I Hurt

A Brief History of Suicide, Suffering and Damnation

The Memphis summer was like wearing damp clothes barely warmed right out of the dryer. There was no air conditioning in the apartment so my Dad “borrowed” a large, heavy, Army green oscillating fan from his office at the Navy base (which we still have 65 years later). It’s the kind you see in the dingy office of old Humphrey Bogart detective movies: you can put your hand through the wire frame surrounding the blades. Which my Mom did when she tried to move it while it was running.

Blood instantly splattered the walls, ceiling and kitchen. My six year old’s recollection is this: My Mom dropped the fan onto the table then grabbed her hand. She didn’t scream. She didn’t panic. She went to the sink, tended to the cut on her finger, wrapped it up in a big white bandage, then cleaned up the mess and started dinner. When Dad got home he got a little box with small white square envelopes in it, tore them open and took out some white pads. He took his lighter and burned the end of a curved needle then sewed her finger at the dining room table while she smoked a cigarette with her other hand. Then he put the stinging red stuff on it that he always put on our cuts. (He was a medic after all.) I doubt he had anesthesia, but I don’t recall my Mom crying or complaining.

That is my recollection of how my Mom dealt with pain, both physical and emotional. Through our constant moving, their marital issues, the turmoils of our teenage years, my brother’s drug problems and death, my Dad’s health issues, her mastectomy and chemo, fracturing her back, she faced it all with a “Zen stoicism”. She never cried, unless she did it at the kitchen sink when her back was turned to us.

“How are you doing, Mom?” I would ask her over the years during various crises.

She would shrug. “I’m doin’…,” she’d say.

Once in a while, if things were particularly bleak, like when we had to decide to pull the plug on my brother, or when Dad had his second bypass we didn’t think he’d survive, or when she got her breast cancer diagnosis, or when she quit her chemotherapy, she would add, “What will be, will be.” That was her surrender flag, I think.

She converted to Roman Catholicism from nominal Buddhism in her early 20’s, but I don’t recall ever having a conversation with her in which she “baptized” pain as some kind of lesson or discipline sent to her personally from God. As “Zenly” as she accepted and endured pain, she didn’t see it as working out some grand personal scheme or worth the price just to live longer while debilitated from sickness. Her end of life directives were to insure she would not be kept alive in some agonized, incapacitated state and be a burden to her family. “Stick me in a nursing home and put me out of my misery…, and don’t worry about me, you kids go on with your life, I’ve had mine,” she’d say.

But none of that happened. We took her out of the nursing home. Dad didn’t let her escape her misery and die peacefully. People did worry about her. She was a “burden”. Lives were put on hold for the sake of hers. She would have protested, I’m sure, but she had dementia and she couldn’t remember any of it.

“Where am I?” she would ask while we fed or changed her.

“You live with us. This is our house together. We’re watching out for you now,” was our agreed upon standard answer after we realized the “long version” got lost even while explaining it.

Sometimes she would look genuinely surprised as if she woke up and suddenly we were there in her house, in her bedroom. Sometimes she looked worrisomely puzzled.

“Do you know who we are?” Half the time she would nod, half the time she would slowly shake her head “no”, as if she was trying to recall a familiar face but drawing a total blank.

We never landed on a unified answer to “no”. My wife would sometimes say, “We’re people who care about you.” Sometimes I’d tell her, “I’m your son, Steve, that’s Peggy, my wife…”. Sometimes Mom would nod, sometimes she’d look confused and close her eyes as if to shut it all out.

Thirty seconds later she would ask, “Where am I?” And we’d repeat.

The last three years she didn’t know that she was bedridden, that her legs were paralyzed and atrophied. She didn’t know her body was fighting bedsores. She didn’t know she couldn’t feed herself. She didn’t know she was incontinent and had to wear diapers. She didn’t know what she had endured for the past six years. She didn’t know she was living the life that she had explicitly told us she did not want to live. She only knew things in the present moment.

I don’t know how she percieved herself in her dementia, if she still thought she was a dancer. When we played Hawaiian music, when she was able, she would raise her arms and wave her crooked hands in the air. But her body was no longer my “dancing Mom”. Her once lithe legs and arms looked like dried, crooked tree limbs. Her strong, supple back was fractured. Her fingers that once gracefully told mimetic stories in hula were curled into her palms, frozen with arthritis, clawing into the flesh of her hands.

She was more fragile than a newborn. When we changed her we had to roll her over on her side to clean her and dress her bedsores. We tried to be careful moving her.

“I hurt.”

Either her pain was intolerable or she had lost her “Zen filter”. Either way, she hurt.

My Mom was hurting.

