When Someone Dies, We Start Asking Why

This post hurts like hell! I hate this so much.

I saw her grow up. My child watched Bug’s Life. On repeat. Like little kids do.

I watched Remember the Titans. She was adorable, beautiful, and more than that; she was humane and talented. I cheered for her. Kept wanting her to win. And she did. She spoke. She lived in truth in spite of all the danger. She won. She could have just kept silent about her pain, but she chose to speak. Through it all, she was so brave. She chose to be a warrior. 

Hayden Panettiere. Photo: chaubaby / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

May she rest now. Gratitude and appreciation for everything that you did to make our world better.

We have recently lost prominent people to suicide, to trauma and unrelenting pain and suffering.

And whenever this happens, there is an understandable hunger for explanation.

People want to know what happened.

What was wrong?

Did somebody miss something?

Was there trauma?

The difficult truth is that suicide rarely gives the living a neat explanation.

We should be especially careful about assigning trauma, depression, addiction, relationship problems, or any other single cause to a particular person’s death unless those facts are actually known. A human life cannot be reverse-engineered from its ending.

But these deaths can still make us ask something important about ourselves.

How good are we at recognizing suffering before it becomes unbearable?

We have become remarkably practiced at responding to people after they fall apart.

We are less practiced at building communities in which people can say, long before catastrophe:

I am not doing well.

Something happened to me.

I cannot stop doing this.

I am ashamed.

I need help.

Those are frightening sentences to say when you believe saying them will cost you respect, employment, relationships, status, masculinity, femininity, belonging, or dignity.

So people learn to perform wellness. Sometimes extraordinarily well.

This is why changing our culture around mental health cannot simply mean encouraging people to “speak up.” Someone has to be safe to speak to. Treatment has to be reachable. Confidentiality has to mean something. Families need language for distress. Friends need to know that listening is not interrogation. Communities need places where a person can be struggling without immediately becoming a scandal.

We cannot know every private battle. But we can build a world in which fewer battles have to remain private.