Suicide, Judas, and The Way

Suicide is something we all participate in, whether we know it or not.

These days, suicide is on my mind. Yesterday and today, Christian themes turn to Judas, of whom “Matthew” claims was a suicide (Matthew 27:3-10), in disagreement with “Luke” (Acts 1:18).

More on Judas, here:

Suicide is on my heart because the wife of a former student committed suicide recently. Please, if you ever consider taking your own life, reach out. There is help. You are irreducibly unique, unrepeatable, and lovable.

CALL 1-800-273-8255
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
Free · 24/7 · Confidential · In English, Spanish
TEXT “SAFE” TO 741-741
Crisis Text Line
Free · 24/7 · Confidential

Love & Suicide

Love is as severe as suicide. And love creates the Beloved. Love goes ouch when the Other hurts. It doesn’t play games with people or act superior to them when they are in need. Love doesn’t manipulate, or bully, or take advantage. And it is never, ever blind. Love sees clearly.

Sometimes love can be challenging because sometimes we need the very hard given to snap us back into reality, where love is. But love is never cruel. However, what often masquerades as love in this society is cruelty in disguise. It can drive people to suicide.  

Love changes to meet the occasion, but people rarely change. Such transformation is possible, and it does happen, but only rarely. It seems that people need to fall on their faces, hit rock bottom, and then change may occur. It can also happen without that, but that’s like a unicorn happening, brothers and sisters.

How sensitive and creative is your love? When someone hurts before you, do you get angry because you are inconvenienced by this person? Do you say, “Why can’t someone else, someone with means, take care of this!” and then make-believe that you’re enraged because of the injustice? I’m being as real and as serious as suicide right now.

Apathy & Suicide

I am coming up on 50 years old in a time of death and apathy: over half a million dead and counting due to gross negligence in the pandemic. So, I thought a post about life and its importance might be appropriate given where we are. Let me take you back a few years into my life.

Remember Y2K? It was then, springtime, 2000, in sunny South Florida, the hottest place to be and the coldest also. It was a Monday evening pretending to be a Saturday. I was in a delusion that I was a defender of the Church, a Catholic superhero called by God (my ego) to bring ex-Catholics back home. Handpicked enablers surrounded me. But it wasn’t all bad for a Catholic Jackass.

It was dinnertime with friends. The steaks had been prepared meticulously—kosher salted and ready to be brought to room temp. Within the hour, my roommate Jean (not his real name), my girlfriend Michaela (not her real name), and I would be dining. Jean was cutting French bread, and Michaela was mixing a salad dressing. We were celebrating something; I can’t recall what exactly.

What followed will never be forgotten.

Death on the Telephone

The phone rang, and I answered. After my hello, I heard a familiar voice, cracked with heartbreak, say—

“My Dad… he killed himself.”

Roger (not his real name) was the voice on the phone. Shocked, I listened as my friend explained. Pitifully, I tried to catch my words to console him.

Before the Suicide

I had only just met his father a couple days earlier, the previous Friday. There he was, a sad, broken man. He appeared very unsure of himself, drinking a beer quietly. There was no eye contact, but I recognized the shadow of depression. I was very familiar with depression. Roger’s father was out of work and had been for some months.

People were brutally hard on Roger’s dad. People close to him called him a loser and not a real man, told him to shake off his depression, get a job. “Get a job!” they said with the Amer-I-Can! love of “Atlas Shrugged.” I was filled in on these details privately in the half-hour following my meeting with Roger’s dad. 

But movies called. Then after, the debate about which Christianity was superior beckoned—I loved getting into it back then. It was my Heroin, my Crack, and my teeth ground for it! I absorbed every Scott Hahn book out voraciously. Except that Scott Hahn isn’t really for South Florida poor people.

Anyway, with bigger fish to fry for Roger and me, the sad old man was quickly placed out of sight, out of mind. And I was a Catholic superhero again, in delusionary flight high over Metropolis.

Coming Home to Death

Fast-forward to Monday night. Roger’s dad is dead. The tool he used to end his life was a .357 Magnum loaded with hollow-point bullets. He sat on his wife’s bed inside an empty house. His life, an endless series of Mondays, was done. A dubious escape and “rest” invited Roger Sr. to select a permanent solution for a temporary problem. Ultimately, he placed the gun into his mouth and anesthetized himself.

And all the Scott Hahn arguments? All that EWTN piety? The endless Bible “studies,” the pro-life marches in D.C., the charismatic prayer meetings, and all those hours before the Blessed Sacrament? None of it could put the pieces of brain and skull back together. Roger Sr. was dead.