“I know, Mom. We’re trying to be careful. We have some medicine we’ll give you for your pain.”

Dad would hover when I got the comfort meds. “Don’t giver her too much! I don’t want her all doped up.”

But I’d make sure she was able to at least sleep for a while.

In the year after Dad died there were many, many times when she was having a particularly bad week and her nurse thought she might be in her final decline, I considered overdosing her with the stockpile of comfort medications we had from the two years of Hospice care. I believed then, and still do, it would have been honoring my Mom’s wishes for a peaceful ending and she would have been grateful for the help, even if she couldn’t remember why she needed it nor that she could not do it on her own if she remembered she wanted to do that.

But, I didn’t. I don’t know why not, still, honestly. Certainly not out of fear of man nor of God. I loved my Mom too much to watch her suffer, I loved her too much to kill her.

Instead I watched her die slowly, trying to find the balance between her Zen pain tolerance and her comfort that she could not speak except “I hurt”. Eventually she lost even those words and could only wince.

“Do you hurt, Mom?” Sometimes she could nod. Sometimes she just stared at me, unflinching.

I dared not try to read what was in her eyes. I could not risk disobeying my Mom if I understood. But she was crippled and could not throw her slipper at me if I disobeyed, not at least in this life. (Yes, you think of stuff like that…)

When she closed her eyes for the last time the days before she died, it was a hard blessing to not have to look into them, and perhaps for her too, to not have the burden of looking into ours and seeing our helplessness and sorrow.

In those years I often went to bed and cursed God on her behalf, wondering how much pain is enough for someone to be “saved”? Does God really sovereignly ordain the dosage of suffering we must endure and when it ends? Is life truly so “sacred” that it demands ALL suffering be endured until God decides you’ve had enough?

________________________________

It is universally understood that the Christian church (in all of its expressions) affirms the sanctity of life. So do most world religions and even some atheists. However, the church also universally affirms that God has also given us the ability and the blessing to end life, both of others and our own under certain circumstances: War, capital punishment, self-defense, self-sacrificial suicides (“jumping on the hand grenade”), voluntary martyrdom and “pious suicides”. (See THIS prior post regarding all that.) Whether we like it or not, and regardless of the opinions of individual theologians, biblically and historically the church has universally supported (or at least has not universally condemned) the death penalty, nor war, and has canonized pious suicides, soldiers who killed in war in the defense of their homeland and faith, Christian emperors who went to war, and has permitted the taking of life in self-defense. Biblical history and church history is written in the blood of enemies of God and His church and His people, and God has killed those who presume to usurp His divine order. God and the church have historically blessed principled killing and deaths for the protection of the weak, preservation of national and international peace, civil order, justice, faith, and personal piety.

The fact of the matter is, the “sanctity of life” is not absolute within the church nor for God. There are things more important to God than the sancity of individual life. It has always been understood that God is “pleased” with martyrdom, voluntary death (as opposed to self-preservation) as a sign of “faith” or fidelity to Him. To preserve one’s life by offering the pinch of incense, a song, a bent knee to an idol has universally been understood as a sin against God. The early church excommunicated people who preserved their life by compromising their faith instead of accepting martyrdom. Eventually, after nearly a century of debate, it became a “grave sin” and a matter of long penance, rather than certain eternal damnation.

If we step back and take the big picture view of what constitutes a “church permitted/blessed death”, there is one common theme: “The Greatest Commandment”. Death chosen for the love of God and killing or dying for the love of neighbor are blessed by God.

Voluntary martyrdom is for the love of God: we die rather than deny God because even in human love, we do not deny or betray our fidelity to our beloved. We will gladly die for and with them to be eternally united. That is the plot of all the greatest love stories.

The second is like the first: “greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). It is love for neighbor expressed in killing or dying in the defense of and preservation of individual life, of family, of nation, of social order, of justice for the oppressed, and (in the biggest picture) the saving of the cosmos ordered by the self-sacrifice of Christ in the love of God for His creation.

John Donne (16th cent.) boldly theorized in Biathanatos, his treatise on death and suicide as he was struggling with his own imminent death, that Jesus’ death for the world, because the Gospel says He “gave up His life willingly”, was therefore a suicide and the ultimate model of love and “laying down one’s life for the brethren”. Hence, he said, suicide done in following Christ’s example, for noble or godly motives is not necessarily a sin. It is interesting that Donne follows Augustine’s and Aquinas’ approach to pious or godly “self-killing/sacrifice” and does not flinch from logically, by the exact, functional definition of the word, calling Christ’s death a “suicide” rather than attempting to offer up a different term or name for it. It is obvious that there IS a theological distinction between “godly self-destruction” and “selfish, cowardly self-destruction” (discussed more in depth in the previous post), but both are named “suicide” and all of the Christian theologians over the centuries (as did even pagan philosophers and non-Christian faiths) chose to work with the familiar word and theologically/philosophically distinguish an honorable self-destruction vs. a dishonorable one.

