Suicide

            Twenty years ago today my 68 year old mother committed suicide.   It was a hot, lonely day for her, not unlike many others in her muggy retirement park.    She sat in her tin trailer, cooking away in a slow simmer of solitude.   First one prescription pill and then another, forgetting to remember the count.   Forgetter pills.   She forgot, all right.  Her brain forgot her pain and her heart forgot to beat.   She wasn’t found for three days. 

               Like little lamb Bertie described in my last entry, she couldn’t hold on.   She was blind to hope that she could recover from her prescription drug abuse; deaf to God’s loving voice.   As for me, I too was blind and deaf in different ways.  I lived in California; she in Florida—physically and symbolically.   I didn’t have eyes to see or ears to hear how far gone she was.  

Now all that’s left is empathy and grief.  Empathy for the old who have no one to care; empathy with God’s father heart when no one sees or hears Him knocking at our doors with love, hope; grief for how Death has such free rein amongst us.   Such empathy and grief fuel my furnace for mission.

               Somehow I’m put in mind of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, The Eagle, with it’s focus on sunny solitude, lonely lands, and sudden falls:

He clasps the crag with crooked hands

 Close to the sun in lonely lands,

 Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.

 

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls,

  He watches from his mountain walls,

  And like a thunderbolt he falls.

                                          --Vance

The Lamb Died

               We learned a few days ago that Bartie, the lamb we described in our last posting, died.  I called the shepherd and found that in spite of injections, salve, bottle feeding, the lamb just couldn’t make it.   So what is there to learn from this experience?  In two words, empathy and grief.   Empathy with the Father’s heart when we will not turn aside to see, stop to listen, respond with obedience.   Grief for sickness, dying, death.    The Devil’s job is to lie, steal, kill.   He’s at work, and generally does a hell of a job.   As long as we live on this occupied planet by this evil ruler, with his tight knit mafia, we need to cultivate empathy and grief as essential life skills. 

If you don’t have little blind sheep around to teach you this, try swans looking into their own reflections.

  Or perhaps regular people bridging rivers over rocky ground. 

Opportunities to learn empathy and grief are all around you. Look, listen, learn—without judgment, knee-jerk reactions, blinding assumptions.   I hope to see you.