Cleaning Up

On the phone, Roger Jr. detailed things. He told me that his mom would be home within two hours. She didn’t know yet. And the people who took the body away left the white bedroom a bloody mess. 

“I can’t let my mom see that,” he said.

So my friends and I stopped what we were doing. We went to buy hydrogen peroxide, cleaning materials, and garbage bags. So we called a good Burundian priest we knew to come and bless the house—even though Roger was Evangelical, his mother and aunts remained practicing Catholics.

We managed to get the family a hotel room. Michaela, Jean, and I cleaned and scrubbed all night. I won’t tell you how it looked before.

My Dad: A Slow-Paced Suicide

I know about depression. My own father died on his 39th birthday, back in 1987. He had spent that Sunday evening worrying behind a poker-face of smiles. Mom was sick and in the guest bedroom. I was getting over the same stomach bug. It hadn’t been much of a birthday weekend for dad. 

We watched a little of the brand new FOX channel. But repeatedly throughout the evening, Dad would switch to the Weather Channel. A hurricane threatened his Key West business. People were suing us unjustly, a case eventually dismissed, but too late for dad. Weeks later, little notes were found that my mother wouldn’t allow me to see. But I found them. They read: “God help my family.” 

Dad didn’t commit suicide with a gun, but he had let himself go. He was a functional alcoholic. He never hit us and was always considerate. “If I could take the pain away from you and put it on me, I would”—that was my daddy. Like Hamlet said of his father, he was all the Olympians rolled into one for me.

But he drank quietly and alone, and it killed him slowly. Beyond his smiles and warmth, he was drowned in deep depression. When he was a kid, dad had been beaten savagely by his violent, alcoholic father. Abused, he abused himself, but not others.  

Haunted By Depression and Suicide

Dad was dead from slow-paced suicide. Then it was mom and me. At 13 and an only child, it’s tough to lose your dad. It is even more challenging when your mom suffers from bipolar manic depression with schizoid tendencies, and lithium no longer works.   

Mom would die eleven years after dad in 1998. She passed from lung failure, smoking up to four packs a day. Between 1987 and her death, she tried to commit suicide seven times. Those were terrifying days. She would always try to overdose. And she would blame me—“You made me do this!” High school years were tough.

So were my college years. One summer morning in 1996, I found her snoring with eyes wide open. Beneath the lamp at her bedside were empty containers of prescription sleeping pills and antidepressants. What followed was a nightmare of waiting in emergency care in a dark weekend of uncertainties.

Mom finally died in 1998 after years buried in an episode that wouldn’t quit until her lungs did. And I was a terrified and angry young male.

Christmas Day Hanging

On the Feast of Stephen, almost two years after Roger Sr. had killed himself, I got a call from a “Bible study” (really, “Catholic cheerleading”) student of mine. Felipe (not his real name) told me that he was worried about Gregor (not his real name). I knew 50-something Gregor. I met him at a Christmas party the year before. Felipe said Gregor had been getting increasingly closed off and depressed. Gregor told Felipe dark things. He suggested something dark that worried Felipe.

“He’s not answering his phone,” Felipe said. “He didn’t pick up on Christmas. He sent me his key in a Christmas package I received. The message said to check on him. Bill, I am scared.”

So I responded, “Let’s go check on him.”

The next day, Felipe and I go over to the townhome. We opened the door, and facing us was a dark entry. Beyond that were the stairs ascending to the second floor. And stepping in, that’s when we saw Gregor’s legs and feet suspended over the stairs. He had hung himself in the stairwell.   

Judas and Suicide

We Catholics haven’t been the best Christians when it comes to suicide. Frankly, we’ve been a pastoral disaster in this regard. Are these people and the countless other wounded and depressed souls who have taken their own lives Judases? No? Then why were they treated thus? And was even Judas Judas? I mean, what we make of Judas, what we have twisted Judas into meaning? Or are they children of God, one-time fellow dying inmates in the tremendous worldwide hospice called Planet Earth? 

There was a time when suicides were not given Christian funeral services and burial (unless they belonged to affluent and powerful families). Even today, some priests still teach that suicides are lost, like Judas. In the 1990s, Catholic teaching officially recognized the role mental illness plays in suicide. Regardless, I can’t accept that they are lost, and a dry “we hope” and “we don’t know” is pathetic. Yeah, there is a lot we don’t know.  

A wise and denigrated Jesuit once said something so profound about love. Father Tony said, “Love creates the beloved.” God is love, and God is creator, and therefore if there is love, there must be someone created also. So do we love? If so, then we must ask: who have I created today? If you’ve loved, then there will be a new creation.

Whom have you created today? This isn’t April Fools. This is serious.

Suicide happens in an ocean of love. And we all participate in both.