Serious stuff today. If you are not up to reading some serious stuff, go to https://www.gocomics.com/comics/a-to-z  This is the comic collection I read every morning and I rarely go away without a smile somewhere along the way.

          From 1983 to the very last day of 2006 I was a pastor. Before that I was a Youth pastor and, believe it or not, a music leader for eight years. A lot of things changed in my life beginning in 1983. My responsibility base expanded greatly, as did the challenge level. As a pastor, I was thrown into everything. Before, I had the luxury of watching my pastor deal with all the issues. When I became the pastor, it was all different.

          Funerals, weddings, counseling, organization, innovation (but only certain innovation because the people had always done things in a certain way and saw no reason to change). You could begin the day with a perfectly set schedule and end the day wondering what it was you had done that day.

          In church life, of course, death is a constant. Over those 23 years I had dealt with all manner of death. Disease, old age, accident, suicide, even murder; whatever way a person can die, I had seen it during those years of pastoring. But it wasn’t constant. I seem to remember once averaging it out and we had suffered, as a church, an average of six deaths a year. I remember one year we had zero deaths as a church! I was always on call at funeral homes in town to do funerals for people who had no church, so I always did between thirty and forty a year. But the actual church wasn’t so bad.

          But then, in 2007, I began working at a funeral home. All of a sudden, the things that had made up my life fell away and I was left with dealing with death alone. Death and grief. I actually enjoyed the work and I really feel as though I helped a lot of people, but it drains you as time goes by.

          Early on, we had four funeral directors, but only one of those was a mortician. That is the person who can legally embalm and prepare a body for the casket. The other three directors were strictly there to conduct the funerals. The mortician/funeral director was always swamped, so I was taught how to do a lot of things. Legally, I couldn’t embalm, but I could do just about everything else. One of those things is called ‘setting features.’ Almost everyone who comes into a funeral home needs to have their eyes and mouth closed and sealed, their facial features relaxed, any tubes taken out and a dozen other things. A good mortician (and we had the best) can even put a little smile on their face. Mostly, the mortician set the features, but there were times, when we were really busy (seemed like a constant) or when the deceased was going to be cremated and the family was going to get to view them for just a bit, when I would set features. It sounds worse than it is. Not everyone has the stomach for it, but it never bothered me.

          First thing each morning we had a meeting to schedule the day out. On the morning in question we were extremely busy. I had a lot to do. We had three funerals going that day. The only saving grace was that there had been no death calls during the night. We all sat down with our coffee for the meeting.

          “OK, first things first. Pastor,” Everyone still called me Pastor because that was the only way they had ever known me. “You are off the first funeral.” I was supposed to drive one of the vehicles and now I wasn’t. I gave the boss a questioning look. “We got a case in from the coroner last night. Forty year old woman, self inflicted gunshot to the head, family in at eleven. I cannot get to her and she needs to have features set and any cranial repair done. She will be cremated, so no embalming. I will also need you to talk to the family. I am really sorry to do this to you.” My standard reply, “Not a problem.”

          But it was a problem. I could not stand suicides. We had a nephew that committed suicide several years before this and the pain it put the family through was beyond believable. Since coming to the funeral home a few years before I had encountered several suicides. They always angered me. And it wasn’t because of a young life that was gone and wasted, it was because the family was so devastated. It seemed to me the one doing the suicide wasn’t the real victim. It was the family. Now, another. And after putting the pieces back together (literally) I would have to table that anger and talk with the family.

          When the meeting ended, I asked my boss what shape she was in. “I don’t know. Haven’t seen her. The coroner tells me she is set up on the main table. But, it was a gunshot to the head. Really, I am sorry you have to handle this one.” “Not a problem.”

          I dropped my coat and tie off at my desk and headed to the prep room. Only one body was there, a sheet pulled up over her face. I pulled the sheet back and looked into the face of a very pretty lady. No blood, no little pile of bone from an exit wound, no hole in the temple. Honestly, I thought they were goofing with me, that the young lady was not dead. But she wasn’t breathing and she was very cold. She was dead, but there were no gunshot wounds. I looked around for another body. There were none. Her eyes were closed, her mouth was shut, there was no tension on her face. Then I noticed a speck of blood at the corner of her mouth. I forced her mouth open and saw the bullet hole in the roof of her mouth. No exit wound in the back of her head, so she had shot herself in the mouth with, probably, a .22 caliber weapon. It had probably got to her skull and just didn’t penetrate. I closed her mouth and just stood there.

