How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart? Psalm 13:1–2
More gun deaths result from suicide than murder. Seriously. More Americans take their own lives than the number who die from car accidents. Seems impossible.
Never in my life have I read the local obituaries as closely as I do now that I’m getting old; still, the facts I just mentioned shock me. But then, I’m sure that very few obits would ever mention suicide; few, in fact, divulge cause of death.
Maybe I’m shocked because I’m not a coroner. Perhaps people don’t tell the truth aloud, especially in a small town like the one I call home. Still, more suicides than murders?
In all my years of teaching Hamlet, Act V’s graveyard scene had to be explained to kids – college or high school: Claudius and Gertrude cut a deal with the church, a deal that allowed Ophelia’s body to buried somewhat honorably, despite her having taken her own life. However, the priest had insisted that not all of the rites ordinarily given to someone of her class and standing could be granted to her body, given the means of death. Her brother, Laertes, is incensed when he sees her dishonored by such paltry rites. He jumps in the grave, Hamlet goes in after him – and we’ve got action.
Kids today have trouble believing that not all that long ago the mortal coil of those who took their own lives would be buried somewhere less honorable than the community cemetery. People reasoned that suicide grew from despair s
o desperate that there could have been no hope, and the hopeless, ultimately, are faithless. Thus, no “Christian” burial.
Compared with life a century ago, we’re dashingly more affluent. The poor we have with us always, but comparing our lives with much of the developing world, we’re loaded. Despite our wealth, people kill themselves at alarming rates.
Loneliness, people say, creates a level of sad resignation that can all too easily lead to suicide. A life without human intimacy is a life that is alone. Some say, as a society, as a culture, we prize our own freedoms so greatly that we’ve begun to eschew traditional institutions like family, church, work, and play. If we bowl at all, we bowl alone. We hole up in our own worlds, some of them virtual, then feel stranded on the island we’ve created, where the commodity we most need – the loving touch of another human being – is impossible.
But tragedy is rarely that simply diagnosed. Few human beings were more celebrated than Mother Teresa, few touched more lives, few were more universally loved. Literally – physically – she touched thousands who loved her. Yet, her own terrifying isolation, hard as it is to believe, brought immense psychic and emotional pain: “nothing enters my soul,” she told a friend, a priest, someone she’d wanted to speak to, but simply couldn’t. “I was longing to speak to you in Bombay – yet I did not even try to make it possible.” And then this: “If there is hell – this must be one” (250).
Who knows? It’s possible to argue that few human beings gave away more love in the 20th century than Mother Teresa; yet her own isolation seemed unrelenting.
To know that about her makes us all sad. B, but to those who know the depths of loneliness and darkness, that she suffered something of what they do is oddly comforting. We are not alone. We are never alone.
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