"He jumped ...and I think he's gone."
My journey through a staff suicide that nearly shipwrecked my soul
“I don’t think I can do this, Baby… I’m not cut out for this…”
On the other end of the phone line was my wife, desperately struggling to hear my barely-whispered words over the mass pandemonium created while trying to get four young children ready for church, alone.
I had never felt so painfully alone myself.
Looking around the cavernous pastoral office in which I sat, it dawned on me that its size was more a measure of the importance of my position than it was a reflection of my experience.
This was my first pastorate, and I was barely four years in.
Outside the window to my left, hundreds of cars were being guided into open spaces. Down the long hall to my right, was our worship facility, where I was due to be in less than fifteen minutes to kick off the first of two worship services.
“I have absolutely no idea what to do. There’s no script for this.”
Outside the exit doors of our three-story worship facility, a staff member had just committed suicide by jumping.
His broken and lifeless body lay in view of our Children’s building.
Dave was dead.
The moment I saw him is indelibly seared in my memory.
Like ultra-high definition virtual reality, all of my senses went into hyperdrive. I felt the searing sun burning on my neck, the hairs on my body stood straight, my ears began to ring, the colors of the surrounding world were saturated beyond normal, and I could feel each thump of my heart beat in half time.
I felt as though I was no longer in my body, and the world around me slowed down as if everything was now moving in slow motion.
I now know what those feelings were.
Trauma.
Deep, unsettling, unavoidable trauma of the worst kind.
Suicide brings on a special kind of mourning. It is not just grief that one experiences but grief and trauma.
As a pastor with a few thousand congregants, I had no time for trauma.
In that moment, I instinctively recognized that everything I thought I knew about doing ministry in this place had changed forever.
The church would never be the same.
What I did not anticipate was the fact that everything I thought I knew about myself was changed forever as well.
I would never be the same.
But it would be a long time before I would fully wrestle my own wrecked soul into something resembling good health.
There is a tendency to push down pain,
ignore the nagging questions, and
avoid facing trauma.
We promise to assess and address it another day. But each passing day makes it easier to avoid …but more difficult to address.
It doesn’t take long for ignored trauma to take root. It soon reaches its tentacles into other areas of our life, slowly destroying the good and infecting its pain in places it should never have been allowed.
Trauma is unavoidable when someone loses their life to suicide.
I hate that word.
Suicide.
I sometimes think that saying it repeatedly will somehow diminish its power… but it doesn’t.
“Died by suicide” is a label that never seems to fit the person it is attached to.
I can never seem to reconcile the person I knew with the way they died.
That brings me pain, and I am not alone.
We don’t usually think or speak of those who die by suicide as victims… but the loved ones left behind after a suicide certainly are victims of it.
And for a Christian, the accompanying questions and spiritual crisis can be tough to navigate.
Christianity teaches that life is a gift, a precious gift on loan to us from God.
Suicide gives that gift back to God, prematurely.
Is that wrong?
This is a complex theological question.
For some of us, rejecting the gift of life seems not just wrong but spiteful to God.
In the days after Dave’s suicide, I found that many in my congregation felt like suicide wasn’t just a rejection of God’s gift of life but an outright rejection of the gift-giver, God himself.
But here is the truth:
For a person suffering from suicidal thoughts, life no longer seems like a gift …but instead, life becomes a burden too heavy to carry.
Suicide is the return of the gift of life back to God.
What must God think?
The books of Job, Jonah, Ecclesiastes, and Habakkuk—try as they might to help us understand the depths of human suffering and the grace of God—seem to have done little to answer the most unsettling of questions that haunt us in these moments.
So in back hallways after Dave’s suicide, I was often asked by the most committed Christians:
“Pastor, do you believe that someone who loses their life to suicide goes to Heaven?”
“Pastor, do you believe that my loved one who lost their life to suicide is with Jesus?”
Let me be as blunt to you as I was to them on that question.
Yes.
Absolutely, yes.
I most certainly do.
Suicide is not the unpardonable sin.
Suicide will not keep you from spending eternity in the presence of God.
Suicide will not send you to hell.
Those who say such things—let me put this as gently as I may—should read their Bible just a bit more … and shut up.
