A Final Word on the Suicide of a Friend

On Friday, February 23, 2007, I discovered the body of my friend. I left work early in order to change a bad tire on the relic Cadillac I was driving at the time, then to drive the forty-five minutes from Kansas City to Lawrence to pick up my two young children for the weekend. I found him in his bed, sunk into the mattress. I had seen him the previous day around the same time of day and thought he was sleeping. Now I found him again in the same position, though I could not be sure. I called his name several times, and he did not respond.

When my first child was a baby, he slept so deeply I sometimes feared that he had become a victim of SIDS, and like many parents have done, would put my ear down to his mouth to hear the consolation of his soft breathing. I did not think of this when confronted with my friend, but instead tried to gently shake him awake. I knew that he was dead, but I did not want to admit it. I called his name. I shook his foot. I yelled, "wake up!" I grabbed his cold arm and shook him. The chasm between the truth and my desire cracked deeply into me, so that I behaved irrationally. For instance, as if being filmed or watched I mimicked what I have seen hundreds of times on television and in the movies, reached forward, and checked his neck for a pulse. As a child might do playing a game. I felt nothing, of course, but then recognized my action for its own absurdity; I did not know how to check for a pulse, a bad actor in bad faith.

After summoning another housemate from downstairs, calling my kid's mom and letting her know I would not be picking them up that evening, calling 911 and, insanely, telling them, "I can't wake my roommate up" even though I knew in my heart that my problem was more metaphysical than any medic would ever be prepared to handle; after the crime scene unit made me wait in the cold for more than an hour, then told me there wasn't any evidence that anyone had come into the house and done this to him (I also knew that already); after they carted his covered body out in silence, leaving behind the overturned garbage they went through, open drawers and even their discarded plastic gloves thrown here and there without care on the furniture; after my friend Mandy checked on me and took me to Tea Drops in Westport where I had a tall glass of bubbly, sweet and exotic green tea, I went back into the house and recognizing that he was dead, that he was gone, slipped easily into a state of shock.

I have been in physical shock before, and have the scars to prove it. The accidents of childhood sent me to the hopsital on several occasions -- a deep cut in my brow, my big front-toe nearly dismembered, the gash on my lip from when the Malamute lashed out at my throat -- and each time, though bleeding, dimly aware of sensation, I did not panic. I remained calm, stoic, cognizant of small ebbs of pain, but derailed from participation in my own existence, doubled, an observer only marginally inhabiting experience. The mind seems to clear, facts differentiate between themselves, variables are assigned degrees of significance and value, a clear course of action determined -- all apart from the pain, the loss, the full dimensions of suffering. One's sensory perceptions of the tragic become numbed and are malfunctioning. One seems more in control, able to cope, to "stay cool in a crisis", or "work better under pressure".

I made arrangements to see my kids, made phone calls. I informed our mutual friends, and other friends of his. I spoke with his family members, bundled up his sheets and blankets to hide some of the travesty from them. I cleaned our section of the house meticulously, except for his room, which still held all his things. His father came the next day, a large man who reminded me of the archetypical farmer, broad and sweeping and somehow connected to the earth, yet disconnected today, his countenance clouded. His older brother, a pastor, generous and full of questions, not understanding what had happened. And another brother, stern and distant, angry in his grief. His presence seemed to linger. I spoke to him.

I asked him, I asked the empty room, why? I asked, what happened? The questions seemed to float up from the floorboards, hang in the air. I spoke his name. I said to him, to the empty room, I love you, and I'm sorry, and pray for me.

My friend was diagnosed as schizophrenic, but he was responsible and to all appearances, sober. He worked a full-time job, paid child support for his two young children (visited them monthly in another state), paid his mortgage and the bills on his house, acted as a landlord to myself and three others (including tenants of a front apartment and a basement apartment), and saw his psychiatrist at least twice a month. He was prescribed an anti-psychotic pill, an antidepressant and Xanax, all of which he took regularly, but against which he also struggled. The drugs paralyzed him. He had very little personal energy. I would sometimes be writing at my computer, and turn around with surprise to discover that he had been sitting in a chair behind me. When I asked for how long, he might say, a while, or thirty minutes, or, not long. He would creep in silently and sit and say nothing. He sat on the back porch and chain smoked cigarettes. He died of a drug overdose, having swallowed all of his medication at once.

Small insinuating accusations gradually presented themselves. I had complained the day before, perhaps even after he had died and was so far undiscovered, to a friend on the phone that his mere presence totally drained me. Had he heard? He asked me to pray with him at an inopportune time, and I was too busy, invited to a banquet but I had other plans. He had written to a mutual friend that he and I didn't do much together, and that 'Eric is in his own little world." I betrayed him through my own omissions, by not reaching out to him as often as I should have, by not being as faithful as I could be, by not being the person who I ought to be. All the various sins of pride, or selfishness, seemingly small acts of neglect, acts that I considered trivial, personal and private collect themselves into an army that defeats me, and through omission, destroys my brother. Would he have not murdered himself had I behaved otherwise? There is no way to tell. I am to blame, however, not for the destruction of possibilities or exigencies in an inscrutible could-have-been future, but for the destruction of the possibility for love and redemption through my own carelessness.

