The Harrowing of Hell

Suicide and the Soul

Several years ago, my closest friend took her own life. Her death catapulted me into an abyss of unanswerable questions. Especially: Does suicide destroy or illuminate soul friendship? Our relationship as poets, soul friends and sister elders was grounded in deep and daring contemplation of matters of ultimate meaning. At the heart of our contemplation was a systematic study of death—the greatest and most demanding of teachers.

I have been an Episcopal priest for twenty years. The church I worked for had an alternative weekly Eucharistic service started by women who valued inclusive language, periods of silence, anointing for healing and passing the consecrated bread and wine to one another around a circle. The priest was one of the circle and moved to the altar at the center only for the Eucharistic prayer. I was fortunate to preside at this service for several years and to work with the leaders in planning many creative liturgies. This group of mostly older women did not shy away from either the spiritual or physical realities of death. Every Holy Saturday, during the evening service before Easter Sunday, the circle sat in dark silence broken only by a few readings and chants. For that holy hour, we prayerfully descended with Jesus into death.

When Christians recite the creed, we acknowledge the centrality of death within the cycle of life, death and rebirth. The Apostle’s Creed bluntly affirms that Jesus “died and was buried, descended into hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead.” The descent to hell is less directly stated in the Nicene Creed: “he suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day.” To rise again implies descent.

The rich conjuring potential of the “descent into hell” captures my imagination. Christians have traditionally referred to Jesus’ time below as “the harrowing of hell.” To harrow means to break up, break apart, as in preparing ground for planting by tilling. It also means to lacerate the feelings—feelings that are by definition acutely distressful or painful. Each year between Good Friday (Jesus’ crucifixion) and Easter Sunday (the resurrection), I am pulled to join Jesus in hell. I try to break up old ground. Using the ancient, powerful image of hellfire, I also try to let unnecessary things burn away.

One Holy Saturday evening in April, we sat in our circle, a few candles flickering on the altar, chanting softly while people joined the service. The door opened and a stranger entered, a very tall, elegant woman. She sat across from me. Each long, rich silence was broken by poems and Taize chants about grief, loss, death and darkness, alternating with the appointed Holy Saturday readings from Job, Lamentations and Gospel portions regarding Jesus’ burial. Slowly, one by one, the candles on the altar were extinguished, pulling us ever deeper into darkness. The new woman’s eyes burned across the circle in the dim light, her face wet with tears. I wept as well, especially during the haunting chant: “Within our darkest night, You kindle the fire that never dies away, never dies away…” Finally, we sat in complete silence and darkness. The room thrummed with Presence. It felt like sinking into stone. After the service in the hall, the stranger took my hands and we stood face to face in silence, looking deep into one another, tears running down our faces.

That was my introduction to Nora (not her real name). Four years later, Nora took her own life. Between the dark Holy Saturday service of our first meeting and her death, we met regularly, often weekly. We became anam ċara—soul friends. We consciously and explicitly committed ourselves to a shared spiritual journey with a rigorous course of study. Our central topic was always related to the transformation of death.

Smell the Roses

Intuitively, we selected books related to old age, spirituality and death, guided by dreams and synchronistic events. Books, films and artwork regularly appeared, syncing uncannily with challenging life conundrums, stretching us always, beckoning us toward strange, intriguing realms. Between meetings, we studied, pondered and wrote. We noted our dreams. When we got together, we read passages from books and our writing out loud to each other. We listened to each other, we listened to our own hearts, we listened to God.

The work was tremendously disturbing for me. Looking at death terrified me. I had just come out of a serious cancer scare and was facing my own mortality. I felt I had to decide with every fiber of my being to live. I sensed that living fully meant facing what death meant to me, and I did not want to. I was and am afraid of dying. Nora was not. I had never met anyone as unafraid of death as Nora. She was able to descend into the chaos of the unconscious again and again, to boldly face the ramifications of the little deaths we must die to relinquish illusions of control over our lives. Her favorite wisdom saying was “Die before you die.” Which both intrigued and horrified me. Nora did not fear dissolution. She may, in fact, have yearned for it.

