(trigger warnings, suicide, depression)
This past Saturday the news broke that Pastor Rick Warren’s 27 year old son Matthew had taken his life after a life-long battle with depression.
Within a few hours I received several messages from friends online to this effect: “thinking of you as I read this news and praying for their family and yours.”
At first I didn’t know how to feel, coming to mind whenever someone encounters suicide. But then I realized that people think of me because I have a unique perspective on this devastating type of loss.
As for me, every time I hear of someone taking their life I freeze up and a lump the size of a grapefruit forms in my throat. My mind drifts off to the family receiving the raw news, their souls smacked with the impossibility of it. The grasping denial leading to utter confusion.
About a month back I was asked to help with childcare for a funeral at a local church, so we loaded the car with diapers and Gluten Free snacks and headed off to help. I was chatting lightly with a friend when she was told that we were working a suicide funeral.
I spent the rest of the morning in a shroud of memories and heartache, reliving the moment where I curled up on the bathroom counter, unable to speak or cry after my brother called to deliver the news of my own Mother’s suicide.
My mind flashed back to her funeral, slowly dragging my weary body down the aisle behind my mother’s casket. Turning around a seeing hundreds of familiar faces, all in shock that she took her life.
We hung on every word the pastor said, hoping he’d give us something to make sense of it all.
I haven’t known all forms of grief, but I think suicide grieving is a rare bird, a hard road, a lifetime of thoughts to be sorted through.
How could they do this?
Why couldn’t life be enough for them?
Didn’t the love we shared matter?
What could we have done differently?
And the hardest one for me: Why didn’t God send healing?
Scriptures like John 14:14 still make me a little angry.
“You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.”
Inwardly I ask God what fault he found in my prayers for my Mom? What spiritual blockage was stopping Him from breaking through the crust of her pain and depression?
Why didn’t He send healing and deliverance? Why didn’t He hear our prayers and set her free, deliver her from that evil pain?
Those who lose loved ones to Mental Illness have an especially cruel burden to carry because many people question the faith of the deceased. They wonder if their journey with Christ was phony and negated by the manner of their death.
I get it, even I went through a season of questioning my Mother’s faith, it’s hard to figure out what happens to the soul while the mind languishes in pain.
Yet in the end I will tell you that my Mother died from depression, that her mental illness finally ended her life. Just as breast cancer or heart disease may have stolen someone you love, depression stole my Mother.
Some days, good days, I see her as brave and long suffering. She fought against her depression for over 30 years, for my entire life and longer.
My mother placed her daughter in a group home and buried her husband on a cold March afternoon and still she fought on.
She lived in her own private, painful world and got up every morning to fight another day for years, until one evening she couldn’t anymore. On that evening, tragically, depression won the battle.
On the days when I see her as brave, I view her death as the most confusing kind of mercy I’ve ever come across.
Sometimes I wonder if God’s timing was right and he called her home in a way that we on earth cannot mentally process. It seems like the most heretical thing in the world, suggesting that God uses suicide to call a child home, yet Cancer ends in death and no one questions it.
I’m not sure, even I don’t know what to do with this idea, suicide as mercy.
But can you imagine going years without feeling joy? I’m not sure I want to even try.
I found a lot of connection in the letter that Pastor Warren wrote: “Kay and I often Marveled at his courage to keep moving in spite of relentless pain. I’ll never forget how, many years ago, after another approach had failed to give relief, Matthew said: “Dad I know I’m going to heaven, why can’t I just die and end this pain?”
The Warrens view their son as a courageous man who fought on for years and not as a quitter who took the easy road out. And I get it, really I do.
There’s no easy answer or black and white perspective when it comes to suicide. But, for those who have seen the long suffering of our loved one, a beatitude that describes depression perfectly, sometimes we wonder if it is a mercy.
A strange and confusing calling home.
Join me in praying for the Warren family as they burry their beloved son this week. Pray also that we as a church give grace and love and that harsh words and judgement be minimal if not non-existant.
(If you are considering suicide, please seek help immediately, please don’t this as an encouragement to take your life. Call the national suicide prevention hotline at 1-800-273-8255)
