It’s impossible to imagine, really, how I would react to losing my child. And it may seem like too much morbid reflection to ponder if a sudden event or a prolonged illness would be harder to face. Having a child die as an act of violence might be the hardest row to hoe, since that involves not only the loss of a person but also the loss of the feeling that the world makes any sort of sense. When the niece of a colleague was found murdered last week, I could not get over the fact that it simply didn’t figure. I couldn’t understand.
Then another young adult died over the weekend. Callum was a bit of a wild child, a risk taker. He was once a faculty brat and later a student at the center of the extracurriculars. The glint in his eye seemed to say that he was up for some good, hard fun. But who knows what else brought forth that glint, and what it sought to cover up. Callum died by his own hand.
Talking with a friend about that, she continued to bemoan “the choice he made.” Maybe for the first time, it struck me how much I don’t really believe that suicide is a choice. Demons, for lack of a better word, are real as far as I’m concerned. Those forces that bring great doubt, fear, or anxiety into our life are not things we would chose to live with, and some people battle them everyday. That’s not to say that anyone who has to battle demons is destined to lose, but when a person does lose it doesn’t mean they chose to.