"And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough,
that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really
counts at all." – poet Ted Hughes (below, with wife Sylvia Plath) in a letter to his adult son Nicholas Hughes, whose mother, poet Sylvia Plath, committed suicide when Nicolas was nine months old.
We never know how much courage it takes for some to live at all, much less to live boldly. When the news was released on March 23 that Sylvia's son Nicholas had, himself, committed suicide at the age of 47, so many must have thought to themselves, "Ah, just like his mother."
The causes of suicide are always more complex than our pat explanations can penetrate. We are often quick to judge. It is harder to try and understand the darkness that shadows the days of some among us. This is true in spite of modern drugs that have eased the pain of many, but not all.
Ted Hughes wanted his son to live not only boldly but courageously – to risk the hurts of being humiliated or embarrassed. But we cannot program the lives of others. All we can due is try to understand and, in our understanding, to withhold any judgment. Life is so hard for so many. Some of us hang on, some of us find it easy to do so. And others simply cannot make it. For those, we need to reach into our hearts and find compassion and love.
So many of us travel dark passages. It is then that suicide may cross our minds. Disappearing can sometimes seem like not only the safer path but the more loving one. After all, if we imagine we are just trouble to others, why not leave? This is, of course, an illusion since suicide rarely, if ever, makes things better (the suicide of Hitler would be a rare exception.)
The vast majority of us strive to save our lives and those of others, not to take them. As we find our own sunlight, may we not forget to love those who may be living in shadows.
Shortly before taking her life at age 30, Sylvia Plath wrote, "I shall never grow old." Sadly, she seems to have influenced the length of her son's life as well. Today, I mourn for both of them and for all those who find it so hard to find Love in this world that they choose to exit early. Here is something Plath wrote shortly before she took her own early departure from this earth:
I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks,
for something to love.
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in
me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
How can we best help others through times of melancholy?
-Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
Leave a comment