I received the fateful call almost 15 years ago. My husband and I, then married little more than a year, were winding our way out of rural Ohio, where we had spent the weekend celebrating the wedding of friends. My phone rang. It was my mother.
"Your brother is dead," she said feebly. I don't remember exactly how the details spilled out, except that she and my stepfather had come home from their own weekend of travel, pulled into their garage, and found my 25-year-old brother dead at the wheel of the car they had parked alongside. When my mother reached through the car window to touch his shoulder, she found it cold and the gas tank empty.
He left behind no note of explanation.
For months, we had thought he was making a real turnaround. Addiction and depression were the demons he had been fighting since high school, but we held out hope for a new chapter in his troubled life. He had enrolled in a culinary program at our local community college. He was developing a mentoring relationship with an older man at my parents' church. Not long before, my then-fiancé and I had come home from college to witness his baptism. We hadn't expected the phone call the day it came. Years earlier, perhaps, like in the months following his week-long disappearance, which ended when he turned up at a local hospital suffering from drug overdose and paranoid delusions. He'd made it out alive from those dark days. The worst of it, we had assumed.
"You sit down to dinner, and life as you know it ends," writes Joan Didion in her book The Year of Magical Thinking, capturing what feels most pernicious about human existence: it ends without warning. And if all death, even death at the more predictable end of a terminal diagnosis, feels like a cruel surprise interjected into the routines of the everyday, suicide is a thousand times as heartless. It has been chosen, purposed, by someone you love. They have forced their goodbye on you, a goodbye you have not wanted and cannot now undo. For that, you have only the ringing, unanswerable whys.
Tyler Clementi's suicide made national news when the Rutgers University student jumped from the George Washington Bridge in the fall of 2010 after learning that his college roommate was webcasting his sexual encounters with another man. Clementi's roommate, Dharun Ravi, was convicted of crimes of intimidation and invasion of privacy and has subsequently served a 30-day jail sentence. But according to The New York Times, "the trial has never directly addressed the question at the heart of the story—what prompted a promising college freshman to kill himself?" The NYT article, "After Gay Son's Suicide, Mother Finds Blame in Herself and in Her Church," suggests that Clementi's evangelical church and their hardline views on homosexuality bear at least some of the responsibility for the tragedy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1S6Mrtaj0k
As one left in suicide's wake of silent shame, I know what it is to ask the question of who's to blame. For years, the only answer was, somehow, me. A close family friend whose own son committed suicide three years ago asked me recently, "Do you ever think you could have done something differently to maybe change your brother's mind?" He alludes to the reconstructing and revising of past events that suicide survivors relentlessly torment themselves with. Had I only called. Told him that I loved him. Had I only paid closer attention. Which chess piece should I have moved? And when? And where?
As The New York Times reports, Jane and Joe Clementi wonder what could have been different. Their pain prompts them to find a locus of blame: as those who grieve, they need something to make sense. "The Clementis continue to blame the bad luck of roommate lottery and the cowardice of students who failed to step up and say that spying was wrong. But their son's suicide has also forced changes, and new honesty, upon them." The honesty, by implication of the article, refers to this new spin of blame, which has shifted from Clementi's roommate to the specter of evangelical Christianity.
Trying to locate blame is not usually helpful when seeking to understand why a person has chosen to take his life, especially when that locus of blame is sought by outside observers. The reasons are never immediately obvious, even to those within the closest circles of family and friends. Moreover, the problems are never one-dimensional or easily fixed. I believe firmly that survivors of suicide heal in part as we learn to refuse the responsibility for the choice our loved ones have made. There is no one person to blame for Clementi's death: not his parents, their fellow churchgoers, or Dharun Ravi. While there may be circumstances and conversations each of them would now change, it was Tyler who jumped from the bridge. Likewise, my own brother's inner turmoil was also not to be entirely blamed on or single-handedly solved by any of those who loved him. And this is the maddening, impregnable mess of suicide: that victims can simultaneously be perpetrators, that the wounded wound.
We cannot untangle the whys and reasonably locate the blame in cases of suicide, although this is frequently our response to all tragic loss. We want clarity when life bleeds, and we think that answers will close the gaping wound of confusion. Much like Job, this understanding can be the very thing that we demand of God.
Answers are not promised to us—sufficient grace is. Biblical wisdom is best heeded as we keep company with families like the Clementis, or families like mine, who have suffered the tragic loss of someone we've loved to suicide. It is our imperative, not to answer the unanswerable, but to mourn with those who mourn.
For this, we will need no words.
Jen Pollock Michel writes for Today in the Word, a monthly devotional published by Moody. She blogs at FindingMyPulse.com.
Jars of Clay, Skillett, Jason Crabb, and Matt Maher each received six nominations for the upcoming Dove Awards, it was announced on Thursday.
Leading the way was producer Wayne Haun, with seven nominations. The 11-time winner is seeking his first major award. He’s up for producer of the year, song of the year, and nine more. Click here for a complete list of nominees. The Dove Awards will be held April 21 at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry House.
