Seeking answer I will never find
Madam -- In reply to "Refusal to condemn suicide is no help to anyone at all", by Eilis O'Hanlon (Sunday Independent, February 5, 2012).
A lack of understanding and ignorance about suicide can in so many ways hurt people so very deeply. Eilis said quite blatantly that the violence of their final act cancels out the warmth of memory.
My 13-year-old daughter committed suicide. I do not know why. However, like any Christian parent I was worried for her spiritual welfare. I asked myself the question: does this put her under the judgement pronounced on Judas Iscariot, "Better to not have been born"?
What a horrible epitaph for someone who brought so much joy into the world. My daughter had an infectious smile and a sharp wit. My daughter showed kindness and concern for others and her beauty was matched only by her love of everything and everybody around her. Can all this be condemned in one sentence and by one moment of madness "Better to not have been born"? Because the violence of the final act will cancel out our love and warmth of her memory? This cannot be true.
The night she died she was upset and had menstrual pain. Expert opinion suggested premenstrual dysphoria was the likely cause. However, no one knows why she took her own life. I could only assume that hormones played a part. We are all made up of body and soul of which the mind is the prominent instigator of events. What went on in the frontal lobe of the brain of my beautiful child will never be known and I was looking for an answer that I will never find.
However, my overwhelming grief was compounded by the stigma associated with suicide. A stigma allowed to flourish by the silence of the Church. Literature given to me by a Catholic institution at the time suggested that suicide was an unspeakable event up there with other social stigmas. The State refusal to condemn suicide is based on best scientific practice given the complexity of the subject. The Church response to suicide should not be horror and fear for the person's eternal salvation. Suicide is indeed a horrible way to die, but we must understand it for what it is: a sickness, be it permanent or transient.
I cannot protest too much at the hurt Eilis inflicted on me and my family. To me there can be no heaven without my daughter because she was heaven here on Earth, and the warmth of her memory will always linger and nothing is cancelled out. Eilis should try to think from that ivory tower of hers as to why, in her own words, there is a prissy refusal to condemn.
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