But this was a uniquely difficult kind of death and a uniquely difficult kind of grief. When a person we love lives out her threescore and ten years and dies a peaceful death, we know how to deal with it. When someone dies earlier, of a disease or an accident, our grief is more painful. But we have ways of making sense of even that kind of tragedy. But suicide creates a different kind of grief altogether.
Suicide marks the negation and rejection of life itself.
It reflects at least a momentary despair and hopelessness. It indicates a sense of the absence of God. And according to biblical thought it is also sin, the sin of self-murder, an act forbidden by the Scriptures as a usurping of the sovereignty of God over human life. So as we grieved our friend we could neither celebrate a life lived to its natural completion nor cleanly grieve a premature but involuntary death. Instead, we had to come to terms with a premature and voluntary death, a death that negated the very principles by which Lisa lived as a Christian person in every other moment of her life.