A Suicide's Love

There was a suicide note posted on the Internet a couple times last week, written by Daniel Somers, a U.S.A. soldier in Iraq, which brought back to my mind the many times we used to talk about the subject of suicide when I was teaching sociology. We would discuss Emile Durkheim's Le Suicide, one of the classic works in the establishment of sociology, which attempted to show that society “influences” us even in such seemingly individual things as suicide.

Most of my students, who were in the 18-25 year-old range, had seriously contemplated suicide by that time, and a surprising number had actually attempted it. It's the third leading cause of death in people of that age range according to the statistics, but the statistics surely under-report the actual incidence.

The passage in Daniel's letter that struck me most strongly was this:

Angeline and Daniel Somers

You must not blame yourself. The simple truth is this: During my first deployment, I was made to participate in things, the enormity of which is hard to describe. War crimes, crimes against humanity. Though I did not participate willingly, and made what I thought was my best effort to stop these events, there are some things that a person simply can not come back from. I take some pride in that, actually, as to move on in life after being part of such a thing would be the mark of a sociopath in my mind. These things go far beyond what most are even aware of.

There is something about suicide notes that touches the essence of everything – love. You see love in Daniel's letter from beginning to end.

The question then arises for me: “How is a young person to be able to come to grips with the fact that his own people around him whom he innocently loved and trusted, with very few exceptions, are willing for him to be their proxy in crimes against humanity?”

The Milgram Obedience Experiments undeniably showed, against fierce resistance, that this is the reality young people face.

There are many “crimes against humanity” besides war crimes, clearly. I consider what goes on in most schools to be crimes against humanity. I remember writing in my resignation note to the superintendent of the high school where I taught for several months - “I just can't do to these kids what their parents want me to do to them.”

That sounds very much like a suicide note that a high school student wrote to his father in the toney town of Concord, Massachusetts, where I lived at the time: “I love you, Dad, but I just can't stand all those bastards.”

The reality is that a young person comes into the world and sees this, sees that it's upside down, backwards, the opposite of love, except for very rare instances which he is extremely unlikely to encounter. Don't say it isn't so – I have met many people who have never encountered a single act of kindness in their lives and do not know how to handle one when they see it. They deny it, won't believe it. They have to deny it because then they would have to realize the depth of their wound, the depth of their woundedness.

You can say to them, “Hang on for a while, it gets better over time,” but what really is being said there is that you may be able with time to assimilate the truth, to come through to a perspective that there is ultimately a God of Love who has not abandoned us. Coming through to that perspective does take a whole lot of thought and experience, going through a Dark Night of the Soul, but it is a fact that there are people who have done it, and who have written about it and talked about it. There are also people who have gone through it and come out the other side but who just say nothing about it.

I have tried many times to say it, but it's difficult to know where to say it. Sometimes I feel that I would not have lived in vain if I were able to say to just one single young person, "Yes, you are right, you are not crazy, the world really is as upside down and backward as you are seeing it, but if you can persevere through the loneliness, calumny, enmity, absurdity, you can come out the other side like the guy in the 22nd Psalm, the 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' psalm."

Tears.