His grandmother, whom he loved very much, was against it almost right up until the last two or three weeks when she came to live with the family.
She went to her minister and told him about Dignitas. And everybody she shared with was kind of quietly agnostic and did not want to get involved.
It was very, very hard for the family. It amazed me that they stayed together because, very often, this type of stress shatters people and families. But in the end, each person in Craig’s life played the role they needed to play or did what was required.
Craig had enormous faith in his mother’s understanding of him and what he was going through. She was prepared to go to Dignitas with him. He was so convinced of her understanding of him that he knew that she would be incredibly sad and that she would miss him, but he felt that she would not wish him back in his present condition.
It is almost unforgivable that human beings have to go through this because they were caught between their love for him and their need to support his decision.
And in a way I was caught up as well, in my love and concern for him and setting him free from my limitations on him, setting him totally free from any requirements I wanted to make. I could make no requirements, no requests. I had to travel with him on this road.
After I buried him I went for therapy. I was dried out emotionally and spiritually. So I went to a friend who was also a fine therapist and spent a couple of hours with her. She affirmed me, as I was asking myself, “Did I do the right thing? Could I have handled it a different way?”
I left the therapist feeling a lot better, trusting that I had done the right thing. I know that in the end it is not about me but about the person who seeks my help.
One of the things that helped was to remember that I was dealing with a mystery and not a problem. If I turned Craig’s situation into a problem, I would have tried to solve it.
If something is a mystery, the only way you can encounter it is to enter it and experience it, to move into that mystery as deeply as you can and to treat the questions and answers as doors through which you walk, continually seeking deeper insights and truth.
At no stage did I have the answers. Each answer that came was a door through which I walked in order to reach deeper understanding.
I would, in walking this path, find doors that would take me closer and closer to Craig’s heart, to the mystery that was Craig, and that, for me, is perhaps the most important thing about how you treat another person.
I see myself as a “second-word person”. By that I mean that I cannot speak unless I hear the first word that someone wants to speak. Once I hear that first word, I can speak the second word.
And that is the way I was with Craig. It was about listening to him. I was then able to distinguish in my mind the difference between suicide and dying to find life.
The people who have committed suicide that I have dealt with have been very worried people, very distressed and often depressed, and we have worked hard at leading them towards healing.
Eventually we lose some of them because they take their lives when we least expect it. In fact, when they are beginning to feel better they are at their most vulnerable for they now have the energy to take their own lives.
I have wept over suicides. Sometimes to describe the way suicides see the world, I tell the family how some people look at the world through the crinkly glass in the bathroom. The other side is always out of shape. Forgive him or her, they were looking at things out of shape.
And then some of these families would say to me, “Would God receive him or her?” And I would say, “Let’s pretend that you and your husband took over from St Peter at the gates of heaven for a day and your son came walking up having committed suicide. Would you let him in?”
They would reply, “Yes, we would embrace him.” And I would reply, “I don’t think that God would do less. I think that God is more loving than any of us can believe… If you would embrace your loved one just imagine what God would do?”
I can still see Craig sitting in my office, and I would see none of the symptoms one would expect from someone so intent on suicide. Let me try to describe how he came across to me.
He was a person who had made a decision, an almost clinical decision that, because God loved him so much, God would understand if he took his own life. So there was no treatment necessary, he was like an arrow aiming for the bull’s-eye.
There was no way I felt like stopping him. Why? Because I felt I was in his world and it was right for him. And to be quite honest, if I had tried to stop him, he would have had no one to go to.
He was a gift to my life. And I think I was a gift to him. He taught me some of the deepest lessons I have learned. One was, and it was the most significant, learning to put myself to the side and totally enter his world. Being with him was an unrepeatable experience.
Or to put it another way, Craig and his parents and their relationship with me was unique. I know I keep on saying this but it was special. Mind you it was a journey that had its critics. I didn’t mind this for they were looking at things from the outside.
So, Craig enriched my life.
