We gather to honor __________’s memory and to support one another in grieving a death that is the hardest death to grieve: death that is chosen. We may find comfort in this time that we live where the freedom to choose is no longer laden with guilt, shame and damnation, and has even become law.
And we come into this time with a range of emotions as deep and complex as the beloved we are remembering.
- Here there is love – and the searing pain of separation.
- Here there is anger – and the futile search to understand why __________ (name) chose freedom from this life.
- Here there are questions – why, mostly. Why?
Some of you come feeling bruised by this death and asking what you could have done to prevent it. You are now as free as ________________, for this was not yours to prevent any more than a wave can defy the pull of the tide.
____________’s choice to die touches the fears that court many of us in our own moments of conflict and threatens the structures of meaning that affirm our own lives.
Let us remember that no single act can define a life.
No matter how stalked by pain, _________’s life also had its moments of delight and happiness, caring and friendship, sharing and love.
Death by choice is not a denial of life; it is the cry of despair for more life, Eternal Life. It grows from a deep personal alienation or profound suffering and is carried out alone, after a struggle within the self. And the Truth of Eternal Life is that it holds the promise of peace.
When a death such as this cuts across life in its fullness, we are left with a certain incompleteness.
We know that ________ leaves much unfinished, unfulfilled, unsaid. There are still other things you wanted to share with him/her, and he/she with you: Graduations, weddings, the birth of grandchildren; another walk on the beach at sunset, another shopping spree, another bridge game with the club. (Include interests)
This sadness for the loss of this life, full and blossoming, mingles with the sadness for the loss of possibilities not realized.
On [Sunday] morning, ____________ completed a decision.
Where there is pain and confusion, despair and doubt, we long for the end to suffering.
For some, like _____________, life no longer has any choices but one.
Life left scars that ______________ could not find the inner resources to heal.
The inner pain was too great – pain that he/she had contained within himself/herself for years, pain that often lashed out in anger, mostly at himself.
_________ chose to end the suffering for himself/herself.
The mind was exhausted, the heart frightened, and the end taken. And in that end, we must believe that the mind was free, the heart wide open and the anticipation of a new beginning filled the soul.
The suffering does not end, however, for those who have loved and cared for him/her.
Friends and family are left with feelings of shock, betrayal, anger, sadness, and – in time – compassion, forgiveness and understanding.
Those who are left ask and continue to ask, “What could I have done? Why didn’t I see it?”
No one knows. And nothing will bring him/her back.
No one is responsible for _________________’s choice but ________________.
It is a happy outlook to feel that we are born of eternal day and that the spiritual sun can never set upon the glory of the soul. And it is a happy thing to believe that no man need prepare to meet his God; he is meeting Him every day and each hour of every day. He meets Him in the rising sun, in the budding rose, in the joy of friendship and love, and in the silence of his own soul. And as the crowning event of man’s experience here, the soul takes its flight to meet Him as Host in the higher realms of a sublime and eternal Reality — not apart from but One with God, for the highest God and the innermost God is one God. Ernest Holmes, 10 Ideas That Make a Difference, 1966, p. 95.3.
We go from this world into another, and That which is us, being immortal, being eternal, goes on, carrying with It everything that makes for the warmth and color and responsiveness of human personality. Just as when we entered this world we were met by loving friends and tender care, so in the next we have every right to believe the same condition will attend us.
Ernest Holmes, Science of Mind Magazine, April 1971, p. 14.
On Death
Kahlil Gibran
You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.
For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.
In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;
And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.
Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king?
Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides,that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
“Prayer at the Funeral of Someone Who Chose Freedom from the Life”
Let there be no whispering, no secrets here:
Our hearts are broken.
_____ took his/her own life.
And even though it might appear
that s/he died by his/her own hand,
no one does this without great, coercing pain,
inner suffering that seems to have no end.
Source of compassion, we cry out loud,
to hold each other gently,
to live with unanswerable questions,
normal feelings of anger and guilt,
and this gaping hole of loss.
We reach out to others who are suffering,
to show them our love, to say the kind word.
We see the Divine Image in the lives of those who suffer.
The sun sets and rises.
We put one foot in front of the other.
We hold our hearts in our hands and lift them up to God’s Eternal Peace,
and to each other.
And So It Is
POEM by David Foster Wallace
The person who ends his life doesn’t do so out of hopelessness or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square, and surely not because death seems suddenly appealing.
The person whose agony reaches a certain unendurable level will end his life the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise.
Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window– the fear of falling remains a constant.
The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors.
It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.
And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on! can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.