As Many As I Love - Suicide, the Church, and the Believer

By Lawrence Taylor, M.Div., Ph.D.

This is a testimony of a father, ordained to Christian minister, board certified as a chaplain, with a PhD in psychology and experience as a psychotherapist, pastor, teacher and college administrator, whose oldest son committed suicide. it is the story of grief, hope, recovery, and grace. It outlines the historical perspective on suicide by religions, and gives practical advice as to how we can prevent suicide and comfort survivors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329089310

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As Many As I Love - Suicide, the Church, and the Believer

As many as I Love: Suicide, the Church, and the Believer

Lawrence R. Taylor, M.S., M.Div., Ph.D., BCC, BCPC[1]

As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent. (Revelation 3:19 KJV[2])

I correct and discipline everyone I love. So be diligent and turn from your indifference. (Revelation 3:19 NLT[3])

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[1] © Lawrence R. Taylor, M.Div., Ph.D., BCCi Dr. Taylor is an ordained American Baptist minister and a healthcare chaplain in the Cincinnati area. His PhD is in psychology, and he has additional expertise in critical incident stress management and suicide grief.

[2] The Authorized (King James) Version of the Holy Bible is in the public domain)

[3] Holy Bible. New Living Translation copyright© 1996, 2004, 2007, 2013 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

An Amazing Day

i thank You God for most this amazing day:

for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth

day of life and love and wings: and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any - lifted from the no

of all nothing - human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e e cummings

It was a typical clear, bright, sunny, cold, February Colorado Springs morning – cloudless sky, unlimited visibility, the Rocky Mountain Front Range punctuated by snowcapped Pike’s Peak and Cheyenne Mountain; western scrub jays, mountain chickadees, brown creepers, snow buntings and western tanagers at the feeders, horses in the pasture, sheep and goats rummaging, chickens pecking here and there; a golden eagle perched on a telephone pole.

My thirty-fifth birthday. I was inwardly pleasantly anticipatory, but outwardly phlegmatic, having been raised in a noncelebratory environment. I drove the 30 minutes to work, and settled in behind my desk to begin arranging the appointments for the day.

Three families and two individual clients – all from homes with adjudicated child abuse. My job as a systemic psychotherapist[4] was to fix them so the kids could go home and everybody could live happily ever after. Or not. In which case, my job was to tell the court that this child would never be safe around that perpetrator.

Around 10:00 AM the phone rang. It was Elliott.

Hi, dad, I overslept and missed the bus to school.

Oh well, don’t worry about it. Take the truck if you want to go (he learned to drive the previous year – this was, after all, the country), or just take a day off if you want. You’re getting all A’s and you pretty much know this stuff anyway.

He sounded fine.

The last thing I ever said to him was, I love you buddy.

The last thing he ever said to me was, I love you too, dad.

After a therapy session, maybe two hours later, the phone rang again.

A panicked voice I recognized as a neighbor down the lane from our little farm said, You have to get home right away! and hung up.

A chill went through me; I called the house.

Ellicott Volunteer Fire Department, Brad speaking.

This is Dr. Taylor, what’s going on?

I am not permitted to give information over the phone, sir.

Give me a break! I’m half an hour away! What the hell is happening at my house?

All I can tell you, sir, is that we have one person down and you should get home immediately.

Trembling, I hung up, grabbed my coat, told a colleague I had to go and left the building.

As I drove the old puke-green Mazda station wagon that came with my new wife when we married five months previously, I was numb. I prayed. I hoped. I intuitively sensed something egregious awaited me.

Right after we married, Kathy and I purchased an old farmhouse, built in 1909, on forty acres east of the Springs where our kids (I was divorced three years prior and had custody of three of my four children) could experience the ideal life. We sought to live out John Prine’s advice:

Blow up your TV, throw away your paper

Move to the country, build you a home

Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches

Try an’ find Jesus on your own[5]

We had horses, sheep, dairy goats, chickens, dogs, cats, 4H projects, fresh air, dilapidated outbuildings, vegetable gardens and kids.

Joshua was eight, toe-headed, cute and funny. Rachel was eleven, sensitive, quiet, loving. Elliott was fourteen, almost fifteen, and exceptionally brilliant. (Becky, who was just fourteen months younger than Elliott, lived with her mom and visited regularly.)

When my house came into view, I saw the flashing lights. Ambulances, fire engines, volunteer firefighter vehicles of various sizes and sorts, sheriff’s deputy cruisers.

