Suicide’s Unsettled Path of Sorrow - And Love

Two years ago, someone I knew took her life. I’ve been with many who’ve suffered this experience, but my own grief and misgivings led me to carefully examine my new life landscape…the one without her in it.

Our culture offers grievers a very narrow vocabulary for suicide. It speaks of illness, of crisis, of a permanent solution to a temporary problem; frameworks that carry truth and genuine compassion. But they can also leave survivors feeling that if they had only done more — noticed more, intervened more effectively — the outcome would have been different.

The grief of that possibility is real and deserves its own tending. But sometimes — and this is what I want to offer here — perhaps a soul has traveled somewhere that others’ love and intervention could not reach in time. In this sense, it arrived at its own unbearable place, not for lack of love provided, but because it longed for, yearned for, peace on terms we just can’t fathom.

George MacDonald, a Scottish minister, wrote more than a century ago that “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul, and you have a body.”
If there is any truth to this, then the person lost was not only the one known by us and beloved - the person we can name, and claim as ours. There’s also something deeply interior within, moving, and beyond our keeping that, in the case of the person lost to us, held a sorrow too great for a body to hold.

These days, I find solace and companionship in poets and others who take the soul seriously — who write about interior life not as metaphor but as lived reality. Joy Harjo is one of those voices. Drawing from her Indigenous heritage and a lifelong practice of listening to what exists beneath the surface of things, Harjo writes of souls that do not move in straight lines — they shapeshift, wander, migrate through grief, and beauty, and time in ways that resist neat mapping. The soul, in her understanding, is not a fixed possession. It's alive and responsive to forces others cannot see, capable of journeys no one else can accompany.  Her tender writings about the soul’s autonomy remind us how much of what matters to us personally lies beyond our power to control.

Love never stops wishing it had known what to do to prevent tragedy, and deserves to be honored; grief remains as constant as memory itself. Sometimes anger does, too. In time, however, some might find it reasonable to consider that a loved one’s soul was on a journey no one could accompany them on. Their leaving wasn't a measure of their love. Something was happening inside them that belonged to them, finally and terribly, alone.

And that the love between you — whatever form that soul is in now — did not, does not end there.