On a foggy morning in Maine, my wife was sleeping, and I was in the kitchen making toast and savoring the absolute freedom of having nothing specific to do. We were on vacation for our twentieth anniversary, and as I dug into the jelly jar, I was trying to decide between hiking and golfing.
Then the phone rang, odd for 6:30 on a vacation morning. Within seconds, I knew the vacation was over.
Darin had committed suicide. As my wife and I drove home to Michigan through that day and the next, the scope and impact came to us in waves, as in call after call over our cell phone, more of the unique and tragic aspects of Darin’s death washed over us.
He attended our church with his family. Darin was a brand-new high school graduate, an accomplished and decorated athlete, and a young man, so it seemed, with a bright future. Like many such deaths, Darin’s made no sense, and still doesn’t as I write this today.
But Darin’s was not like all suicides. What he did—and how he did it—forced our small, rural community to wrestle with isolation and technology, and forced me as a pastor to speak and respond differently at Darin’s funeral than I had at any other.
Finger at the triggers
There are grainy, faded images in my mind about the church and suicide. Years ago, suicide was kept quiet. The deceased person would leave a note that the sackclothed family would read in private. At the funeral, though people may have known what actually happened, the self-destructive element of death was kept very low-profile. With Darin, the old things had most certainly passed away.
Darin was online just moments before he shot himself, “IMing” a girl from school. He was hinting heavily at what he was about to do, and she was trying to talk him out of it, but within seconds of signing off, he took his life.
Just prior to that, or probably simultaneously, he used his cell phone to text message a vast group of family, friends, and teammates a final farewell.
In the old days, a few people would read a hastily scribbled note and suffer torment knowing the darkness of a suicidal soul. but This way, everyone knew.
The thing that propelled us all into another world of grief, however, was Darin’s MySpace site. In the old days, just a small group of people would read a hastily scribbled note and suffer torment knowing the darkness of a suicidal soul. Now, everyone knew. Darin, like most other young people now, had a MySpace site. Sometime on or near the day of his death, he had unloaded himself on it. He was angry at many people, especially at a girl. He vented his confusion and his fury, and he did so with graphic verbiage and profanity.
We are a close-knit farming community. We usually know something about someone almost the instant it happens, whether they want us to know or not. In this case, knowledge of Darin’s last public words traveled worldwide at the speed of the internet.
I pulled into town after two days of driving, bracing myself for a barrage of questions and tears, prayers and contemplations that would, by God’s grace, make me ready to speak at Darin’s funeral. I began to meet people bowed down in confusion and sorrow, who would look to the ground or to the sky and shake their heads, and eventually each one would finish his sentences with the words, “And, have you seen his MySpace page?” One of our guys from church, when I asked him about it, pulled a printout of Darin’s site from his pocket to show me.
Suicide used to be shrouded, right? We tended not to talk very openly about it. But when suicide went cyberspace, literally hundreds of people were vividly and intimately aware of every texture and nuance in Darin’s mind.
Deafening echoes
I try to be honest at funerals. If I didn’t know the person well, I say so and don’t try to pretend I did. If the person was colorfully sinful, I don’t reduce their sins to black-and-white; I gently, but openly speak of weaknesses and sin, all the while highlighting the good that God worked in that person, as well. I don’t preach them into heaven, nor do I shove a smoldering piece of brimstone into their casket and render them to hell. I think honesty, appropriately done, can help people, and that’s how I choose to do it. There was no choice with Darin’s funeral: honesty was a necessity.
I used the word “suicide” regularly. I referred a number of times to how Darin “took his own life.” My friend and colleague, Dave, who also took part in the service, spoke of the promises of Jesus, and of how, in these last moments of his life, Darin forgot those promises. There was no use trying to reduce or minimize the reason Darin died. To avoid it would be to fly off into some deserted island where no one lived.
With most funerals, even “normal” ones, I have the immediate family foremost in mind. Of course, I have a community of people listening in, and I am always mindful of non-Christians who attend; but the biggest burden on my heart is to help the family find the hope of Jesus Christ in their loss.
Now, however, I found my heart beating in two rhythms, one connected to the pain of Darin’s family, the other syncopated with the enormous echo of pain and confusion rising up from our whole community.
Suicide is a highly suggestible activity, and an entire high school of students would come to this funeral who knew intimately Darin’s state of mind prior to his action. The weight of it all was compounded by the fact that our three-county area had suffered 18 suicides in the last year.
I decided to talk with Darin’s family openly about this, and they agreed that much of what we said and did at the funeral should be offered specifically to students. So I spoke about pain and where to go with pain. I referred to cutting and other self-damaging behaviors. I used the example of an engine under friction, that without lubrication “seizes up,” and that somehow Darin seized up under the friction of life. Then I tried to point to specific ways faith in Christ enables us to deal with the pain, the friction, of our souls.
MySpace, OurHope
During the three weeks following the funeral, our church sponsored three community gatherings, which we advertised in the newspaper and on our website. The first meeting was for everyone, including parents and students. We invited professional counselors from our area to come and speak, and offered a time for open discussion. (At this meeting, it was very important to create a “boundary” around Darin’s family, so that our discussion didn’t delve too much into the private matters of home and family.)
The second meeting was just for students. Again, we invited a professional counselor in, and offered a time for students to come and just talk about what was happening around us, and how they were dealing with this loss.
The third meeting was for parents only, and this was all about MySpace.com. Because technology had played such a powerful role in Darin’s suicide, parents who had never heard of MySpace were overcome with worry and curiosity. We invited a local youth pastor who knew a lot about computers, and we went live on the internet on our sanctuary screen to show actual sites, and to teach people how to work around sites like MySpace, Xanga, and others.
If I had it to do over again, I would try to cram all those follow-up meetings into the week right after Darin took his life, when people were especially open. Although attendance dropped with each successive week, the pain was still real for many of Darin’s classmates. I was surprised to learn that three weeks after Darin’s death, students were still writing to him on his MySpace site, asking him why, venting their anger at him, telling him things they never were able to in real life. Now it’s up to our church to point these young people beyond Darin’s very public despair to the One who can give them hope.
Keith Mannes is pastor of Highland Christian Reformed Church in Marion, Michigan.
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