I sent a reflection on suicide to a follower of the Dharma after a relative in her 30’s committed suicide following a separation. I have changed her name to Angela. Angela had sat a retreat with me some years ago. Our heart reaches out to loved ones who try to make sense of suicide. We have to be mindful not to rush to judgment in terms of simplistic psychological analysis about a person who ends their life.
I wrote: “The world and self can never find any sustainable integration. Struggle and acceptance often functions as the norm. Death, whether through the intentional form or not, makes little real difference to the underlying circumstances that trigger the resignation of the self and its sudden exit.
As you witnessed, and continue to witness, Angela’s termination of presence leaves behind for some a realm of unhappiness, despair and anger, and further expressions of vulnerable and reactive anguish to Angela’s departure, and the manner of it.
Those with intimate knowledge of unfolding events, noticeably family and close friends, have to deal with the struggle to make sense of it all, and the apparent senselessness of the act of termination of presence, but also the task of understanding that Angela saw no further reason to live in her world.
Loved ones will ask why? Why? Why? But the loved one’s were not in her world, and the presence of loved ones in her world had become marginalised as the self withdrew itself from the familiar, and into the unknown through the final act. The wish, the desire for non-existence, functions as the potential for our species when the self no longer sees fit for the constructed world that it knows.
The world and self never have real ease, never knows real harmony, nor long standing co-existence. As human beings, we have to take responsibility for our lives, for the manner of its unfoldment as much as possible, and acknowledge as fully as possible, that Angela’s has acted within her circumstances. It is hard to know whether it is an act of desperation or a quiet determination to call it a day on the dynamics that formed her existence.
We extend our love and kindness for her, her family, her loved ones to the degree that it transcends the sad circumstances that formed the event. Our condolences are with you all today at the funeral. There is a day-to-day adjustment-taking place at every level of being for the renewal that makes life worthwhile and pays respect to those who take a different view and act on that view.”