My personal experience with death comes from my family and years as a physician. As the years have gone by I consider living difficult and dying easy. I see many people use their disease as a convenient way to commit suicide, and perhaps that is why so many young people today consider suicide as their treatment of choice. Yet I wonder if they ever consider the fact that they are choosing to kill someone while wounding many others. One of our sons is an FBI agent and he was asked if he could kill someone as part of his training. Perhaps to protect the lives of my loved ones I could, but even then I find it a difficult question to answer. A teenager I know was contemplating suicide after being physically, psychologically, and sexually abused by his parents. He was HIV-positive and ready to jump in front of a subway train. I wondered why he chose to kill himself rather than the people who were destroying his life. When I asked him, he responded, “I never wanted to be like them.”
I think that when you don’t know what to do with your pain and are feeling unloved, suicide seems like a better choice than life. As one of our sons e-mailed to me one day, “Life sucks, most people suck, and if you wake up one day and everyone loves you and the weather is beautiful, you’re dead.” That gets a laugh when I read it, but I’m afraid there is a lot of truth in it.
We are born beautiful creations and then run into parents, teachers, and religious leaders, all of whom have the potential to make us feel unworthy and defective. We have to remember that, as authority figures, we can kill with words when they become wordswordswords…swords. It is an exceptional child who grows up loved and feeling like a child of God. When you do, you care for yourself in a way the unloved do not. Their addictions and destructive behavior are searches for the feeling of being loved, a feeling they never had.
Because of this childhood experience stored within us we think we are the problem and suicide is a way of ending our problem. At workshops I ask people to tell me their favorite animal and why it is their favorite. What would your answer be? One woman said, “I hate pets and killed my canary,” and I knew she was talking about herself and might destroy herself as well. Another young woman said, “I am here to decide whether to commit suicide or not. My favorite animal is an eagle.” By the time she had finished describing the beauty of an eagle soaring through the sky, she said, “I have decided not to commit suicide.”
We need to understand that he who seeks to save his life will lose it. We give up our lives to please others and we die inside. When you develop a life-threatening illness or just accept your mortality, you may come to realize that he who is willing to lose his life will save it. You give up the life that was killing you and start living your true life. Then you will outlive any expectations related to your disease, and often you will heal physically and psychologically. What this teaches me is that the suicidal need to learn to eliminate what is killing them from their lives and not kill themselves. My New York friend Carmine says if something is killing you—your job, marriage, or anything else—eliminate it from your life. But if it isn’t a threat to your health, then ask how love could change the situation and solve the problem.
The pain of depression and despair can build enough heat to melt the lead walls surrounding you. The darkness of charcoal, under pressure, can turn into a diamond. We need to realize blessings come in many strange shapes and sizes, and if we are willing to learn from our pain, then suicide is not on the list of options. The son I quoted above once said to me, “If you write another book about how to deal with life’s difficulties call it Holy Shit.” I agree with him and think that when we learn to use the compost of life to fertilize new growth we do not kill ourselves but are reborn to life and its labor pains. I know how easy it is to get high school students to write suicide notes and how hard it is for them to write notes about why they are lovable. I never considered suicide because of how I was parented, but I know the majority of people have—including many self-help experts and authors. For me it seemed a better idea to just go out and have fun. Be a clown and embarrass everyone rather than destroy myself. But that’s me and my upbringing.
I was born an ugly duckling, but had a grandmother who had no problem loving me while my mother was trying to hide me from the neighbors. It is not an easy thing to do to find your own beauty as the ugly duckling did, but if everyone had a loving grandparent available, the suicide rate would plummet. I received a phone call one day asking me for Jack Kevorkian’s phone number; the young lady on the line had been abused, had a brain tumor, and wanted to die. I told her she was a child of God and I wanted her to send me some drawings of herself. Nine years later she is still alive and feeling loved. Remember that we can all be a CD or CM for those in pain—a Chosen Dad or a Chosen Mom—someone who loves them even if we don’t like what they are doing or thinking.
When you realize that those who admit they are suicidal really get our attention, you begin to see it is their way of filling the space devoid of love. The opposite of love is not hate but indifference. So keep on loving until the person you are loving feels that he or she is worth loving thanks to your persistent love and attention.
You can help by maintaining connections. Get a pet who will teach you about love and the meaning of life. Accept the darkness but also see the light around it that is a part of your life. Start to change by acting as if you are the person you want to be. When you are in a dark place, ask yourself: What would Lassie do now? Or, What would Lucille Ball do now? I know several lives that were saved by people doing that simple thing. Become a child again and live.
When a policeman I know called to tell me he was going to commit suicide, I said, “Jimmy, if you kill yourself I’ll never talk to you again.” He showed up in my office twenty minutes later, mad at me for being so insensitive. He said he had a gun in his mouth and I said something stupid. I pointed out that he hadn’t killed himself and he is still alive today because the child in me responded to his pain.
So be a survivor. Ask for help. Get your baby pictures out and look at them. Realize we are all here for a limited time, so use it and live your chocolate ice cream. Remember that we need not information but inspiration to survive. If you don’t inspire, you expire. So find meaning and inspiration and a way to serve the world and contribute love to it. We are not here to be served but to serve and to offer our bodies for the benefit of others in the way we choose to contribute.
I know a woman who learned she had cancer, was fired from her job, and had her husband tell her he wanted a divorce all in one day. She sipped a glass of wine and planned a leap from her tenth-story window. A friend had given her one of my tapes, which she put on. She said, “It made me laugh and it made me cry and so I decided to live.” That is what life is about, and when others are crying, show them compassion and you will heal your life too. Love and laughter are the bricks we build our lives out of and the mortar that cements them together.
Remember that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. Read on and learn how to live the mystery from the experience and wisdom expressed in this book. We love you. Learn from our pain in a way that only natives can understand and because of their experience help each other in a way that tourists never could.
To summarize, “Be what you is and not what you ain’t, ’cause if you is what you ain’t, you ain’t what you is.” Let Susan’s book and experience help you to become what you is.