Suicide - General

By Jerry Price - Nov 1, 2006 - 1

“Suicide is such a waste—a waste of life, of opportunity. This is the element that keeps recurring for those who are left behind: this death did not have to happen. The entire experience seems so wrong, so pointless, so lacking in logic.

“A person who kills himself wastes his future and even his past—all that has been given to him, or invested in him, or that he has gained on his own. Nothing of benefit, it seems, can flow from a life deliberately ended prematurely.”

Mary Langford, That Nothing Be Wasted (Birmingham: New Hope, 1988), 38.

Further Learning

Learn more about: Life, Suicide

1 comments (post your own) feed

1 On Nov 12th, 2008, at 12:35pm, Renee Zitzloff wrote:

Our son Joshua died by what is commonly called suicide in August 2007 at age 24. Since then I’ve learned of a word I think is better suited than “suicide” to describe his death: “penacide.” Pena is from the latin which means “pain,” “cide” to kill”. In other words, a person who dies by their own hand seeks not death, but to kill the pain.

Joshua loved life and brought great joy to us and others. He had been sexually abused as child by my father, something we didn’t know until about two years before he died. Such betrayal in childhood may already be a wound unto death. Who really took his life?

Whatever people may feel about early death being a waste of life, I agree with Mary Langford that nothing is wasted in the light of God’s life and love. I believe that Joshua and her son James are very much alive, no longer suffering, and have found their true lives in Christ.

Renee Zitzloff
http://www.joshuaalive.org

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