Providential Circumstances
Sometimes I am reminded that God really is present in the everyday, ordinary, events and circumstances of our lives. This is especially true when some seemingly ordinary everyday thing occurs at just the right time or season to have a profound and lasting impact on us.
Not long ago a friend asked me if I had ever read or heard of Frederick Buechner. I hadn’t, but I trust her taste in books, so I wrote down the name and went home and looked up his books on Amazon. As I read excerpts and book descriptions, I thought, “Why I haven’t heard of him before?” His writing was so similar in style and topic to some of my favorite authors I was surprised I hadn’t come across him in my continual search for good books.
So, after perusing his books I finally decided on The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life. This seemed so similar in topic to my own writing that I couldn’t wait to read it. Although an audible book was available, some books are meant to be read slowly and savored, so I purchased the Kindle version and began reading.
An Unexpected Story
Then I came to this unexpected passage, and I was so profoundly moved that a great wound opened inside of me, and I think perhaps a deeper cleansing of old hurts was done.
“Every family has something perhaps like that that blows everything sky high. It is the shadow cast by family, and even though this is fifty-six years later, it’s still a shadow over me. I’ve worked at it and with it and written about it and thought about it and talked about it and had it exposed to loving, healing people, and yet still it’s a part of who I am. I think almost a day doesn’t go by without thinking about it.
What happened then, and what perhaps is the reason why it remains a shadow, is that it was (as in so many dysfunctional families, to use that jargon phrase) a secret that we simply never told. I mean, people knew, of course, that he had committed suicide, but as far as the world in which we moved was concerned, it was never talked about. We never talked about it to ourselves.” ….
“When different people would ask me how he died, or if the subject came up, I would say he died of heart trouble, which seemed a kind of truth. His heart was troubled, and he died. So, my father’s suicide was never talked about, nor did we talk about his life. We didn’t talk about him at all. We didn’t talk about what it had been like to be with him, to have him around. We didn’t talk about what it was like not to have him around. It was almost as if he had not existed.” ….
“I didn’t even have tears in me to cry about it at that point because it had become somehow a nonevent, if I can put it like that. The crying came much later, fifty years later.” **
A Silent Burden
I read this and I wept. I wept the tears I had not cried more than 20 years ago; I wept for my children because his story so closely mirrors their own; and I wept for others whose lives have been impacted by such trauma and tragedy.
Suicide. It marks both the living and the dead. For those closest to the one who has died, there is guilt and shame as though we are somehow responsible. We think, “If only I would have said something different, or done something different, this would not have happened.” I think it must be even harder for a child who cannot reason the ‘what if’s’ and simply feels the sense of secret shame.
But for all those who carry this silent burden, I pray your heart hears me when I tell you: we simply cannot be responsible for something we cannot control.
My Response is My Responsibility
I remember driving down a dusty dirt road many years after Robby died and after my children were all grown, I was thinking about a completely different conversation and reminding myself that my response to someone else was my responsibility- I could not control their words or actions but I did have control over my own response. Then suddenly it hit me, almost out of the blue, this concept worked the other way too. Even if my words and actions were hurtful, Robby was responsible for his response.
This was, I think, the beginning of my heart healing which continues to be a process that I am working on, and yet, nothing will completely erase it, this event will forever be a part of who I am. And the same is true for my children and for Robby’s siblings, and for all others who have been marked by suicide.
And suicide marks the victim too. It becomes the big black spot that marks the end of their life and sadly splattered backwards over all the rest of their life so that mingled in every memory is the thought of how it ended.
Tainted by Trauma and Terror
Fredrick Buechner writes, “When there were fights -…it was a matter of not just hearing two people fight, but I think as a child my terror was that if something blew them up, I would have no place to be. They were home. I have good memories of my childhood, certainly, but I think that the dark memories are memories of that terror. **
His words give language to my own experience, and I suspect, that of my children too. We, my children, and I, never talked much about what happened and consequently, we never talked about their Daddy at all. My own trauma and terror around that time was so overwhelming and almost incapacitating, that the only way I could manage it was to bury it and pretend it didn’t exist. However, in burying the horror, I also buried all the good. I forgot all the kind and loving things he did, we didn’t talk about the good and creative things he did, or the times he played with them and the good times we all enjoyed. And I didn’t tell his children how much he loved them.
Compassion for the Marked
Twenty years ago, there was little understanding or compassion for those who struggled with depression and mental illness. It wasn’t recognized or talked about as much as it is today, at least not in the small-town circles not yet impacted by the larger world of the internet and social media that were the daily part of our lives. But even today, despite all the talk about mental illness and mental health, those who are not directly impacted by someone seriously struggling with mental illness, may still find it difficult to understand and therefore hard to truly feel empathy or compassion.
And those who struggle with mental illness often also struggle with addiction and other destructive behaviors as they try to cope with their symptoms. This makes it even more difficult for those not directly connected to understand and empathize. And it may leave families feeling isolated and alone or trying to hide their struggles. That was my experience, and that feeling of isolation was only intensified after Robby took his life.
So, if you know someone whose life has been impacted by suicide, please remember this: when mental illness takes a life, it forever marks many others. My own struggles have reminded me that we don’t always know what has shaped someone’s life and it has reminded me to offer others the grace that I have so often needed.
Author's Note
When I wrote this post, I thought I would post it in my More Than Mended column because writing it has certainly been part of the mending process in my life. But I decided to post it in this Space for Grace as a reminder to myself and others that we cannot know what ‘secrets’ have shaped the lives of those around us. Often our own are so buried we’re not even aware of the things that have shaped ourselves, but as we work through our own secrets or consciously rebury them, I pray we allow them to expand our hearts with space for grace that we can lovingly extend to others.
This post was written in memory of Robert Ross (Robby) Campbell, my husband, my high school sweetheart, the father of my four children, and my friend. And as I sit and watch the rainfall from the porch of a house he designed, my whispered words to him truly are, “Rest in peace.”
**(Buechner, 2017) The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life. Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546: Zondervan.