Losing an old friend, turning to the only thing that matters: love
A friend of mine committed suicide this past week. I don’t know how. Don’t suppose it matters.
It’s chilling, haunting.
Truth be told, I can’t truly understand why it has shaken me so much, rattled me to my very core. There are people who are far closer to Brian Rampolla who have far more a right to be overwhelmed with grief than I, though it’s not quite grief that’s rattled me. It’s as if my soul has a funny bone, and this news just took a sledgehammer to it. And, just as when the doctor taps your funny bone, it isn’t exceptionally painful, just supremely unpleasant – foreign, unfamiliar, strange, your brain mulling it over, turning it this way and that, examining it, unable to really grasp the sensation for what it is.
I hadn’t seen Brian in years. The last time was probably at a bar when I came home from college. It’s probably been a full decade since we had a legitimate conversation. In that span, I hadn’t talked to him, hadn’t reached out, but when I got a call on Sunday morning from one of my best friends, letting me know that Brian had committed suicide, I was at a loss.
We use breathtaking a fair amount in our daily lives.
This was the first time that had ever rung true for me.
I had no words, little to say, too stunned to really know how to react. I just listened to the other end of the phone, lost, muttering “God,” or “man…” trailing off.
Brian and I had played on the same soccer and baseball teams as kids. In high school, we played three years of golf together, rode buses together, won and lost and laughed and got into a little good ole’ fashioned mischief together. But I hadn’t seen him since, didn’t know what he was up to, whether he went to school, had a girl, anything.
Yet there was this icy void – still is – in my stomach. It was the first time that suicide had become very real to me, that those numbers I hear about regarding the issue were no longer just numbers, cold and anonymous statistics; but a friend, a golf partner, a soccer teammate, a pitcher, a jokester, a prankster, the guy who once, playing in the group ahead of me, surreptitiously threw my golf ball back in bounds to save my ass on the 18th hole of a critical match.
I prayed on it. Thought on it. Chewed on it.
Went to church.
Why was this impacting me so?
And then my brain alas began to connect the dots, turning the numbers on the lock until it popped. A few days ago, I began reading Victor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” It’s excellent, both dark and poignant and, as I came to discover quickly, abruptly, very real.
Frankl, a psychologist, discussed suicide in his memoir of his time spent in Nazi concentration camps, mentioning that suicide was “born of the hopelessness of the situation.” Sixteen pages later, he writes: “A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
Was Brian so hopeless? Did he feel so devoid of love that there was but one option left? The fact that a human being, someone I knew and once cared for quite a bit, could feel at such a loss is so profoundly sad it is a feeling beyond any words I can truly explain. I can’t comprehend such sadness, hopelessness. I have goosebumps even writing that.
It explained why the news had cast such a pall over me. It wasn’t grief, but the realization that someone I knew very well at one point could feel so empty and hollow as to wish to feel nothing at all.
It’s haunting.
Personally, I prefer to a much older text than Frankl’s. While he writes a good book, it is not The Good Book, for it’s spelled out right there in Romans 13:15: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.”
I can tell you for a fact that Brian was loved. He was supposed to be in a wedding soon after his suicide. He had friends who loved him enough to include him in the most significant day of their lives.
That’s powerful.
Yet somehow, for some reason, he wasn’t filled with love, wasn’t penetrated by it, inspired by it, didn’t feel abound in hope.
Like I said, I hadn’t seen Brian in years. I can’t tell you why he didn’t feel that love, wasn’t awash in it. But what I can tell you is this: Everyone is struggling with something you know nothing about. Everyone. When I was a pledge in college, my fraternity did a bonding exercise called cross the line, where a brother asks a yes or no question, and if your answer is yes, you step forward and cross the line, if no, you stay put.
One question was whether they had ever contemplated suicide.
Maybe a quarter of the brotherhood stepped forward.
Some of my best friends, some of the happiest individuals I had ever met, crossed the line, confirming that they had felt those darkest of thoughts. I was floored.
That fraternity basement is not the exception, but the norm.
Suicide is a complex, vexing, impossible to truly understand matter. I acknowledge that, and I don’t mean to paint such a broad stroke on such a delicate issue, but the antidote, or at least the foundation to battling it, seems to be as old and reliable as an oak: love.
If the Bible is your thing – and for those to whom it’s not, bear with me for a few sentences here – you’ll know that when Jesus was asked what the greatest of the commandments is, he responded by saying “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind” before also referring to a second commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”
The two biggest things God has ever asked for us, the first two things God wished us to do, is to love.
He’s proven to be quite the prescient being.
He knew, before Frankl studied it and analyzed it and put science behind it, that love is what gives us the reason to live, the will to live, the purpose of being on this planet. It was, and still is, the original antidote.
But if neither the psychology of Frankl nor the theology of The Bible is your taste, perhaps it’s Harry Potter. Anyone who has read or watched the movie will know that Harry’s secret sauce, the reason he can continue to thwart Voldemort, the indefinite power behind his decidedly mediocre abilities as a young wizard, was love. His mother, Lily Potter, had died trying to save him, and it was an act so powerful that Voldemort was confounded to the point that to Harry he could do no harm.
I think Voldemort is an apt metaphor for suicide in this case.
Love is our armor not only from the outside world and forces but from within ourselves. Love gives us everything we could ever ask for – a purpose, a reason to carry on, which Frankl writes is the most important aspect of a human’s existence. And you don’t need a martyr like Lily Potter, either.
Christians believe we already have one in Jesus. For those who aren’t of the faith, that’s totally fine, I get it. I’ll simply refer back to Harry Potter.
In the Order of the Phoenix, Harry is in deep shit with Voldemort, who has sort of possessed him, taken over his body. Harry’s consumed by the darkest of thoughts – his uncle dying, dementors, flashes of green light from a death spell. And then he flips the script, fighting back, flashing through moments with his friends, his family, smiles, laughter, the type of moments begat from love.
“You’re the weak one,” he says, “You’ve never felt love, or friendship, and I feel sorry for you.”
And just like that, Voldemort – the suicidal thoughts – is exorcised, gone, released.
Defeated.
Every single one of us has this. I promise you. Though we all have struggles of our own, we all have those moments we can use as armor, moments with our friends and family that, in some cases, may just save our lives or the lives of our friends and family.
So I ask you. I beg you. I implore you. Call someone. Text someone. Write someone. Tell them you love them. Make them feel it. I don’t care if it’s your favorite barista at Starbucks or your wife or husband or cousin or crazy uncle or funny aunt. Give them something to recall in a time where they’ll need it most, because they will, because we all will, because we’re human, and we all need those moments.
Give them something, or someone, to live for, for we have no idea who could possibly be contemplating no longer living at all.
Make them feel loved.
You might just save a life.
