Thursday, February 9, 2012

My friend, Jane had a son commit suicide years ago. He & John had so much in common it was uncanny...everything from the ubsurd number of girls they dated in highschool to the way they served everyone they met. Jane gave me the audio of his funeral to listen to. I resisted for 2 years, one because I didn't own a cassette player and two because I was afraid of the flood of emotions that might return. Today on the 2nd Anniversary of John's death, I listened to it. In it a psychologist, who is a dear friend of theirs spoke. His words were so helpful and very true for John as well. So I transcribed the audio and adapted the talk for John. Here it is:

Love was and is the final triumph of John’s life. How we loved him and how he made it so easy for us to love him and how he loved us through everything he went through. I was asked to speak to help make a little more sense of out of the experiences that John struggled with and somehow understand the paradox of one so vital and so wonderful and so full of life and yet somehow not with us. The saga of his generosity and vitality but also the journey of those internal struggles that were silent to most of us.

Sometimes in life we face mortal illness, and I mean MORTAL illness, where love is not enough to stop their destructive forces. Some illnesses are that way, like cancer. They grow in spite of everything we can do and they take away our vitality. So it is with depression. It can overcome the temporal body, the brain, which is the seed of where that illness lies and leave the loving spirit with no home, no heart, no place of repose. The chemistry of the brain is something we have to live with, even in our spiritual sense we need to have that place of a home, where our minds can have a place to rest and when that imbalance of chemistry creates confusion, irritability or loss of sense of well being then it makes it enormously difficult to live in that place of pain because that’s the part of our brain that tells us a sense of well being or happiness or a sense of energy for us to look forward to things because we sense nothing will disturb that sense of ourselves. But when that chemistry is not there and it is imbalanced in a way that it goes right to the core of our sense of self, it robs us of our feelings and locks us into a feeling state of anxiety, fear and despair. And at times it makes it feel like there is no way out of that place because it is us. It can be an insidious illness that starts very, very early in ways some of us will probably never quite understand.
It began to steel the emotional center of his well being and in its place leave despair, pain, & insecurity. Living with a silent burden then he begins to think, “You know, this is just me.” And not understanding that other people around are not experiencing this and so he keeps it silent, thinking, “I can’t do better than this so what I am going to do is connect with everybody I know and I am going to make those connections really worth something. Because when I do I feel so much better. And in those moments when I make those connections and that friendship rolls forth its wonderful how I don’t feel that pain so much anymore.”
And its remarkable how very little many of us really knew how much that burden was and how much he had to shoulder it and he did and he carried the pain so that most us would never see it. Can you imagine anyone so excited and interested in life. He was incredible and that connection that he had with people. Out of his pain grew a capacity for healing. You know you’ve heard that one of the things that was a gift of his was to listen and to serve and to be there to comfort others. The tragedy was that he couldn’t comfort himself at times when he was alone to his own feeling state. When his brain just left that sense of comfort and he was there to face the despair that was in his mind and therefore took hold of his heart. It’s almost like when you are with your friends the sun is up and you see the sun but when that friend leaves the sun goes down and you are left with darkness because his emotional state can’t retain those feelings that would give him that feeling that inside himself he was really ok. And it was only when he was giving, when he was full of joy and sensing what he was giving someone else, could that pain completely for a period of time be gone. But it grew greater.
Eventually in spite of everything he could do and what everyone else tried to understand how to respond, it overcame his sense of strength, his rationality, and worst of all it overcame his hope that somehow it would be different. That some morning he would wake up and it would be gone. It would be gone and he wouldn’t have to keep facing it. He fought the good fight and he did it so well but maybe he was just worn out. Sometimes cancers do that to our bodies. Depressions do it to our brains. But John struggled and he did it magnificently. For the wonder that he was what everyone saw and in spite of what he felt, in spite of the illness and pain and confusion it created a problem of knowing how he would go on, he never stopped loving and he never stopped trying to connect with all of us with that love.
You know sometimes it makes me get really angry and there is a piece of me that wants to say, “John, Why did you do this?! Why did you leave me the pleasure of your company and the joy of your soul and the warmth of your companionship? WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME!?” And obviously it is easy to forgive him for that because I’m really angry at his illness. I’m angry at that illness for taking him away from me. But really the thing that troubles me more is I guess I would ask him to forgive me.
Forgive me for not really understanding the pain that you carried for so long and I know you were so strong that you felt you needed to do it in order to protect me from carrying that burden along with you. But oh, I wish I could have carried more of it with you. For you stretched to care for everyone else and you also stretched to make sure I wasn’t going to carry that burden. But please, please forgive me for perhaps not being sensitive enough at times, for not understanding more of what you were going through and for taking you sometimes maybe just a little for granted.
But then I guess it always comes back to love doesn’t it. He made us love him and it wasn’t because he was trying to make us love him, that’s just who he was. And he carried the burden and he carried it magnificently and he gave himself in a thousand ways to all of us and carried the burden still. We feel this enormous love for him and it was his gift to make us feel that way. And so as I said before “Love is the final triumph of his life. For nothing in this temporal state will ever take that from him. His spirit reigns transcendent above it all. In spite of it all, he will still love and he will still carry that magnificent spirit with him forever. Thank you John. For your life and your example, your love, your sense of desire to make us feel better than we are. Even at this moment, you are in our hearts reminding us what it is to love each other. We celebrate him today and I say this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

By: Psychologist, Dr. Richard Ferre Speaking at the Funeral of a Suicide Victim (Stephen Linton)-Adapted for John