We began our studies with John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul and ċara means friend. We met with a spiritual director, who helped us define how we wanted to be soul friends. We recognized that our first commitment had to be to our own self-care and flourishing. Nora and I had much in common in terms of our early hurts. We were both oldest daughters in large working-class Catholic families. Each of us had a cruel parent and sustained significant abuse. We were both divorced and had grown children. We identified strongly with our Catholic heritage but were no longer at home in the Catholic Church; nor did we feel truly at home in the Episcopal Church. Yet she joined the church where I worked and came to many of my programs and services. We were grounded in Christianity, especially our shared love of Christ, the Eucharist and our devotion to Mother Mary, but we were open to all streams of spiritual wisdom.

O’Donohue emphasized that you can’t love another person unless you do the difficult spiritual work of loving yourself. We both struggled mightily with loving ourselves, and were old enough to know that expecting another person to fill that void was disastrous for a relationship. So our focus throughout was on supporting each other in loving ourselves— physically, emotionally and spiritually.

Now, two years after Nora’s death, I ask myself, would I have been able to sustain our relationship had I known she would die at her own hand? I honestly do not know. My approach to death was rather simplistic. I believed suicide was wrong and that I had to convince her not to kill herself. That sounds arrogant to me now, but I truly believed it at the time. I was fighting for life and wanted her to fight alongside me.

It’s not like Nora was morbid. She was, paradoxically, one of the most alive people I have ever known. She had hundreds of photos of flowers on her phone and knew their names. She had personal relationships with the plants in her neighborhood. Her living room was crowded with plants, each of whom she doted upon. During Covid summers, we spent dozens of hours wandering through a nearby rose garden, endlessly smelling flowers, enraptured by subtle differences in scent, color and texture, laughing at their crazy names. We sat by the river watching the water flow by, listening raptly to the birds. During Covid winters we met in the park, bundled in puffed-up coats, quilts and warm hats, reading Rilke out loud, swapping recipes for sugar-free cookies, worrying about our kids.

Tender Regard

Yet always, she wanted to die.

Nora’s day-to-day challenges were grindingly difficult and her resources dwindling. Now in her seventies, she had been on disability for two decades, which put her well below the poverty line. Tremors made daily tasks increasingly onerous. It became nearly impossible for her to butter a piece of bread or brush her teeth. Medical assistance was scandalously difficult to obtain. She rode the bus everywhere, but often could not leave her little apartment for days because of health problems. We talked frequently about finding an assisted living situation, but the waiting lists were long. I became aware of the increasing number of elders with disabilities and the seriousness of homelessness in our town. The worst obstacle was in her mind. A vibrant, beautiful, sensual woman, Nora found it impossible to imagine accepting basic bodily care from paid strangers. For her, being confined to a wheelchair was death in life. Nora could face and even celebrate the idea of death, but she could not face physical helplessness and dependency.

One day, talking with a social worker who worked with older people, I asked, rather naively. “What is the plan? Where is the safety net for impoverished elders?”

“Honestly,” my friend told me, “many people, when I ask them, say seriously that their plan is to die. To kill themselves.” We had been sliding towards this for decades, she pointed out, but a global pandemic had suddenly put tremendous stress on an already collapsing system.

I wanted to save her, to DO something. I wanted to tear down the old, rotten system and build a new one with my bare hands. I wanted to advocate for her, pound on doors and make demands. However, that was not our agreement. She did not want a rescuer or a caretaker, she wanted a soul friend. My job was to keep loving myself, to grow strong and well. To face my own fears of death and old age in a society that does not value elders, helplessness and dependency. To show up. That’s what I did well—I showed up, week after week. I got better at expressing my tender regard for Nora and refraining from judging her and solving her problems.

Descent

One of the most powerful books we studied was Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women, by Sylvia Britton Perera. Jungian analyst Perera provides a compelling psychological interpretation of the ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna, Goddess of Heaven and Earth, who makes a deadly journey into the underworld to find her suffering, angry sister Ereshkigal. I say “deadly” because Inanna must descend through seven gates and suffer being stripped, humiliated and tortured. When she arrives in the land of the dead, Ereshkigal kills Inanna with “the eyes of death” and hangs her on a nail to rot.

