I wrote this to a friend recently. I thought you might like to read it. There was a death, a suicide, and this was just a small attempt to say something decent.
“It’s a been a few days since it happened and life keeps moving on.
And that is precisely the difficulty: the struggle of life. It keeps changing and moving. When we almost get our feet under us, the ground shifts again, and we stumble and fall. How many times have we fallen now? 50? 100? 500? More than we can count. And it gets old. We get tired and worn out. For some, they just get sick of all that struggle and falling. They want that to stop, to end. It’s too hard. It hurts too much. They don’t want to keep feeling all that pain.
It’s very understandable. It’s something we all go through.
The hardest pain of someone taking their life is perhaps not that you’ll miss them. You certain will. But the hardest part is that they’ve left us to struggle without them; to face the pain and the hurt and the toil and the falling–all without them. And we needed them. Life is too hard to do alone. We need each other.
Perhaps they didn’t realize that they were needed. They were not just a cog in the machine. They were not just a piece of a pointless puzzle. They were absolutely necessary. We are all bound up in each other. A family is bound by a father and a mother. Children are bound by blood. And the web keeps expanding. All of us are bound to each other. So, each of us are absolutely necessary in the line and life of each other. You can’t just cut the line and return to normal. A necessary part of the chain was cut. A part of the chain that we needed to make the thing whole!
For those that remain, this is how you stay out of the bottom of despair: remember that you are necessary. You are absolutely necessary. Your life matters. And without your life, we are all less that we should be. So, even though there is inconsolable loss, those that remain have to struggle to see how necessary they are. For those that remain: struggle, hold on to the chain, hold on to each other, you are needed.
If there is anything that I or St. Paul’s can do, all you have to do is ask. And you can tell the family the same.”
Tom+