I once stopped a man from killing himself. There was nothing noble in what I did, though the story might seem admirable from a distance—the kind of thing some people share on Facebook, with lines about never giving up on the people you love. 

What I actually did was prevent a person from doing something he desperately wanted to do. And afterward, I left him at a hospital while I went on with my life. 

I’m sorry this is happening, I hope you get better, but I have to go. That is, in essence, what I said. What else could I say? I had a job to do, bills to pay, and a baby on the way. Even if I’d had no other responsibilities, the hospital’s visiting hours were limited. 

But I still found time to visit him often in the following weeks. He told me he didn’t feel any better, but he showed enough “progress” (the scare quotes are his) to be discharged after almost a month. The medical system rushes things. Psychiatric hospitals are expensive and crowded, and insurance companies don’t want to pay more than they have to. I drove him home, said goodbye again, and went back to my bills, my job, my life. 

This was not the first such episode. Matt struggled with life in a way that was, to borrow a theological term, abyssal. The depth of his illness did not diminish with attention, medication, or love, though all three were applied generously. At least two other times that summer, he had called me—as I’d insisted—when he “felt suicidal” so that I could intervene. 

A few weeks after I brought him home that last time, he decided not to warn me. He took his life alone and in secret, tired of burdening his friends and family. Many people had helped him as much as they could, across many years. But what he needed was something no person or doctor could provide. 

I wish he hadn’t done it, but I wasn’t surprised he did. My brother was twenty-two and healthy. By every medical and moral metric available to us, he should not have died. There was no terminal diagnosis, no chronic pain, no physical deterioration that would make a case for merciful release. He had no addictions of any kind. And yet the interior experience of his suffering was total—he told me so, and I witnessed it.

I don’t say this to argue that his suicide was justified or somehow inevitable. Perhaps, if everything about his life had been different, it could have been avoided. But everything was not different. And my interventions across several years, however well-intentioned, amounted to asking a man to remain on the balcony of a burning building because the fire department might still come. The fire department did not come. 

Last March, twenty-five-year-old Noelia Castillo Ramos of Barcelona chose to end her life with the assistance of a physician. After previous suicide attempts rendered her physically disabled and suffering from constant pain, she was granted permission by her doctors and her mother to “finally rest.” 

Noelia’s story was well-covered by Catholic media and influencers, many of them incredulous that this could be allowed to happen. Pro-life advocate Lila Rose captured the prevailing tone, casting Noelia as a political victim and calling her death a “murder” by a government that was “giving up on her” and insisting that, instead, Noelia simply “needs care.” 

But Noelia had care, and plenty of it. She lived in constant dependence on her doctors, caretakers, and family. None of it was enough to sustain her will to live. She wanted to die, and did, even with the knowledge that people around the world prayed for her to change her mind. The decision was hers, and it’s one she had made and tried to carry out a few times already. 

I understand why the Church teaches that ending one’s life is wrong. The argument is familiar and, on its own terms, internally consistent: life is a gift from God, suffering can be redemptive, and no creature has the authority to revoke what only the Creator can give. I cannot think of a better principle. Suffering can be offered up in the model of Christ’s own agony, and the acceptance of death in God’s time is an act of faith. I embrace the principle in my own life, and I hope it sustains me, as it has before, when I suffer again. 

But the distance between affirming those ideas and applying them is considerable. In my experience, someone who has made up their mind to die has traversed a distance from which it is very difficult to return. Pretending otherwise is its own species of cruelty. Even the best rule can be spoken badly—with a resolve that mistakes clarity for compassion and treats unimaginable suffering as a problem easily, or already, solved. 

This is what troubled me about Rose’s framing of Noelia’s story. It was just a social-media post, I know, and not a pastoral letter. But it showed how easily we can become trite about suffering we have not sat with. “Suffers from depression” is clinical shorthand—a single label stretched over a vast and varied landscape of suffering, too thin to bear the weight of what Noelia actually endured. And one can only imagine how Noelia, who had been cared for exhaustively and at great cost to the people who loved her, might have received Rose’s prescription of “needs care.”

So when the affirmation turns tactical—when “culture of life” becomes a slogan deployed against people in agony, or against those who spend every day caring for them and doing their bidding—it reveals itself as something other than hope. To a person suffering enough pain to the point of preferring death, triumphantly insisting on the goodness of life (or, for that matter, combatively rejecting a “culture of death”) is likely to land not as hope but as a taunt.

Instead of Noelia or my brother, whose youth bore the potential of many more decades of life, imagine an eighty-four-year-old woman (we’ll call her Edith) of sound mind in chronic and escalating pain, perhaps on a morphine drip. In any prior century, she’d have been long dead. Her pain is overwhelming, beyond what any intervention has been able to reach. The building is burning, and the fire department will not come. And we are asking her to stay on the balcony, even for years on end, while we visit and attend to her suffering at times when it’s convenient for us, during our own lives’ commercial breaks. 

Are we so eager to pray for Edith? That she might change her mind, choose to live, and thereby suffer another day, week, or year? If so, why? Is it because we believe a full life awaits her on the other side—one that features our steady and loving presence? Or does it just feel better to know that we didn’t give up? I think we are considerably more disturbed when the young choose to die—when potential is wasted, when a life unlived haunts us—than when the sufferer is likely to die soon either way. The media coverage (or lack thereof) surrounding the two respective events certainly reflects such an imbalance. But the two people’s desire is similar. The old woman on the morphine drip wants to die as badly as the young woman. That we are more disturbed by one than the other tells us something about how seriously we are (or, more precisely, are not) taking the suffering itself. 

“We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of.” That’s from paragraph 2280 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which introduces its treatment of suicide. Ultimately, this teaching tells us what we must not do. It doesn’t give us anything helpful to say to those facing intolerable suffering. A rule, and our embrace of it, can be correct and still be insufficient—still leave enormous human suffering unresolved, still ask more of people than they are able to give. 

It’s been eleven years since my brother took his life, and I think about him often. I think about how he thanked me when I dropped him off, as if I had done him a favor rather than merely delayed him. I think about what it means that the Church’s teaching, applied to his case, would have required me to do exactly what I did: intervene, prevent, deposit him somewhere safe, and leave. Over and over. Until he found his way around me. 

Looking back, it’s hard for me to imagine what else I could’ve done, or done differently, to save my brother’s life. Those who’ve lost loved ones to suicide often feel the same sense of helplessness—a jarring dead end with no silver lining. All that’s left for me is to memorialize his life and his suffering with humility, knowing I will never fully understand either.

The Church’s teaching on suicide is fixed. I cannot change it. But whether it should change is neither the hardest nor the most important question. Nor, for that matter, are the laws governing whether it’s permitted. What’s really at stake here is whether we can sit with each other’s unbearable pain as human beings and fellow travelers, and not just as partisans of political positions. Are we willing to stay with that pain—with all the gravity and sobriety it demands—even at the expense of comfortable, resolute condemnations against suicide?

We owe the suffering at least that honesty. We owe them the admission that the balcony is burning and that asking someone to stay on it, even for the right reasons, is still a terrible thing to ask.

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