The single most powerful prevention of suicide in my Catholic patients is their belief that if you kill yourself you go straight to Hell. No matter how bad their lives, they figure it's not as bad as hell. This applies to the most lapsed of Catholics. I ask the question I ask all day at work: "Do you ever think about suicide?" And the answer from this group is always, "I don't want to go to hell." It is a powerful and real reason to them, and makes them seem less risky to work with than patients without any religious beliefs prohibiting suicide. As a Jew, I have no clue what the post-mortem consequences of suicide would be. The subject of suicide was never raised in Jewish school or Orthodox synagogue. It seemed completely irrelevant, like after Hitler, who would even think of such a thing? But the prohibition is not even recorded in the Talmud. Conservative Jews didn't come up with some sort of statement against it until l998, mainly focused on assisted suicide. I think there is enormous denial about suicide in Judaism, like if a Jew committed suicide it would be because he was a total loser and secret blasphemer and probably deserved it. In Islam, on the other hand, suicide offers to be a holy act of the murderer martyr. It is the exact opposite of both the Jewish and even more so Catholic positions. There can be no reconciliation with Islam on this subject.
I don't believe in the afterlife. I believe that the effects of suicide ripple around the family members who loved the person and causes great pain. For some, this is the goal: to hurt the people who hurt them. For my non-Catholic patients, including Jews, the main reason not to commit suicide is "I would never do that to my children." I know people who live hopelessly anguished lives who would never take "the easy way out" because of the harm it would cause their children.
There was a time I believed in the afterlife. I lived there, mostly. It was when I was a child on a chicken farm, listening to my mother's stories about her experiences in the Holocaust. She greatly missed her mother who was gassed with her five youngest children. I was named after her. In many ways, my mother treated me as her own mother and I felt like a family protector who had failed to protect the Holocaust victims. I lived with enormous survivor guilt and felt very connected to the grandmother I never met. I was certain I would someday meet her. After all, in Orthodox Judaism, Heaven exists and she was there waiting for me. I talked to her all the time.
As an adult, I lost my belief in Orthodox Judaism and fell in love with a lapsed Catholic. We decided to take Judaism classes together, but in the most liberal sect of Judaism: Reform Judaism. Rabbi Shapiro was a gifted and lively teacher, though we had some heated debates about some of my beliefs he referred to as the backwards peasant tales of impoverished Jews from Eastern Europe, like my Hungarian mother.
It is important to note that Reform Judaism arose from the intellectual Jews of Germany who looked down on the Eastern European impoverished Jews. So some of what I loved about my Orthodoxy, the great story-telling traditions, were simply mocked and erased by the German Jews.
The worst class was when Rabbi Shapiro told me that in Reform Judaism, there is no such thing as Heaven. There is only this world, the here and now, and all that counts is Repairing the World, Tikkun Olam.
I felt like I would faint. No Heaven? That meant I would never be united with my lifelong confidante, my grandmother Gittel. I cursed Rabbi Shapiro and cried the whole way home. I never got over the loss, as real as if I had known her and she had died.
Rabbi Shapiro married us. It's hard to find a rabbi who will intermarry. But he had faith in us. And he believed that my husband would someday convert. Rabbi Shapiro is gone. My husband hasn't converted, but we raised our children partly in a Reform Jewish school and partly in a hippy progressive high school so they could make up their own minds about religion. I certainly wouldn't impose my own beliefs on anyone else.
(Thanks to Thomma Lynn for sparking this story.)
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7 comments:
My stint in Islam did a similar thing to me. I remember mourning the loss of unconditional love in the loss of the Christian concept of a savior... someone who could love me no matter how badly I seemed to have mucked things up... That concept of enduring grace kept me many times from attempting suicide. Islam seemed to be of two minds about suicide. The moderate and conservative Muslims abhorred suicide. The fanatics placed suicide bombers on martyred pedestals, nearly deifying these vile people who indiscriminately killed innocent people and exonerating themselves from the consequences at the same time. I felt trapped in a routine of five daily prayers, and obsessively praying over every little thing because it was what the religion prescribed. I never thought of suicide during that time, just of breaking free. I had children to think of, suicide, after that loss of enduring grace was no longer an option.
I always thought the definitive answer to suicide was a comment from an old friend who later became a cherished brother-in-law. He said if he ever tried it, he was afraid his last thought would be: I was wrong. Wrong about what didn't matter; suicide only makes sense to people convinced they are RIGHT about something. Uncertainty (or open-mindedness, if you will) can be a powerful demotivator.
Storm: I grew up with the constant praying, but I never felt unconditional love from God. How could I after the Holocaust? Enduring grace is a beautiful concept.
JES: I tell my suicidal patients who think it will "make my life better"??????That in fact, no one has ever come back to tell the tell, and it really might make your life worse. Of course a crazy conversation, but it inserts uncertainty.
Thought-provoking post, oh Fuzzy-Tailed One. My heart goes out to you, re: your grandmother. In a very real way, she did help you, since she was your confidante and a source of comfort, and that's something you share with her despite never having known her in the flesh. It's one of the amazing things of life, how things like that can work. I wear a ring from a great aunt I never met but with whom I always knew I would have shared a special relationship if I had known her. When I was a child and a teenager, she was one of my dearest "confidantes."
I'm so glad you understand about a strong relationship with essentially a ghost relative. I, too, wear my grandmother's ring. I think of it as a my "writing ring".
I am very close to the memory of my grandmother too. She keeps me going. Suicide is a tough one. I've lost a few people to suicide and would never condemn them rather I feel that somehow I failed them for not seeing how bad it really was for them.
I do believe in an afterlife but heaven and hell not so much. I couldn't commit suicide because of my son. But I would also be worried that maybe Dante was right and I would be condemned to one of the circles of hell for eternity if I did. To repent. Now that would really suck.
Glad to hear you are close to your grandmother's memory. It's so soothing. It is very difficult to succeed at suicide, and those who do are very careful not to put out any distress calls. Once the decision is made, there's usually nothing anyone else can say or do. You just have to think of it like someone who chooses death over any kind of excruciating pain. It's what they wanted. I know that is hard to accept. Ohh! Dante's circles of Hell! I should have an illustration of it on my wall for those people who tell me "I want to commit suicide to make my life better" or "to stop the pain." I should at least memorize what they are so we can discuss which circle they think they would end on.
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