Living

My sister Caty committed suicide ten years ago this week. She was eighteen. I wish she had known the bigness of the future, the way that feelings and circumstances change, people forgive, and love reenters. I’d like to remember Caty by insisting that our lives reach much wider than we can acknowledge at any given moment. This is a distillation of Jennifer Michael Hecht’s secular argument against suicide in her recent book Stay (you can listen to an interview with Hecht here and read articles by her here and here). The argument goes like this: We should choose to live rather than to die. We should do so for each other and also for our future selves.

More Americans commit suicide every year than die of AIDS, cancer, heart disease, or homicide. In 2004, the year that my sister committed suicide, 32,000 other Americans also did, including more than 4,000 other young people under the age of 24. Globally, about 800,000 people took their own lives in 2004. The global suicide rate has risen over the past decade. Soldiers and veterans of recent American wars abroad are more likely to kill themselves than to die in combat. It is untrue that nothing will stop a person with suicidal thoughts from killing themselves. Most people who kill themselves can be deterred; they often waver and express ambivalence in their decision even in their final moments. Psychiatric interventions and the stable presence of a community prevent suicide, as does curbing access to lethal means, especially firearms. A gun kept in a home is 11 times more likely to be used by someone to attempt or commit suicide than it is for self-defense.

Suicide causes immeasurable pain to family and friends, but also to people who barely knew the victim. Suicide has an influential “cluster effect” or a “contagion effect,” which means it causes other suicides. It is best understood as an act that is socially formed and will reverberate back into the social whole, often by provoking other people to kill themselves as well. To see suicide as purely a question of an individual life-- or individual will or agency-- is to fail to acknowledge the ways that we are shaped by and connected to other people. None of us are completely alone. Hecht summarized this part of her argument in a 2013 Chronicle of Higher Education article: “Suicidal influence is so strong that if you want your niece, or your fellow soldier, your sorority sister, or fellow poet, to make it through their dark nights, you have to make it through yours. Those who have suicidal thoughts must know that resisting them is an act of generosity equal to that of running into a burning house and rescuing a child.”

This is not a condemnation of suicide victims but a celebration of those who struggle with the idea and ultimately do not commit suicide. The decision to live is a decision to keep others alive. Likewise, to remove the option of suicide is to refuse to commit violence against an entire web of people who need and will need you. I implore all of us to remove the option of suicide. Most people who make it through their dark nights will never earn notoriety for their courage.Yet they refuse to give into their one, most destructive self, and I think that’s courageous. I think we should all decide to live.

It’s difficult to speculate on who Caty Lewis would have been at age 28, but she probably would have been different than she was at 18. Few of us would say we are the same person than we were a decade ago. Catie probably would have been someone she could live with, and perhaps even someone she liked. Time changes us.

Grieving over the past decade was not ultimately good for me, nor did it provide me with extraordinary strength or wisdom. Catie’s suicide provided insight into a kind of pain that I would have preferred to avoid. I find solace not in asserting an ultimate plan or goodness in what happened, but in the reminder that love never ceases and I have been given the great privilege to exist. We all have the opportunity to remind other people how important their lives are through our work and our relationships.

The best I can do to conclude is to name some of the many people who supported me in the immediate aftermath of Catie’s death as well as in the multiplicity of ways I’ve sought to make sense out of her death since. This is not a comprehensive list, but a nod to a wonderfully wide web of people who have shown me

and my family kindnesses. Several of Catie’s friends, especially Brook, CJ, Tara and the rest of her group in Fort Wayne. At WMUMC: Pastors Steve and Amanda, the At Lee family, the Mingee family, the Liceaga family, Jeremy, Jon, Nathan, Amanda and the Crossett family, Lauren, Megan N., Aaron. At HRA: Louise, Emmi, Heather, Martha and Abe, the Rous family, the Gillespie family. Several of my classmates did small and large things for me when Catie died: Ben, Amy, Julie, Kim L, and Thorsteinn. At SEVA Seahawks Swimming and Coast Guard Blue Dolphins Swimming: my coaches Dave, Carl, Steve G, and Marc R. My teammates Laura, Kelsey, Chelsea, Anne, Hope, Kerry. At Denison: Trey, Gregg, Mark O, Matthew M, Laura M, Jenny C, Rochelle, Ashley M, Jessica M, Kelsey W, Bethany, Callan, Eric E, Kathleen C, Reyna, Leigh, Emily A, JC, Steve F, Anne M. In Ecuador: Julianne, Emily R, Sophie, Jessica, Ryan, Trent, Anita, Marco, Rachel. Special thanks to Rebecca Deeley, who tends to Catie’s grave since we have relocated. Not least, my partner Bryan and my family, Marcia, Jim, Jenny, Mitch, and Anna, as well as my extended family-- Lewis, Jackson, Getz, Franklin, and otherwise.