A young man opened my car door for me. That look on his face – sad, grief-stricken, hurting, sympathetic. He said nothing, but directed me to the ambulance.

The back doors were open. Inside, my wife Kathy sat on the gurney, a firefighter/EMT next to her holding an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. The EMT was a man I considered a friend. Gene was probably 50 but looked 70. He owned a country general store and repair shop and a truck he used to deliver fuel. He fixed and jury-rigged our cars, pickup truck, and tractor, and kept our underground hand-cranked tank filled with gasoline.

Kathy was as white as the proverbial ghost.

It’s Elliott. He’s dead.

All I could do was think that I had to get out of the ambulance. Claustrophobia enveloped me.

The other firefighters and paramedics were alarmed. They thought I might collapse, so they kept close.

What happened?

I was already crying. The numbness that had inundated me when I got the phone call now consumed my being.

Quietly, Gene replied, He left a note.

Suicide!? Elliott committed suicide?

In my most harrowing nightmares, I never imagined that such a thing could happen. Most especially to Elliott. He was too bright, too lovable, too full of life and curiosity. He was too adventuresome. Elliott skied double black diamond slopes on his first trip to Keystone (actually his first time skiing anywhere). Elliott was a technical and free-climbing enthusiast. One day, with the younger kids, we drove into Garden of the Gods and I spotted a tiny speck 300 feet up on the side of a rock formation. Kathy exclaimed, Look at that crazy guy, way up there! It was Elliott.

The details slowly emerged.

I had a .22 bolt action, single shot rifle I used to chase coyotes away from the sheep. (Never could hit anything.) Elliott had dressed as if he were going someplace. Leather jacket, dark glasses, hat. His cat that normally lived outdoors was in the house. He had indeed left a note. I’m not depressed. I love you all. I just want to try a new life. Elliott had pressed the rifle to his forehead and pulled the trigger.

Had I not owned that gun, had it been inaccessible, Elliott might very likely still be alive.

Outside the ambulance, I paced and cried and clung to Kathy. Scripture flooded my mind.

The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord. [6]

I have to get to Rachel and Josh.

The school bus driver had wisely dropped them off at a neighbor’s house. Barbara and Lloyd were good friends and mentors. A generation older than us, we bought the house and land from them. They carried the mortgage. Lloyd taught me animal husbandry. Together, we fenced and built and repaired, and I listened to stories about the Great Depression and how his family lived off of jackrabbits and dust. I learned that he was born premature and kept in a cigar box in a slow burning oven to warm up.

Rachel and Joshua were standing in the living room looking anxiously out the picture window down the hill at our house where the emergency lights continued to flash.

Kathy and I rushed in. All four of us embraced and cried.

Elliott’s dead.

Why? What happened? Rachel asked as she choked on tears.

He killed himself, I told them directly.

I did not know it then, but that pain would remain intense and threaten to undo our very souls for years to come. It would never leave us completely.

Sorrow, Like Sea Billows Roll

The terrible agony of loss that not only swept over us, but also gripped our hearts in permanent sorrow, is beyond description. Even years later, after the numbness, sadness, weeping, and fears have mostly worn off, there remain a constant wound of grief, an inner aching, a tender bleeding spot within the heart that will never change.

And, if truth were known, we do not want it to change. The permanent sorrow, the inner tenderness of pain, does not so much hurt as remind. It reminds us of the life, in our case, the life of my son and my children’s brother, who touched us inwardly; it reminds us of the love that we bear for him forever. To lose that touch of sorrow would be to lose love, to say in essence that our lives were never profoundly and fundamentally changed for having known and loved Elliott. It is more than just he living in our memories, it is that contact with him blessed us, changed us, enriched us, and made us more human, more aware of life and love. The inner sorrow bleeds continuously, but it does not hurt as the early agony did. It is a sweet sorrow that flows from the tender, severe mercies of God.[7]

Our neighbors fed us, put us up for the night, went down to the house, cleaned up the blood, fed the animals, milked the goats and tidied up. They never asked for thanks.

I am so grateful that I never had to see my son’s blood on the walls and rug. It was bad enough that my wife Kathy had to see it when she had come home to find his slain body.

Her first reaction was a terrorized fear that he’d been murdered, and that the murderer was still present. Panicked, she drove seven miles to a country garage and burst