In fact, the Bible strongly indicates the opposite.
Samson, for instance, was one of seven acts of suicide in the Bible. Yet even after his suicide, you will find his name listed among the heroes of the faith in Hebrews 11.
“How much more do I need to say? It would take too long to recount the stories of the faith of Gideon, Barak, Samson, … All these people earned a good reputation because of their faith, yet none of them received all that God had promised.”
— HEBREWS 11:32-39
And while the Bible does not explicitly condemn suicide, each of the seven acts recorded within its pages are painted in a negative light.
But just because death by suicide is never painted positively does not mean the people themselves are sinning.
ALL death is painted negatively in scripture… except Christ’s.
And speaking of J.C.
It may surprise you to know that even Jesus himself once experienced suicide-levels of pain and suffering in a garden by the name of Gethsemane.
In this dramatic and tense scene, Jesus whispers to three of his closest friends:
“My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death.”
— MATTHEW 26:38
“End this suffering,” Jesus pleads. “Don’t ask me to endure another moment of this pain-filled path.”
Jesus desired to escape it and shouted to God to intervene.
God doesn’t.
In so doing, Jesus echoes throughout the ages the cries of those who have similarly suffered… those who have shouted out to God for the pain to end, but yet the pain remains.
Dave’s pain was now ended, but a part of it had been transferred to me.
And of all of my questions about his suicide, it wasn’t so much the: who, what, when, where, or how of the suicide that haunted me. It was the why.
I wanted an answer to why.
I felt as though I/we deserved an answer as to why.
We believe that we need those answers in order to move forward. We think that it will make the pain a bit more bearable.
It won’t.
We want to be certain that we weren’t at fault. We want to know that we could have done nothing to avoid it. We want to assuage our guilt.
If someone you love dies by suicide, it’s not your fault.
In fact, it’s not about you at all.
The person did not see fit to allow you deep inside their hurt in life; and they will not do so in his death either.
“I don’t know why.
I’ll never know why.
I don’t have to know why.”
There are never enough answers to assuage our grief.
And ultimately, we don’t need answers to the why questions to begin healing.
Comfort never comes from answers.
What we need is healing for our utterly broken hearts.
“God is our hope, our help in time of trouble.”
— PSALM 46:1
But also, here me clearly:
God alone is not enough when we suffer extreme trauma.
We need each other—which I suggest is the presence of God—and we need wise counsel/therapy—which I consider to be the active hands of feet of God.
It took far too long for me to admit that I needed expert therapy, that I needed help.
The Bible and church were not enough.
Years.
It took me years to realize I was slowly dying from the compounding trauma.
Years where the power of a single painful event slowly leeched its way into all of the good parts of my soul and took away their joy.
Had I made mental health a priority before I needed it, I might have been able to have a different conversation with my wife in the moments after Dave’s suicide.
I hung up the phone, tears streaming down my cheek.
“I can’t do this, God,” I whispered.
The downbeat of the drums echoed in my chest as the worship team kicked up the band not far from my office.
Sunlight streamed through the window.
Hope.
Hope mixed with a deep sense of grief … and dread.
I stood to my shaky feet, centering myself.
I was needed.
I had to go, but I knew that I had little to give.
It would have to be enough.
Picking up my Bible, I walked out the door and into the next season of my life with as much determination as I could muster in that moment.
I instinctively knew that a different man exited the office than the one that had only just entered, but it would take years for me to fully meet him.
For the moment, he was buried beneath the trauma.
Thank you for this, Kevin. As one who treats the trauma every day, and experiences the backwash of secondary trauma, and has to help my trainees learn to do likewise while holding onto their own humanity, your words are more soothing than you may perhaps realize. It's a tough world out there--and it's precious balm to the soul to find others who are comfortable to sit with the pain and questions, instead of insisting on the clearcut answers, as our religions and churches do these days.
Peace.
We lost a grandson to suicide. I was called to preach his funeral. When I sent a transcript to my pastor for review, he instructed me that had forgotten to address the pain of those who are left behind. This was sound advice. We often try to gloss over our pain, which is unhealthy spiritually. Thank you for an insightful article.