I am to blame and I am not to blame. We are all responsible for ourselves and for each other, it all connects, and if that isn't true in this situation, then I do not know where it might ever be found to be true. Yet, I am not to blame. I did not cause or create his mental illness, nor suggest to his sensibilities the notion of ending his life, nor make the decision, in whatever skewed or layered dimension of thought it lay, for him. We are all responsible for each other, but we are all responsible for ourselves as well.

The day of the funeral arrived, a day to slide from shock, remember him, begin to grieve. My friend was interested in becoming Orthodox, and had attended services at my parish, but he had not; he still struggled, he said, with a few issues. His parents were lifetime members of a Protestant church which I took to be Dutch and Reformed and Evangelical, though I was never sure of the exact denomination. I prepared to let go, to mourn the loss. The memorial service began, the pastor spoke of my friend's childhood, his antics, narratives designed to highlight the facticity of his life, sharpen the loss, open the doorway to grief.

But his eulogy shifted, turned sour by his tenacious and discursive allegience to theological fairy-tales. Most of the congregants were not well acquainted with my friend, but knew his family, and they were there for them, so the pastor, he seemed to feel, had a duty to instruct. This was a suicide, after all, an act which elucidates human freedom, our capacity for destruction, the great and terrible responsibility of freedom in the face of which we might tremble in humility, or run from in abstraction and fear. The pastor chose the latter route, and his refrain became, "...what happened to the joyful boy we knew? how did he go wrong?" Obviously, the notion that he had a mental illness beyond his control and for which he was not at fault never occurred to the man.

His presumption was clearly that my friend's suicide (assuming it was a suicide) was proof that he had backslidden from faith, that he had plunged himself into the decadence of his own darkness. His words and arguments did not gel well, became ethereal and patronizing and self-contradictory as he sought to balance a doctrine of "eternal security" against an error of antinomianism. Finally, with great bravado and indignity, he held his Bible up Jimmy Swaggart-style, and roared that my friend's problem was that he "started hanging out with a group of people who do not believe in this!" By this he meant myself and our mutual friends; he meant the Orthodox Church. What was meant to be a eulogy turned quickly into an accusation against my friend's character that Satan himself would heartily approve, slander of my friends and myself, and a glaring misrepresentation of the Orthodox Church and its understanding of the holy Scriptures.

My grief turned quickly into anger and disgust. My friend was mentally ill, a sickness that preceded any interest he had in Orthodoxy, and manifested itself long before he started hanging out with the likes of me or our mutual friends. He struggled in courage, but in the end lost that fight. But this pastor followed the gist of his religious fervor, which is to turn life into abstraction, God into an object of discursive theologizing, prayer itself into a privatized validation of personal doctrinaire tenets and beliefs. The church of my friend's family, the church of his childhood, even the sickness of his soul could not be culprits to his downfall, none of these could be blamed for the audacity of his tragic ending. So we were blamed out of fear and for the sake of doctrinal propriety. At least the pastor could protect and defend his beliefs and himself, escape blame for this final act that ought not have happened given the "correct doctrine" in which he was raised. So he ran in rhetorical fear to slander a dead young man, thirty-two years old, in the rabid defense of sola Scriptura.

I was angry, but I did not want to respond directly to the pastor because my friend's brother worked with him, and I did not want to cause him any further pain. Instead, I responded more indirectly by posting a heartfelt message on the funeral home guestbook webpage. I recieved grateful responses from my friend's mother, his ex-wife, and other members of his extended family, and friends as well. I merely pointed out the good qualities he exemplified, tried to give a more complete picture of who he is without trying to make a "theological" point.

Various people respond differently to suicide. The Orthodox Church is lenient and understanding towards those who murder themselves when it can be shown that the person was not mentally sound. It is less lenient (i.e., will not provide an Orthodox burial) towards those who are of a sound mind, but believe that suicide is a viable option from a philosophical basis. We do not have the right to murder anyone, nor to take our own lives.

I do not know what happened in the case of my friend, what went through his mind, whether or not it was an accident, or what happened to him beyond death. None of that is any of my business or within the purview of my knowledge. I think of him often, and I pray for him, my requests for mercy on his behalf hopefully reaching beyond the gates of time and space to broach the timeless Day that is not a day, that of judgment, in the eternal presence of God.

Some scientists believe that memory works by remembering memories; gradually, we no longer really recall the initial event, but our memory of it. Because my sweet, dear friend was significant to me, and had died, my mind, clutched in the fist of my heart, began to quickly remember various moments in the time we spent together, conjure his presence, his aloof demeanor, the light in his eyes, a repressed humor.

I tell others about the many times he would walk out of his room, and my two children, four and two years old, would cry out with joy, “Philip!” and run to him, and as children do, grab his arm or his legs, tell him what they have been doing, a pure greeting from which I can learn.

On one occasion, he looked at me with genuine bafflement, as one child wrapped himself around Phil’s leg and the other pulled on his hand, and said, “I wonder why your kids like me so much?” I laughed at him, but didn’t reply because I thought the answer was obvious. Maybe I should have said, “because you are a likeable guy,” or something to that effect, but I didn’t. I did not realize that he didn’t know.