Will we ever be able to understand suicide?

I have known several people who have taken their own lives and each time it has been a colossal shock to me. A beloved professor from university who had been brilliant and gifted; the first man to give me work as book reviewer in Canada, the literary editor at the Toronto Star; a respected writer at the Globe and Mail whose last piece for that paper was a profile of me. As a young man I could never understand how life could be so painful that death would seem preferable. But we grow up, we learn, we mature and we put away childish things. 

The Church used to believe that suicide was so heinous that those who took their own lives were denied a Christian burial. Times, thank God, have changed and now Catholics offer prayers for the deceased, say Mass for them and offer pity. The Catholic author and apologist G.K. Chesterton said that, “Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men. As far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.” But while Chesterton could be incisive and brilliant, he could also be severe, self-consciously judgmental and simply wrong. 

I was reminded of this when Robin Williams took his own life. He was brilliant and hilarious of course, but that shouldn’t matter. What is relevant is that he was a man, a soul, loved and loving, unique and precious and — vital, this — in such despair and darkness that he tried to cut his wrists before hanging himself. How, people asked, could someone so wealthy and famous and with so many friends and with such a privileged life simply want to end it all?