What’s on my mind today is how surprise can lurk in the language we use to tell stories, how unexamined words and phrases can shape what we say or write in ways we aren’t aware of.
My father’s father ended his own life in May of 1941, seven years before I was born. His story has haunted me—or rather, what I don’t know of his story, what I do know of how silence in the aftermath of suicide can ripple for decades. About a decade ago, as I launched a personal essay focusing on my grandfather, almost by itself, my keyboard spilled this phrase onto the page: commit suicide. For some reason I paused. Looked. And the words stopped me cold.
I was raised in the Catholic Church. Saturday mornings at catechism class, we learned a two-part dogma about sin. There are two kinds of sin, the nuns informed us—sins of commission and sins of omission. A sin of commission is the sole responsibility of the person who chooses—and then enacts—the sin. This kind of sin results from a personal choice. The person who commits it must own the sin and accept the consequences—must confess the sin and promise to expunge the sin from future behavior.
Saturday mornings, we learned two complementary categories—venial sin and mortal sin. Venial sins, the nuns informed us, are trivial—mere smudges on the soul. But a mortal sin is consequential. A mortal sin must be followed by confession and atonement; a mortal sin, unconfessed, unatoned at death—damns the committer to eternal hell. Suicide, according to this belief system, cannot be confessed, cannot be atoned, must result in permanent punishment.
Staring at the page I’d been drafting, thinking about the import of the two words I’d keyed into my narrative, I realized that decades after I’d left the Catholic Church and the rigid dogma that would consign my grandfather to eternal flame, the phrase so often on my lips when I spoke of him actually certified orthodox, unforgiving religious dogma.
Every time we speak of someone committing suicide, our words are saying: suicide is a choice, taken rationally; the committer must own the act, must accept the consequences. I do not believe any of this. I do not believe that my grandfather’s death was a rational choice, a cold-blooded choice, a mortal sin. I do not believe that he committed suicide.
Since that day at my keyboard, I have not used the expression that so surprised me, that changed how I tell what I know of my grandfather’s death. “He took his own life,” I say. “He died by suicide.” My words need not say this man was the worst of sinners, need not say he is eternally damned. Any way of referencing suicide sees a person acting in his own death. But without the word commit, there is room for compassion when we speak of individuals who take themselves out.
Leonard Cohen, in his litany “Who by Fire,” put it as “who by his own hand.” David, your choice of words—empathetically acknowledging the silent tragedies of people who struggled with mental health or unbearable situations—is more merciful and therefore more Christian than that of those nuns who didn’t know what they were talking about. Btw, in the Bible, there are several nonjudgmental descriptions of suicides, and moreover: "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" (Romans 10:13, NIV).
Thank you for writing this. My step son died of suicide—did I say that right. He was so tormented by life—I thought of him then as now as alone and without anyone to help him. I still hug him before bed.