NEWTOWN—Anna was barely two years old when her aunt Carolyn lost her life to suicide. More than 50 years later, her family still mourns their loss.
“She was a beautiful young woman, beautiful and brilliant,” Anna said. She played the flute and oboe and performed with the Chicago Youth Symphony and later studied music at Stanford University, but she suffered from mental illness and died by suicide at 23.
Her family is still feeling the pain, and it was this pain that brought Anna, along with others from throughout the diocese, to a Mass for Suicide Healing and Remembrance at St. Rose of Lima Parish.
“I just want to know my family isn’t alone,” Anna said. “I’m here because of my mother Rosellen, who was Carolyn’s older sister. She lives in Alabama and isn’t a Catholic, but when she heard about this Mass, she wanted me to come for all of us.”
Carolyn Killian, Director of Bereavement, welcomed people to the Mass and thanked Father Peter Cipriani, the pastor, for approaching her and the Bereavement Ministry of Catholic Cemeteries about support for those who have lost a loved one to suicide.
“We often struggle to be supportive and sensitive with those who are facing unthinkable loss, and we usually have no idea what to say,” Killian said. “And when we are grieving, we often cannot find the words to describe the intensity of our emotions. And when our loss is due to death by suicide, our hearts are broken, and we are speechless. I truly believe that prayer supports us when words fail us. So we come together today in prayer to remember our loved ones and to ask the Holy Spirit to wrap us in love and walk with us on this path to healing.”
Father Cipriani said a fundamental truth of our faith can be found in Christ’s words, “Blessed are those who mourn … for they shall be comforted.” Catholics are called “to be that comfort, but it’s not just any comfort. It’s the comfort of Christ.”
“When confronted with tragedies, there is, of course, that lingering and haunting immediate question, ‘why?’” he said in his homily. “And though there are some who might insist there is no real ‘why’ to why some things happen, I would beg to differ.”
“Our loved ones did not take their own life,” he said. “They died of an illness. It was the sickness that took their life, similar to if it had been a heart attack or cancer or a car accident. If someone dies of a heart attack, we don’t say that he killed himself, although his body certainly did that to him. We say that the heart disease killed him. Our loved ones died of a disease, and that disease was depression.”
He said that depression is “a deep sadness that lies to the one who has it … telling them they will never get better, there is no safe harbor, and there is no available kindness. This disease destroys a person’s ability to think, to reason rightly, to make decisions and ultimately to cope. How much blame would you assign to someone with dementia for making a poor choice? This sadness is like a psychological form of dementia.”
He raised a commonly asked question of whether we can believe in a good God “amidst this turmoil and pain”? Families and friends of a suicide victim also ask, “What could we have done differently?” Or “did I say something or do something to cause or to aggravate this illness?” Father Cipriani said that “is so extremely unlikely.”
Instead, it is appropriate to ask “How might I live differently, not because of feeling responsible for another’s death, but being responsible for a person’s life, having loved them and still loving them with such intensity and not allowing the sadness to suffocate that capacity for intense and more intense loving and believing.”
As believers we must make Jesus’ words to Martha, the sister of Lazarus, central to our faith: “I am the Resurrection and the Life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
This is a reality the faithful can experience during Mass in the Eucharist, when we receive the Risen Christ, he said.
He urged the congregation to focus on what is truly important in the face of death and encouraged them, in the words of country singer Tim McGraw, to “live like you were dying,” motivated by the realization that “what matters is God and God’s love, because God is love and God loves us. God is love itself made visible in Jesus Christ. We can know God if we love one another … And receiving in Holy Communion, you will literally have that taste of love and the cure for all that ails us…none more so than dying and death. As Jesus promises, ‘Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day.’”
During the Mass, the names of the deceased were placed at the altar, and candles were lit in their remembrance.
Father Cipriani said, “When we pray for those whose lives were lost to the illness of suicide, we find that these prayers, inspired by the hope that God has placed in our wounded hearts, is the very balm he uses to fully heal both them and us.”
Father concelebrated the Mass with Father Richard Murphy and Father Michael Flynn.
After the liturgy, a woman who previously attended a grieving parents retreat, expressed her appreciation, Killian said.
“She said the energy in the church when she entered was serious and somber as people sat waiting for Mass to begin. And as the Mass continued, and they listened to the homily, the energy level literally lifted in the entire church. She was smiling as she left and felt so much better than when she arrived.”
The Mass coincided with National Suicide Prevention Week from September 8 to 14. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in the United States, and according to data by the Centers for Disease Control, almost 50,000 Americans died by suicide in 2022, and another 1.7 million tried to take their lives in 2021.
By Joe Pisani
