The Culture Beat

I can’t begin to understand what Tony Dungy and his wife, Lauren, whose 18-year-old son, James, died from an apparent suicide two days ago, are feeling. The death of a child is devastating enough; to add the inescapable “survivor’s guilt” that suicides leave in their wake makes the grief unimaginable.

While I can’t imagine what the Dungys are feeling, I can, at the risk of presumption, imagine a bit of what James may have been feeling. As I wrote few years ago for Boundless webzine, I have manic-depressive illness, a.k.a., bipolar disorder (BPD). As Johns Hopkins’Kay Redfield Jamison famously put it, to have BPD is to live with “An Unquiet Mind.”

Actually, a mind on fire is more like it: oscillating between debilitating depression and agitation/irritability/mania.

My particular “flavor” of BPD is, in the bland language of psychiatric literature, “highly associated with the risk for suicide.” As I told Boundless readers, timely medical intervention and medication probably saved my life. That and a young man who will turn 14 tomorrow: my son, David.

When my kid brother learned about David’s autism, he remarked that God knew what he was doing in making me David’s dad. I would provide David with what he needed: someone who would expend his last breath making sure that he was taken care of. And, in turn, David would give me the reason I needed to continue drawing breath.

Even with medication, I’m no stranger to things like “pessimism, helplessness,” and the “loss of interest or pleasure in life.” More than once, I’ve found myself looking for the exit. What has stayed my hand is not so much the fear of God but, instead, the fear of leaving the one who needs me most to pick up the pieces.

Of course, I’m 50; James Dungy was 18. For all I know, the illness — and that’s what it is, an illness — that caused him to take his life hadn’t been diagnosed yet. Mine wasn’t when I was 18.

What little comfort I can find in a story like this one is my firm conviction that God is not done with James Dungy: that if St. Paul’s words in Romans 8, “for I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord,” mean anything, they meant it double when what I strongly suspect was James Dungy’s infellicitous brain chemistry finally betrayed him.

That’s why the way suicide is treated in Constantine and What Dreams May Come, whatever its dramatic merits, is bad theology. In my favorite C.S. Lewis book, The Great Divorce, the love of God overcomes sin, death, and even time. It’s likely that Lewis would have agreed with physicist/theologian John Polkinghorne when he wrote that God’s love and mercy aren’t removed from us at our deaths. An “iron curtain” doesn’t descend “cutting off anyone found on the wrong side of it from any hope of everlasting salvation. God will not say ‘you had your chance over all those years. Now you’ve lost it and that’s that.’”

To insist on “that’s that” is to confuse “the everlasting mercy of God” with the “short-lived mercy of man.” It shortchanges the unimaginable love and mercy needed to give us that baby in the manger. And in the face of unimaginable sorrow, the source of our hope needs to be equally beyond our imagining or it isn’t hope at all.