On Suicide and Man’s Search for Meaning…

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For a number of years I served as a volunteer chaplain for our local law enforcement and one day I was called out to a home where a middle aged woman had hung herself.  She had been experiencing many issues - physical and emotional pain along with being on the verge of losing her home to foreclosure.  The friend who had found her was distraught, as was her housemate.  When her children arrived, while upset, they indicated that they had been angry and semi-estranged from her for some time.  Their mother's suicide seemed to be an uncomfortable and unhappy mixture of anger, sadness, resignation, and relief for them. 

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Later on that evening I was reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, and as it happened, I read the part where he wrote about suicide in Hitler’s concentration camps.  He writes that there was a rule in the camps that when someone was found to be attempting suicide they were not to be stopped.  However, there were times when other prisoners knew that someone was contemplating suicide and they would attempt to talk them out of it.  He writes of how everyone understood that if one were to lose their faith in the future they would lose their spiritual hold on life, and would soon die anyway. 

Nietzsche wrote “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”  Frankl responds to this by saying “it did not really matter what we expected from life, but what life expected from us.”  He reminds us that if we are to discover that the destiny and meaning of our lives is to suffer, then we must take on our suffering as our unique task in life, and that our opportunities lie in the ways in which we carry this burden.

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It seems that when someone attempts, or succeeds, at suicide that they have lost their “why.”  No longer are they able to see the worthiness of their individual suffering, and they soon lose sight of how these burdens can be gifts. 

We have no way of knowing how our personal experience will impact the world.  We see our lives as self-contained and self-involved mysteries that sometimes overwhelm our ability to maintain faith in our future.  When we lose the why of our lives, we lose our reason for living.  As was shown in the concentration camps, without a why our lives will end regardless of whether we choose the timing of that ending. 

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The woman who hangs herself, and all of the others who commit suicide that we meet as chaplains, seem to have lost their why and the how’s of their lives became unbearable. As painful as it is for their loved ones to see this happen, the life of the deceased had certainly been equally as painful and their suffering had become more than they could bear. 

Our gift to share with others is our ability to help them see the "whys" of life.  When we remember that there is a greater possibility for our future, we almost certainly will choose to live.  It is our faith in this possibility that gives us the strength to bear our burdens and choose life, regardless of the how we are experiencing today. 

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Let this be the offering we lay at the feet of God; to be an example of the why of life, to maintain an unshakable faith in the future, and to bear a willingness to be worthy of our suffering, for this is certainly one of God’s gifts to us.

By Cynkay Morningsong