How To Hold On For Dear Life

Just a few days apart, the untimely deaths of two young people—one of whom, a teenager, jumped from a building near my house—sent me deep into prayer, especially for their parents and what I could only imagine is the agony of losing a child.

When someone dies suddenly—be it accidental, at the hands of another, or self-inflicted—it’s our nature to crave understanding, to want to tie up incomprehensible tragedy with presumptions and blame. If it’s a loved one, our hearts are stricken with a desperate instinct to conjure what went on in their last moment between life and death, as if reason or understanding will bring us peace. They do not. Reason has no power to comfort the soul who becomes stuck in the endless replay of a precious life suddenly gone.

I was stuck there when I was twenty-seven years old and my dance teacher got shot to death by her ex-boyfriend. A year later the man who set me on my path to become a writer got killed by a drunk driver. As the days and weeks went by after losing him, I became morbidly obsessed, wondering what happened in that split second in which life changed to death, longing for a glance into that terrifying last frame of his life as if it would resolve the mystery and bond us forever. It never came. Only silence. Twenty years later, my aunt, who’d become a second mother to me, killed herself.

What I’ve come to recognize since then is that while the wound of a loved one’s traumatic death heals, the scar never goes away. There’s a good reason for that: Those scars are reminders that life is fragile, that no one is invincible, and that kindness is still the most important power in this world.

Following my aunt’s suicide, I found myself scrutinizing recent moments we’d had together—phone calls, a spontaneous visit—wondering if, had I not called or come by, one of those moments might have been the moment she decided to end her life. Perhaps so, but in the end, it didn’t matter; not even God can “rescue” people from their free will to choose.

Yet there is something we can do, and that is to invest in the value (not accomplishments or behavior) of other lives—by listening, caring, demonstrating love, and praying for that self-love to fill their moment of hopelessness... and hold them back from making a irrevocable choice, one that we can never understand.