Sometimes even to live is an act of courage. Hopelessness is at the root of suicide. When a person feels there will be no end to their current pain and no way out of their present situation, they feel trapped and without options. Thus, when a person mentions suicide, it’s not an empty threat. They are letting you know that they feel they have no real choices. But those feelings are false, because 80-90 percent of people with chronic depression respond well to treatment. Don’t brush off a person’s offhand reference to suicide. Make sure they get help. Suicide is preventable, but someone must intervene.
People’s inner reaction to tragedies varies, so much so when a person commits suicide it is always a tragedy, not always an act of despair, but it is an attempt to end unendurable pain and hurt. Suicide is indeed a desperate way to die but we must understand it for what it is a sickness of the soul. There is something about the news of a suicide somewhere in all of us; a silent shiver of fear begins.
There is so much of mystery about the inner state of those whose hearts and minds cannot go on with the journey of life. We are made of body and soul either can snap. We can die of cancer, of a heart failure, or kidney failure these are physical illnesses but we can suffer those too in the soul the human spirit, mental wounds, from which the soul cannot recover. “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”
Do any of us ever succeed in experiencing our dreams of a fuller life? what kind of unspeakable loneliness, what inarticulate vision of fulfillment have driven different people to hang themselves ,to jump in river or wells, as we read in the papers?
“Did you really want to die?”
“No one commits suicide because they want to die.”
“Then why do they do it?”
“Because they want to stop the pain.”
In the shadow of deaths like this, may be that is what we are called to do to hold wanton death and undying life in the one embrace, if we ever find hope in our darkest times? There are times and places in our lives, mysterious moments when such spiritual conflicts is brought home, to us with almost unbearable intensity. If God has filled us with an insatiable yearning for life in its fullness, towards what is always over the horizon of our possibilities, then is it any wonder that we are tortured by the futility of our own efforts to transcend our mortality. Turn your demons into art, your shadows into friends, your fears into fuel, your failures into teachers, your weaknesses into reasons to keep fighting. Don’t waste your pain. Recycle your heart.
Even though we have been hurt, we must find a way to get through it, life goes on whether we want it to or not. The world keeps turning no matter how bad we feel. This is why we have to learn how to bounce back and keep moving forward.
