The S word

“We’re afraid he’s going to hell” my new boss said, recounting her most recent visit with a family after their son had died by suicide. We were debriefing in our tiny, musty basement office after a long day of visiting patients at the community hospital where we work. I had seen two men that day who were painfully alive, laying prostrate in their hospital beds, no emotional tenor to speak of besides the tears that would occasionally fall from their eyes onto dry, just-beginning-to-wrinkle cheeks. Two very different men who had both tried to kill themselves and who both, in a perverse twist of language, had failed.

Buddhism’s teachings are pretty clear on suicide—killing is bad. From a karmic perspective, it’s not all that complicated, but from a human perspective, when an embodied person is looking you in the eye and telling you about why they tried to end their own life, there is no possible resolution for the complexity of that suffering. In fact, the complexity is so threateningly real that the first instinct I had in the face of it was to run away.

I hit the point, around 4:30 when I was driving home, when I realized that I needed to pay attention to this with more than a breathing ritual and a call to a friend (my usual on-the-go processing techniques for an average day of work). But my breathing was tight, my head foggy, and my thoughts were racing from one thing to another, feeling a combination of anxious adrenaline, fear, and exhaustion lingering in the background as I listened to my friend tell me about his recent travels. Suicide kept ringing in my ears like one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s mindfulness bells. The word drips with taboo and I felt the urge to shout it from the top of my lungs in some desperate attempt to shake off its sticky, wet coating.

We talk more and more about self-care, and the importance of tending to one’s own wellbeing, especially for people who are caring for others on a regular basis. Trendy words like “burnout” and “compassion fatigue” swim around in the same cultural soup with “mindfulness,” “hydration” and “yoga.” Find a way to be normal they all echo in the back of my mind. Be okay, or else they whisper as my nervous system vibrates at a low hum of disequilibrium.

But being okay felt like an insane response after sitting with people who not only tried to commit suicide, but were suffering so deeply in the aftermath that they cried not in shock of what they’d done, but in disappointment because it hadn’t worked. All I wanted was to block it out, shut it down, erase it from my mind so that I could return to the self that felt safe and familiar. I heard the voice in my head, reassuring myself that with the right stretching routine and hug from my partner and nourishing meal that I would return to being normal and I would “process” the disequilibrium away. But a deeper part of me knew that if I tried to move on like I hadn’t seen those blue and green eyes, I wouldn’t be saving myself from an emotional burden, I would be betraying something bigger than myself.

New questions started to come: How can this change me? How can this reality seep into my bones and fortify them with resolve and determination to love bigger and to fear less? Because we don’t know. We don’t know the pain inside of other people and if there is pain that we cannot witness, then there are beings who we erase, and the Buddha path erases no one.

Karma and Bodhicitta once again lock horns in the battle for the future. I no longer feel the urge to scream the name of suicide, but I also no longer wish to erase it from my heart, even though it stings every time I look at it.