My middle son, 19, and living in Virginia, told me yesterday that his boss – the manager of the fast-food restaurant where he works – had committed suicide. All he knew is that it was via pills, she was in her 40’s and was leaving two teen-age girls behind. The wake was this evening, and the funeral is tomorrow. He went to the wake and was a bit shaken, I could tell, but because he’s naturally quite reticent about his feelings, he didn’t say much, and I didn’t push him. I can imagine the scene was difficult, and the whole situation is just very sad, especially when you consider what those girls will live with the rest of their lives.

For a long time I had subscribed to the view that the Church had been pastorally harsh and psychologically backward in defining suicide as a mortal sin. Until, several years ago, I encountered two deeply contrasting experiences.

Both involved people with diagnoses of serious, potentially terminally illness. One was a man in his thirties, married, with a newly-adopted child from China. Leukemia was his cross, and for a year and a half he fought, with every conceivable and possible treatment, but the remissions were always temporary. Finally, there was no question that all that could be done had been done, and so the sad journey began. He eventually died at home, under the care of his wife, friends and Hospice. I knew a couple of the people that were there that last night, and they told me of the praying, the hymn-singing, the tears, the quiet and more prayers, until finally Gale went to God.

The other was just a few months later. I was working in a parish, and I came to work one morning – I’m almost certain it was the Tuesday after Memorial Day, and one of the secretaries told me that a parishioner had died. The woman, in her late fifties, had, the previous week, received a diagnosis of stomach cancer. She told no one – not her husband, children or friends. She had been for a long walk with one of her daughters the night before, cheerful, with no indication that anything was wrong. Monday morning, she had risen early, left a note on the kitchen table, gone into the bathroom, closed the door, and shot herself.

The contrast in aftermaths could not have been more stark. There was, of course, sadness all ’round, and questions, certainly, as there always are when it comes to any matter of life and death, unexpected or expected. But in the latter case, there was no peace. There was anger, there was a feeling of abandonment.

In a dark place, at the bottom of the pit, there can seem no way out, and it is not ours to judge, only ours to pray that in those last moments, one driven to such despair finally reaches out for the mercy of God. But in observing the suffering of those left behind after a suicide, I finally understood why it is not a bad thing to characterize suicide as a sin.