THE WORST NIGHTMARE

A while back I visited some friends who were sitting shiva for their son who  had committed suicide at the age of 28. There is a younger sister. He had been struggling with depression for some years and it got the better of him.

There was no attempt to hide the fact that it was a suicide and there was no sense of ostracism as might have happened in the past. He was buried in a Jewish cemetery and it is understood that he was ill; depression is an illness, not a moral failing or sin.

His parents were devastated but were trying to comfort themselves with the fact that they had had him for 28 years; that he was ‘alternate’ but not alienated from them. Throughout the visit, young people, his friends and cousins, came in and out, everyone with a story of his kindness, his generosity, his humour, his quirkiness. The atmosphere almost became festive at times, kids laughing and reminiscing. Until the parents started weeping again.

There is nothing worse than having to bury your child. No matter what the cause of death; suicide is probably worse than disease or accident. I lost my brother when I was 18 when he was killed in the Yom Kippur War at the age of 22. There is nothing that can be said to comfort bereaved parents but people were trying to say that it was somehow better because he died defending Israel. Well, maybe. But dead is dead, gone is gone. And bereaved parents can find it hard to continue to be parents to surviving children, and that’s a whole other story.

I have just heard of a suicide of another young man in the community. I can’t stop thinking about it. I want to say to any young person, or any person contemplating suicide, that the world is never a better place without them. That it may seem all horrible and insurmountable today but it might get better tomorrow. That we are not meaningless specks in an uncaring cosmos, we are here as the creations of G-d and that fact alone means that we matter, that our existence matters, perhaps in ways that we can’t see or comprehend, but still we matter.

I believe that if this young man, the one I knew, and perhaps any suicide, could have seen the pain that he would be putting his family through, he would never have done it. I believe that in the moments of awareness between the act and the loss of consciousness, the suicide truly regrets the act; but it is too late. The sense of loss is so deep, so tragic, so pathetic, there are no words. He is gone. He is never to be a husband, a father, he will never be an uncle to his sister’s children; the loss to his family and to his community is unfathomable.

I want to say to his parents, the pain will never go but it will lessen over time; that they must not forget that they have a daughter, and that she will need them more than ever now, even though it looks like she is OK, laughing with her friends. She is not OK. I want to say that, although it is dark and cold now, that one day the sun will shine on their faces again, that life goes on, not because the world is callous and uncaring, but because Life is powerful and it will always prevail. But we must choose Life. It is a choice. We must all choose Life.