So, can I say to you that that experience enriched me? I am not giving myself marks for being altruistic. I was put in a position where I needed to forget myself.
I think Craig moved in his thinking from performance to meaning. He came here talking about performance. How he had to end his life. And we went from action into meaning. It was the meaning that kept him going.
When I counsel suicides, they usually tell me how they are going to do it. Craig didn’t.
I said to him, “If you manage to do this, what effect will it have on your parents?” And he said, “Well, they will be very sad, no doubt, but a major problem will be removed from their lives.”
He understood what it would mean for his parents, because they had walked such a long road with him and he felt it would be good for both of them if he died. He said they would feel the pain but their problems would be over. So, he saw his death as sad for them but liberating. Because his mother could go out again without having to stay at home with him. He was thinking of others as well.
He began seeing his death as a gift to himself and to his parents, to those who loved him. They would not be put through the agony of watching him writhe on a bed.
He had this ability to care for others, as well as think through his own issues. Now a suicide doesn’t think like that. A suicide doesn’t stop to ask, what is this going to do to my family?
Some suicidal people can be vindictive. “I’ll get my father for this,” or “This boyfriend dropped me, I will give him pain for the rest of his life.”
That kind of vindictiveness is often part of suicide. That was not present in him. Craig was on a different kind of mission. He could not see any future; he could not see how his dying by normal means could benefit anybody. If he had lived to 40 or 50, he could not see living longer as a gift to anybody.
I have often wondered why he wanted to write about it. Dying does not make you famous, I told him. He was of the opinion that he wanted people to know that a person deciding to die could be doing the right thing. He also hoped that people could read about his life and think deeply about their own situations, hoping that it would turn them to gratitude.
The right people arrived at the right time for him and I believe, with Craig, that somehow God was in on this thing.
People who will be reading this book will probably wonder how a Christian minister who had been a bishop of a church could not have stopped this young man from doing what he was going to do, could not have preached to him about the evil of suicide.
For, as I have said, taking his life was not evil. Of course if one is forced to listen to someone who wants to murder and rape it is entirely different. They want to destroy others and that cannot be condoned.
What I am saying about Craig is that he became convinced that in taking his life God would agree with him and receive him. He never doubted that. Nor did he doubt that his parents would be liberated from a deep burden. There is a difference here.
When it was all over I thought, if you show this on the stage you would never believe it.
Life is a very messy business and most of us want it to be clean and sterile. But the messiness of life, which someone like Craig brings to us, is a sort of spiritual compost, something that provokes us to learn, think and grow.
For religious people thinking about assisted suicide, self-killing or euthanasia is a whole new territory we need to move into. If the Church is honest, people will admit that over the centuries positions have shifted on many things: slavery, divorce, equal rights for women, for example.
Craig’s journey, if it is going to be helpful, would need to be read critically and carefully and I hope people will recognise the sacrifices some parents have to make for the good of their children.
I hope they can recognise that a person can make a decision that they should die rather than face what we have been talking about, and allow them to make that decision without trying to stop them; I think, I hope, people will come to that conclusion.
And I hope that out of it all comes a deep desire to listen more, to not be so critical, to learn something of what it means to enter another person’s world, to park yourself to the side, and to know what it means to live with mystery and not problems, because mysteries have to be experienced deeply.
12Sandy Coffey: Bosnia or Mauritius
Sandy Coffey is an established photographer and magazine feature writer who lives in Port Elizabeth with her husband, David, and sons Peter (15) and Jonathan (13).
Sandy says her work as a photographer is “about getting closer to the essence of life”, and meeting Craig during the last four months of his life, she feels, did exactly that.
Sandy had intended to write Craig’s book, but the events that unfolded
