Suicide.

It is two months short of the death anniversary of a friend of mine. She committed suicide. Having been depressed for a number of years, the disease finally overwhelmed her and she lost sight of her options. I remember hearing about it from my friend, and the shock hung around me for days. Death is no stranger to me in my short life, I lost a schoolmate to a horrific road traffic accident when I was 11. We used to take the bus the bus to school. We must have attended each other's birthday parties. When I was 17, my choir mistress passed away while giving birth. It was her first child. Two years later, I watched as multiple myeloma robbed my grandfather of his last breath. Over time, the saintly Irish Jesuits who ran my parish in Singapore, all succumbed to their age. I watched another uncle pass away just before I left for college, and then a dear and holy priest from lung cancer. A friend lost her father in junior college, and later on, a very young friend, barely out of junior college, succumbed to a brain tumour. To add to that, I am a medical student. The business of medicine, in a sense, is death. From day one, we are in the anatomy lab, dissecting our cadavers, our first patients, albeit deceased. Long before we meet live patients, we learn pathology, a subject that deals a lot with discovering how disease killed a patient. Yet, suicide is a different matter.

I have friends who have had friends or relatives who committed suicide, but this is my first one. Yet, I know every suicide will always hit hard. Perhaps, it is having sat on the ledge myself. Perhaps, it is the Catholic understanding, as St Thomas Aquinas notes, that suicide is always a mortal sin, the unforgivable sin, the complete and abject lost of hope in God's mercy. The paradox to God's infinite mercy. There is never a sin that God will not forgive, for His love is that boundless, yet, to be forgiven, one must seek it. 

To die in mortal sin is to kill the soul, to completely remove oneself from the sanctifying grace of God and His loving embrace. A mortal sin is a grave sin always performed with knowledge and full consent. It is the immediate passport to hell and eternal damnation. Christ is gracious to us till the very end, always attempting to guide us back to Him, into His loving arms, yet at the end, He still respects the choices we have made, and in His infinite justice, gives us what we deserve. [NB: I am have not argued for the morality of suicide here. It is clearly evil, and there are others who have done and will do a far better job than I on the subject. I recommend the reader to look at these lovely posts on St Peter's List, here, here, and here, for 22 arguments against Euthanasia, which when voluntary is suicide, and when sanctioned without consent, is murder.] 

It is no wonder that in the past, The Church denied funerals to individuals who had chosen to imitate Judas. The stance has now softened with the recognition that the majority of suicides are done out of sheer desperation brought about by depression. These poor people were certainly non compos mentis, and that may remove the consent, and lessen their culpability.  However, I cannot even begin to imagine the horror such acts bring to family members. I was not close to this friend, yet, I wondered constantly, what went through her mind? Did she repent at the last moment? All this wondering was vain speculation. I shall never know, perhaps, until I meet Our Lord. The sheer paralysing helplessness that someone I cared about may be now enduring the eternal fires of hell.

Yet, again that too is speculation. The Church, while She declares that there are many in hell, does not wish to speculate as to whom is in hell; the only one we know, through tradition, is the betrayer who kissed our Lord. After all, it is not within the power of the Church to pass such Judgment. That alone is Christ's.  

And, as my confessor consoled me, it is in Christ's infinite mercy that one must hold onto in such times. St Augustine taught that God's goodness is such that he 'brings good even out of evil', and in that thought, one finds again the comfort of hope. For here, the poor tormented soul is completely and utterly at the mercy of God. And, it is there, that in His infinite mercy, should the soul be willing at the last second, He may accept her contrition. This is the beauty of God's goodness, for He even took the Thief with Him, at the last moment, into paradise.

Lest, we fall into the heresy of Balthazar, one must remember that God is still just, and that the cooperation of the soul, her search for forgiveness is still necessary. Yet, it is in this Hope, and the knowledge of the God's justice and mercy, in the abandonment to His Divine Providence, that we can still pray for these souls. Lent is upon us. Each Friday in great season of Lent permits one to seek a plenary indulgence. Perhaps, my dear reader, you may, in a spiritual act of mercy, seek an indulgence for these souls, and those Holy Souls in purgatory.

In te Domine, speravi, non confundar in aeternam. In Thee, O Lord, I have Hoped, never let me be confounded. - Ps XXX.ii