The Suicide

Navigating on autopilot, Fr. Gregory nearly drove into the river. There had always been a bridge there before, and the confidence born of past times very nearly carried him out and over the abyss. But somehow the darker dark under his headlight beams made him uneasy, and he slammed his foot on the brake.

​Disappointment struggled with relief as he got out of the car to look. Relief, because an evening spent alone in a confessional without even the hope that anyone will come is dismal beyond description. His conscience would not bother him for turning back when the bridge was out. Disappointment, because an evening alone at home browsing social media is somehow even worse, dismal in a way that just admits the hopelessness of everything. To be forced back to that — somehow he couldn’t face it.

​He recalled a footbridge somewhere upstream. Maybe the footbridge was still up.

The church was as silent as a tomb. Fr. Gregory sat in the confessional and tried to focus on a Bible. Anything was better than letting his mind wander into God only knows what corner of his secret fears, and he thought again that perhaps it would not be disrespectful to bring in a mystery novel. It would be more respectful, from one point of view, because he could stay awake in this sacred place. The sacredness of the place. The place. The sacredness.

​A sigh from the other side of the screen woke him. No telling how long the guy had been waiting. Fr. Gregory straightened himself with a jerk and forced his voice to be brisk: “Yes, my son?”

​“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” the man began in a pleasant baritone. “It has been fifteen years since my last confession.”

​Oh dear, thought Fr. Gregory. These are always long and rambling. “God is pleased that you have returned to the sacrament of forgiveness.” There was a long pause. “Go on,” he prompted, “what do you have to confess?”

​“I killed myself.”

​The hair stood up on Fr. Gregory’s neck. For just a moment he teetered on the border between solid, material everydayness and spirits, goblins, crawling shadows — that uncanny world kept securely at bay by electric lights and gasoline engines.

​But the man went on in a normal voice, with its comfortingly thick and material timbre. “I don’t know when it was that I lost my sense of smell,” he said, “but it has been so long since life’s goodness flared my nostrils. I see beauty: my wife, a glorious person; my daughter, so full of joy; the world all around me, deep with mystery. But it is like seeing bakery goods behind a thick pane of glass: the goodness does not come to me, remains distant or unreal. I see it there, but I can’t smell it.

“Or was it that I lost my hearing? I stand near my wife, but we are so far apart with no voice to create a space, like watching a movie with the sound off. We are all discrete bodies that move in separate spaces and nothing envelopes us all together; we are so alone. My daughter’s lips are moving — is she singing? Is there a melody and I just can’t take it in?”

​The voice behind the screen hesitated, then resumed: “No, that’s not it, that’s not it: I think I lost my ability to see in color. Everything has been gray for so long. I can’t remember when I last saw a vibrant red, or a tranquil green, or a heart-piercing blue. Everything shades from dingy white to dirty black, even my own child’s eyes that used to sparkle in a pool of hazel depth.”

​Another pause, longer this time. “If I am entirely honest, I have to admit that I smell and hear and see, but the appetites within me have all gone inert. Sensation enters to no response, no fanfare of desire or joy, no stirring of the depths. In the abstract my mind acknowledges beauty and goodness, but my heart has died prematurely, has become an inanimate mass of flesh, a dead weight in my chest, dragging me forward and down, bombarded uselessly by the allurements of the world.

​“But what is goodness when there is no desire? What is beauty when there is no joy? Even my mind becomes suspicious that perhaps these things are all unreal. That sunset is a fake; my wife is a deception; my child is bait in a trap for the simple, who can still believe in transcendence. Do you know what happens when cynicism metastasizes? No radiation will kill it, because it is already dead.

​“And so I decided to remove myself from temptation to belief once and for all. At dusk I left the house, without a word or a glance to say farewell, and I sought out the storm-swollen river. As I stood on the bridge, staring down into the angry chaos of water, I tried to say that life is like this angry chaos, that it is either ignorant or malevolent, but the words stuck in my mind’s throat. How can the world be malevolent when I have said it is inert?

“All of a sudden I saw that there has always been a surreptitious hand clasp between myself and my disease, a hidden place where I have given it my support — sometimes, as now, even violently. When a gentle truth intruded itself on my hard delusion, sometimes I have ridden roughly over it, but with my back turned to it, like Perseus approaching the gorgon.

​“This was the moment of danger. Let this go on, and all the pain returns. With a great effort, I leapt up onto the guardrail and threw myself forward into the welcoming darkness.”

​There was a long silence. “Go on,” Fr. Gregory said breathlessly. “What happened?”

​The penitent, his voice strained with emotion, went on: “Even as I stepped from the rail, the bridge shifted and groaned beneath me, twisting and crying out. It wrenched itself out of its form, tore open like a blossoming flower, reached one thick iron support out into the void like an enormous arm, and hooked the back of my coat. I hung in midair, suspended between stars and flood. For a moment, shock drove out all thought: dumb matter had disrupted my act, had caught me like a gentle giant, and now held me by the scruff of my neck like a mother cat, waiting — waiting for what? Why would the world care a scrap what happened to me?

​“Father, I saw it, I was convicted, I was guilty: I opened the secret door in my heart, and smells and sounds and colors came flooding in, overwhelming my poor heart, so tender from long neglect, and I longed for my daughter, and I loved my wife, and I yearned to embrace all that is. This world is good, it is good, I say it from the bottom of my heart: God who is knows.

​“Marissa, I loved you! Marissa — I did, I loved you, I long for you, I want you back so badly. Marissa, what will we do?”

​The man was sobbing uncontrollably. Fr. Gregory waited until the sobs had faded to silence, and then spoke tenderly, “When I came through this evening, the bridge had been entirely washed away. How did you escape?”

​There was another long pause. “Are you alright?” he asked. But his voice carried the bell-like harmony of a complete overtone series, the sound of words that have gone out and, finding no yielding surface, have returned to their owner with news of empty space. An image flashed through Fr. Gregory’s mind of the penitent slumped unconscious in the bottom of the confessional, and he raised his voice: “Are you there?”

His voice echoed.

Fr. Gregory leapt out of the confessional and ripped open the opposite door: no one. No one anywhere in the church. Trembling violently, he held his breath and listened intently for receding footsteps, for a door closing, for any sound. Nothing.

His breath came out as a ragged growl. For a moment he glared at the tabernacle, but then his eyes widened, his shoulders slumped, and he looked back at the confessional with all the hair on his neck standing on end. Slowly, reluctantly, he shut the penitent’s door and climbed back into the priest’s booth.

All was quiet. Fr. Gregory sat until his breath was even again, and then straightened his shoulders. In a firm voice he began: “God the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins.” He took a deep breath and made the sign of the cross: “Through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

Jeremy Holmes is Associate Professor of Theology at Wyoming Catholic College. He received a Bachelors in Liberal Arts at Thomas Aquinas College in California, a Masters in Sacred Theology from the International Theological Institute in Gaming, Austria, and a Doctoral Degree in Theology with an emphasis in New Testament Studies from Marquette University. He lives with his wife and seven of his eight children in Lander, Wyoming.