          The door opening startled me. The county coroner walked in. He looked at me and said there was one more vial of blood to draw he had forgotten about. “You know, I had the same reaction you are having. There are no drugs in her system, no alcohol, nothing that would make her temporarily stupid. She had just hung up the phone from her mother and they had been making plans for a niece’s birthday party and she had really been excited. Her husband had already left for work and she was getting ready to go to the job she loved. It is creepy.” I looked at the coroner. “So, what happened, doctor?” “Best guess, snap suicide.” H saw by my look I had no idea. He shrugged. “She hangs up from her mother. Going to work. She is looking for something, probably her keys. She opens the junk drawer and there is a low caliber pistol. She looks at it. Now, I would bet that when you talk to the family you will find she has some worrisome thing in her life. She picked up the gun and something snapped in her mind.”

          That changed my whole thought process on suicide. I began to read about it and go deeper and deeper into it. For one thing, I think ‘snap suicide’ was his word for it, but it is descriptive. I had been looking at suicide from a pastor’s perspective. How it affects the ones left behind. My anger was directed at the deceased as I sought to help the living. Although suicide is largely something that is done by the young and often done for attention, it does affect all age groups. And it is increasing.

          Suicide is the 10^th leading cause of death in the country, among all ages. 45,000 people will take their own lives this year. 14% of all high schoolers have gone so far as to make a suicide plan, figuring out how to do it and even writing a note. Obviously, not all 14% go through with it, but they consider it. Females will consider it more than males, twice as often as males, but males will actually do it more often. Four out of five suicides among teens are male. When an attempt fails, the individual is often damaged for the rest of their lives. Bullets do not always kill, hanging may lead to brain damage, drug overdose may also lead to brain damage. I was once asked to visit a man in the hospital who had attempted suicide by taking a power drill to the top of his head and drilling into his brain. Once the bit got into his brain, he lost control and dropped it, and he lived. He could follow you with his eyes, but that was it. He could not move and he could give you no demonstration that he was hearing you. Nothing. And, something rarely considered, the medical costs nationwide for treating failed suicides is in the neighborhood of 60 billion dollars and a lot of insurance plans do not cover suicide attempts.

          There is a feeling among people that anyone attempting suicide is crazy. Let’s just say they have momentarily taken leave of their senses. And that is not always true, either. Suicide is a complicated thing, usually arrived at when one gets to the point they cannot go on. But that is not always true. I think it is on the rise because life is more and more complicated and we have so devalued life in this country that living is not as important as it once was. We have states now where it is legal to kill a baby after it is born and still call it an abortion. A person can be playing a very real seeming video game and, when they run out of lives, they can reset. You don’t really die. Our culture is, in many ways, dehumanizing. Suicide can often seem the only way out.

          I didn’t have to do anything to the forty year old woman. I could not have set her features any better than they were. I led the family into the room where I had placed her and I allowed them to have their time. Then we returned to the conference room and we began to talk. Since I was ‘Pastor Wade’ rather than the funeral director they would be dealing with later, I was able to ask some questions. It seems that she had always wanted children, but was unable to conceive. It didn’t bother her husband all that much, but it was deep seated with her. The gun wasn’t where it normally was and, when she had hung up with her mother, no doubt a little blue from planning a birthday party for her niece when she would have loved to have been planning a party for her own daughter, she saw the gun and something happened in her mind. If the gun hadn’t been there or if her mother had still been on the phone or if her husband hadn’t gone in early, nothing would have happened. The woman’s mother looked at me that morning and said, “You have to believe me, nothing like this has ever happened in our family!”

          Be aware of what is going on. Children, teens, young adults, aging parents. Anyone. Don’t be blind to the possibility. Come and talk to me. It could be going on with you or someone you love. Believe me when I say, it is a lot easier dealing with it before it happens than it is after it happens.