So, if the divine economy values certain “principles” over “life”, then the issue is more defining the principles and the divine economy in order to properly define when life is sacred and when a certain principle is “more sacred than life”. The problem then is not life, suicide or death in themselves, it is attempting to define them according to the mystery of divine principles and how God works within them.

The mystery for this discussion is simply this: If God omniscient AND omnipotent, how does that work in regard to human suffering? When faced with suffering and evil within the boundaries of “principled suicide/killing” the church affirms that we have free will and have freedom and the blessing to self-determine the time and manner of our death and the death of others. However, the church also teaches that God omnipotently and omnisciently controls how much pain we suffer (to teach and save us), and He sovereignly ordains the day that we will die. So, God’s omniscience and omnipotence are the sticky points at the intersection of the doctrine of free will, His sovereign benevolence and providence, and His economy of “principled killing/suicide” in the fallen order.

So, if we say that there is an absolute sovereign divine order in which God causally ordains all things toward a divine purpose and end, then we must ask: Why then do we humanly intervene in sickness and pain at all? If we intervene in alleviating pain then perhaps we are interfering with a “salvific sovereignly God ordained lesson” for that person. Or for that matter, if all suffering (and health) is ordained by God “for our salvation”, why do we order creation for our own personal (or corporate) safety and well-being? Why build levies against hurricanes, send food and medicine to Third World nations, research for cures of diseases, offer “strong drink to him who is perishing, and wine to him whose life is bitter” (Proverbs 31:6)? (The list of self-serving, self/life-preserving human endeavors can go on for pages.)

If we say that in the divine order God does not actively create all things (including suffering) but only permits certain things in His providence, then we must ask: What then is the true difference between what God permits and what He intervenes in to prevent? If God permits evil but CAN prevent it by not permitting it then why does anyone at all suffer so much that they fall into despondency and commit suicide? If God is omniscient, merciful, compassionate and omnipotently able to not permit damning suffering beyond the ability of a person to endure (which He omnisciently foreknew they would do), is God culpable for the suicide’s damnation to Dante’s seventh level of hell below the greedy and murderous.

If we understand that life is a sacred gift from God and only God can take that gift, then we must ask: Can a perfect gift be defiled and broken to the point it is no longer identifiable as the gift given? (You are free to insert your “theology of the Fall” here…) If God takes His “gift” back (in death) by some sovereign plan that involves inflicting (or allowing) suffering as a part of taking the gift back, then was it a true “gift” to begin with? A gift by definition is given freely and not controlled by the giver. If we have no control over it in our free will then why would a loving, merciful, omnipotent God inflict such a “gift” on someone, demand they be thankful for a “gift of a life of unbearable suffering” then condemn them eternally for caving in to suffering He ordained in the process of Him taking it back?

Of course none of these questions and issues are new under the sun. It is merely bringing the focus of some of the problems of theodicy on the issue of suicide. The theologians of the Christian faith for 1600 years have continued to wrestle with Augustine’s “soft determinism” regarding God’s sovereignty over life and death, and with his systematic theology of suicide and “pious suicides”.

In the centuries since Aquinas the trajectory of the theology of suicide has become more and more nuanced. Donne and Calvin offered the possibility of mercy for suicide. Over the past five centuries Christian theologians and philosophers have wrestled with the “Augustinian/Thomist hard line” of certain damnation for suicide and the concepts of personal autonomy, responsibility to community, and the sovereignty of God.

With the advent of psychology and its influences along with the more nuanced theological discussions and theories that began 1600 years ago with Augustine’s first “systematic theology” of suicide, Churches now take into consideration concepts of “mental illness” and situational duress as mitigating factors regarding their official statements regarding the eternal state of a suicide. The church no longer permits the desecration of the bodies and the confiscation of property of suicides as it did in the Middle Ages. Even the most “traditional” churches have pastorally relaxed blanket policies regarding church funerals and have been more open to the possibility of the grace and mercy of God toward the suicide victim. The 2019 Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church sums up the predominant modern Christian view of suicide across mainline denominations:

2282 (Regarding assisted suicide)…Voluntary co-operation in suicide is contrary to the moral law. Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.

2283 We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.

How then can we understand the church’s blessing of “principled killing/suicide” when faced with certain death, the prospect of immeasurable suffering, and what that means to our family and community?

NEXT: The meaning of suffering, salvation, and death.