My millennium started with my sister’s suicide in August of 2000, followed by my nephew’s suicide in August 2004 (not her son). So I’m not so crazy about August, but please bear with me as I repeat this reflection every year; it not only bears repeating, but also sharing, so please feel free to pass it along.
Although I’ll never get used to the word suicide, in fact I hate the word, we don’t have any other word to describe this way of dying. And although it’s the way someone dies, the way someone leaves the world, it doesn’t define them.
Unfortunately, as we all know, there is a hell of a lot of stigma that surrounds suicide, and when someone dies this way, inevitably the neighbors and the town folk (as if they are immune to the possibility in their own lives) talk in whispers and gasps about “that” family and our beloved person who is no longer here.
And while they whisper and conjure their theories in judgment of how this person could possibly do this to herself or his family, or how it’s such a cowardly and selfish act, or how there must be a lot of issues in “that” family… we survivors, those who are left behind in the aftermath of this tragedy, those who must live with this unspeakable loss, who now carry the crushing burden of sorrow and grief, sort through all the whys and questions, all the pain and anguish, and get no answers.
What we do know is that they were in unfathomable and unimaginable pain, but not anymore.
What we do know is that their brains were sick in a way that science has yet to understand.
And what we also know is that they did not commit a crime and they did not commit a sin. “Commit,” is a word always associated with crime, sin and judgment. To chip away at the stigma surrounding suicide, we need to start consciously changing our language. So let’s replace the “commit” with phrases like: He died by suicide, or she took her life. And let’s stop judging people‘s lives, brains, and souls that we will never be able to fully understand.