It was pouring rain, and my hands were full as I stumbled into the room. The last thing on my mind was meeting and greeting the other writers at the wine-tasting reception. I plopped into the first free chair, muttering unpleasant things under my breath, when she looked up and smiled. I half-smiled back and looked away. I was leaving the city in less than five days and didn’t have the energy or time to make a new friend.
The next afternoon, we ended up in the same small group, waiting outside the classroom for the teacher to arrive.
“Have you been to this workshop?” she asked. She was slight of frame and freckle-faced, and had the air of being both warm and cautious.
In better spirits today, I entered the conversation. “No, I actually had never heard of it till a few weeks before I arrived in Paris, but decided since I’d be here I might as well check it out.”
“I heard about it from my writer’s group in Geneva. It’s supposed to be wonderful.”
“Is that where you live?” I asked.
“No, I’m actually from Australia, but I’ve been doing research in Europe all summer.”
“Oh, on what?”
“It might sound odd, but I’m fascinated with this Catholic saint named Therese of Lisieux. I’m writing my doctoral thesis on her.”
It was the last thing I expected her to say as we stood amid poets, novelists, and memoir writers who had all come to Paris to attend the renowned workshop.
“Hi, I’m Ruby.”
Ruby and I soon discovered our mutual interests in the art of spiritual direction, and our experiences within the Catholic Church. Then the teacher showed up and we vowed to try and continue our discussion before the week ended. We didn’t see one another again till the last day. On impulse, we decided to skip that afternoon session for a long uninterrupted lunch together.
Ruby and I had so much in common, it was eerie. We could have talked for hours as though we were old college girlfriends. There was no question we would exchange information and really hoped to remain in touch. But we also simply had not had enough time together to pretend that a long-distance friendship would follow suit. And yet, it was an enriching couple of hours in which we both felt met by God in one another’s presence. In sharing the gifts and the challenges of our current life stages, we both felt seen anew and reaffirmed in our unique strengths and passions.
Two weeks after my encounter with Ruby, I read an article in The New York Times about the challenge of making friends after age 30. The writer, Alex Williams, makes several valid points about the difficulty various life seasons can bring to how we cultivate new friendships and maintain old ones. But though I could relate to a number of his points, I didn’t agree with his rather depressing conclusion, that “No matter how many friends you make … the period for making BFFs, the way you did in your teens or early 20s, is pretty much over. It’s time to resign yourself to situational friends: K.O.F.’s (kind of friends)—for now.”
Yes, the challenge of nurturing friendships when folks move away, couple up, or have babies can be frustrating and at times painful. But as a busy woman in my 30s, I am not looking for the kinds of friendships I had in college or in my 20s, anyway. I am not looking to make new BFFs. I am more invested in the hard work of deepening the old friendships that have seen me through the awkward and beautiful seasons of life. Meeting Ruby is one example of how I am learning to embrace the reality of a shrinking community of friends with the ongoing appreciation that I will probably continue to meet people I’d love to befriend if I had multiple lifetimes. But the reality is, I have just this one. And in this lifetime, I have learned that long-term friendships do require time and effort and commitment.
Long-term friendships take not just the work of making time to see one another, but also the work of choosing to communicate clearly and honestly, to extend grace and room when necessary. When you’ve been friends with someone for a long time, you learn that sometimes friendship means weathering the seemingly unfair contexts where you are giving more than you receive, or are taking more than you can give. Part of faithful friendship is knowing when to allow for space, and making peace with the varied roles that different relationships can and should play in our lives.
In truth, my “Best Friend Forever” is really a conglomerate of amazing friends who nourish my life in essential ways. This is not to deny the difficulties of friendships. Through at times uncomfortable experiences, I’ve realized that some friendships are seasonal, and I continually seek to discern when that is the case. Like anything else, if we try to grasp onto something beyond its season, we often do more harm than good. Certain friendships fall into this category. And as I reflect more and more, I realize I desire to be viewed as one of a handful of deep friends within my social community. I could not bear the unrealistic burden of being any one’s sole BFF.
Whether 2 or 12 people, whether for one afternoon or 10 years, the most significant part of this entire discussion is how Friendship can orient our lives toward God and one another across a spectrum of relationships. I read John 15 and have to acknowledge the claims friendship makes on us and on God. The disciples were the people Jesus called friends, and whom he sent out to extend and receive friendship in a broken world.
We all need people in our lives who help point us toward Christ, and toward living into the fullness of whom God has created us to be. More times than not, the issue at hand is not whether you continue to make new BFFs, but rather how we open our lives, our schedules, and our imaginations to call all varieties of people “friend” as God calls us the same.
Two notable names were among the eight nominees for Male Vocalist of the Year – one for his inclusion, one for his omission. Missing from the nominees is Chris Tomlin, who had won the award three straight years before losing it to Brandon Heath last year. And back on the list for the first time in sixteen years is Michael English, nominated for Male Vocalist of the Year for the first time since 1994, when just one week after he won that particular award, his Christian music career came to an abrupt end when his record label dropped him after he confessed to having an extramarital affair
English didn’t perform for three years, but got back into the business slowly first as a producer and later as a performer again. He has slowly been re-accepted back in Christian music circles, and is now one of the singers in the Gaither Vocal Band.
