Dying to Live

Why don’t you kill yourself?  That’s not a rhetorical question; ask yourself that with every intention of answering.  What is stopping you from taking your own life?  Life is full of pain, and some would even say that life is pain.  If that is indeed the case, and if we follow our natural instinct to escape pain, would it not logically follow that the best way to do so would be to escape life? So what’s stopping you?

If you are reading this, it is safe to say that you are alive and have probably experienced pain at one point or another, and that you have chosen not to escape the pain of life.  We accept the pain of life because we know that life has so much more to offer than pain alone.  The pain of this world is devastatingly abundant and abundantly devastating, but we look around and see also laughter, art, adventure, beauty, and love.  With all of these incredible gifts, why is it that so many men and women choose to end it all? When we decide to end our lives, it is nearly always because suffering has crippled our minds to the point that we believe such positive things are beyond our reach or are even illusory altogether.  But what if they have become impossible to obtain?

The prisoners of Nazi concentration camps, suddenly and violently yanked from the “real world” of civilisation and families and forced into an “unreal world” of barbed-wire and machine guns, must have been asking where, in this hell on earth, could there be laughter? Where could there be beauty? Where could there be love?  I asked myself these things at one point or another in war-torn Afghanistan.

There comes a point in such places where the two worlds previously mentioned swap places.  The truth settles in that this horribly “unreal world” is indeed the reality all around, and the “real world” of friends and comfort begins to feel more and more unreal.  It is at this point that the question of what stops one from suicide is a very dangerous question.  A very important question.  Dangerous because of the chance that one may find they cannot think of an answer.  Important because it is the question of a lifetime and no other environment, including the “real world,” gives it such perspective and boldness.  So many people in concentration camps took their own lives because they asked this question; and so very many survived because they asked this question, realising they had families and dreams waiting for them.

In Afghanistan I never truly contemplated suicide; but I did ask myself these questions, and found answers.  Perhaps that is why I never considered it an option.  In his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychologist and Holocaust survivor of Auschwitz, recounts many instances where he asked himself and his suicidal fellow prisoners these questions, helping them find their answers.  As the guards made it a punishable offense to try to stop someone attempting suicide, he realised that preventing the initial despair had to be his aim instead of simply trying to stop the act itself long after the infection of despair had already set in.

After I had answered those first questions, I began to ask myself others.  So often it felt as though people around me and even my superiors were actually trying to make life harder on others…but what was I doing to make life better for others?  Early in the deployment, another soldier in a different platoon had taken his own life.  A memorial service was held and both higher-ups and grunts gave long speeches, asking what suicide says about a person and their strength, and telling us, basically, to just suck it up when things are hard.  But I was asking different questions.  If I can’t answer why I shouldn’t kill myself, how can I explain why I should “suck it up”?  I wanted to ask what this soldier’s suicide said about us!  What does it say about us when a grown man would rather end his life in an Afghani porta-john than have to live with us? I didn’t really know this soldier, so I can’t say whether he was actively mistreated by those around him, but I can assure you he wasn’t in an environment that actively sought to uplift people.

We can never know what is in another person’s mind, but that is no reason to pass up opportunities to show the Love of Christ. In fact it is all the more reason to always seek to do so.  As we ask ourselves what matters in life, making it worth any pain and suffering we experience along the way, let us remember others are asking the same questions.  In John 10:10, Jesus tells us that he wants not only to give us life, but an abundant life, full of all that goes with life.  Do our actions spread Christ’s Love that enriches life, or do we let ourselves make life difficult for others?  Do our words cause hurt, or are we speaking God’s language of Life and Love, telling the world that when life asks us why we choose to live, everyone can boldly give an answer?