I wanted to share Beyond Blue reader Julia’s comment that she wrote on the message board of my post “Dear God: On Getting the Right View” for two reasons: I was taken aback by her beautiful articulation of what it’s like living with depression, and what faith does for a depressive, but also because I hope that her comment might provide some consolation to those who have lost a loved one to suicide. Perhaps your loved one’s death in some weird way saved the lives of others.
I hope I’m not being disrespectful in saying that. I don’t want to discount your pain in anyway. However, as I read Julia’s comment, I thought to myself that if I had lost someone to suicide, her words would have comforted me.

Isn’t depression a bit like being stuck at the top of the tree? Hanging on for dear life, so stuck in your head you barely notice the crowds gathered below? When it’s at its worst, you’re in the jungle canopy–you think you’re alone because you can’t see the ground at all.
It was just a few years ago that I was thinking about jumping when a fellow tree-dweller saved my life. I shiver when I think how close I had come when, like Fr. Rolheiser, I found myself beside my colleague’s open grave. Fear–or reality–set in and suddenly the door of suicide was closed to me. I was dumbfounded that I had been so self-absorbed that I hadn’t seen what was going on with him and even furious that this young man had done “such a thing” to his parents and young sister, who had stood outside his bedroom door when he shot himself. But mostly, I could barely tolerate the scalding truth that the timing of his demise could hardly have been a coincidence: literally, in the hour before I learned of his death, I had written my own suicide plan, which burned in my pocket as I heard the news.
It was many months, maybe even years, before I could see through my own sense of guilt to any relief on my own behalf, but I knew immediately that his suicide had prevented my own. My sense of injustice stick in my throat–how could God have chosen the 22-year-old survivor of the Bosnian genocide over me as the one to die?! Why couldn’t I have acted first and saved this young man instead? But, as you say, that silent grace tells you that the world is much, much bigger than your own tree and God’s mercy is sufficient.
Sometimes, as you’re clutching to the branch, squinting for a glimpse of the Christ passing by, he suddenly turns and makes eye contact and the world is never the same.