when he got off the late bus that day, having just finished cross-country practice with Mr. Ladue? How could I know that every vestige of memory of me - and all his more popular classmates - would be splashed all over the walls of his family's kitchen wall?
Russell Holt's death shook me to the core, and it all called me toward Christ. My conversion began with a desire to be open to all the horrors and sorrows of the human heart; I did not want to be blind to whatever it was I hadn't seen in Russell Holt as his leg jiggled alongside mine in Contemporary Issues. I wanted to see, to be present: I wanted to believe that there was hope, redemption, joy, and a peace that could heal. That could comfort and console. And I wanted, in accepting Christianity, to embrace a love that could see beyond the end of my own self-absorption; I wanted to notice the forgotten, the forsaken, the overlooked; I wanted Russell Holt to know that I cared, that I was glad that he was alive.
Now, nearly 30 years later, I know that I still can't see even beyond the end of my nose. In fact, it is getting harder to see at all. How I wish this were not so! How my heart breaks over all the noise I've allowed to drown out so many calls for help -- even the one call for help -- I may have heard had I just quieted my mind and my soul. And yet (!), I know how fearful it can be to hear such cries, to be open to the scream: griefs and sorrows can overwhelm us, can reveal to us our weaknesses, often weakening our ability to keep the flame of our good intent burning at all. We often flee such sorrows because we believe they will indeed consume us; will indeed suck the life and marrow out of our own being, leaving us too weak to live our own dreams or to love our own sons and daughters. My heart wants to be bold but not too bold; I want to hear, but not too much: I want to fight fires, but only the safe fires; I want to climb mountains, but only the lower ones; I want to sow love, but only when it is lovely.
The heart is a difficult place to find one's hope, one's joy. It is a hard place to find a foothold. Perhaps that is why I am so eager to fill my day with distractions and sundry trivialities: books, bargains, baseball, beer, and the other banalities of the day. I am afraid to really be what I am called to be; I am afraid of what is true about the nature of even my own need: that I cannot avoid the fact that I am a person very much in need of grace, forgiveness, redemption, and a hope that is not some cheap illusion.
The Physician did not come to heal the healthy, but the sick. And He does not heal the wallet, or the ego; He does not heal with accolades and honors, with awards and Christmas bonuses, with publishing deals or tax write-offs or hot babes or hot sex or cold beer in fast cars or Botox or breast implants or a new kitchen or a well-lauded poem or an iconoclastic rock song or a five-star meal or a bigger church or a bulging credit line or a new gun or a better wife. His healing begins with a broken God nailed to a cross.
The next step is for me to let go of the hammer, to let fall the nails.
Peace.
©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.
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