Nora and I spent many months with this dense book, wrestling with unsettling images of death and transformation. Ereshkigal demands not only death, but the complete destruction of individuality. The only way Inanna can be transformed is to consciously and willingly surrender her bright, “can-do” upper-world values, especially her freedom and power.

Inanna’s suffering and submission to death made Jesus’ willing surrender to his death more accessible to Nora and I. We reflected on Jesus’ words in the garden of Gethsemane when he faces his death: “Not my will, but thine be done.” Though the story of Inanna is thousands of years older than the New Testament, it grapples with similar issues in ways we could relate to as women. We ventured beyond the question, “What is God’s will for my life?” to the more difficult, “What is God’s will for my death?”

At last I had found someone who was willing to grapple with truly difficult questions. I had gotten a degree in theology and entered the church as a spiritual leader to do precisely this. Though as a feminist I had issues with Christianity, I had provisionally accepted my received tradition because the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ played such a pivotal role. However, I found that many Christians do not like to linger on Good Friday and the harrowing of hell—the death part. They want to rush over it to Easter, to resurrection, eggs, flowers and triumphal celebration. Nora was willing to face and integrate the implications of death.

In my mind, we were preparing for our deaths in the hopefully-distant future. I was willing to psychologically die, to shed illusions, to wrestle with my desire to control everything. I wanted to grow old with Nora exploring how to fully be alive until our “natural” deaths. I relished every minute of our time together. We did not ignore the day-to-day realities of our struggles as aging, single women. With Nora’s support, I made a series of decisions about taking care of myself that enhanced my longevity and flourishing. With my encouragement and support, Nora took difficult steps towards healing and advocating for herself. In my fantasy, we were on the same path.

Bottom Line

I live in a retirement community with people significantly older than myself. I have witnessed the long, slow deaths of people who strongly believed they had to take death as it came to them. I have also witnessed spouses and family taking heroic measures to keep loved ones alive when it wasn’t clear what the dying persons themselves wanted. People have taken advantage of physician-assisted death. Elders routinely crack dark jokes about killing themselves. This has become part of our everyday culture as elders in this country. I’ve led many programs in the church contemplating the spiritual meaning of death, but we don’t talk deeply about the specifics of our own physical deaths. The Episcopal church has a strong value of respecting individual beliefs and there is no consensus on assisted suicide, let alone on a person taking their own life. We do not talk about it openly.

Looking back, I could not accept that Nora had her own path. We spoke about our histories of depression, suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. We talked about assisted suicide and the Death with Dignity movement. We grappled with our inherited Catholic rigidities—the prohibition of euthanasia, the certitude that death is the province of God alone. In our tradition, suicide was a mortal sin. That conditioning does not yield easily. Nora and I did agree that sovereignty was our bottom line. We agreed that in the end, how we died had to be each person’s decision. From our long experience of oppression as women and mothers from our class background, we had each come to unshakable convictions about our freedom of choice.

Dimly, I suspected that Nora intended to choose the time of her death, and that the time was sooner rather than later. She increasingly tried to tell me, but I argued her out of it every time. I thought my job was to keep her alive. This is deep within me. My own mother wanted to die for most of my childhood, and I worked hard to keep her alive by making her life easier. Philosophically and theologically, I had no sense of peace or acceptance about my own death. I believed that dying the long, slow way or however it came to me had something to teach me. I stubbornly clung to the belief that I was convincing enough to keep Nora alive. Selfishly, I wanted her in my life. I wanted her alive. I don’t think it was nothing that I was able to articulate this to Nora. She seemed to be glad that I valued her so highly.

On the surface, Nora let me think I was talking her out of dying. I was unable to acknowledge signs that may have indicated otherwise. She told me offhandedly about watching videos of people around the world who had decided to take their own lives. She participated in online events that celebrated dying. Since she had an official “mental health diagnosis,” she could not legally use our state’s Death with Dignity provision but she did extensive research on how a person could die, and told me about it.

There were also positive signs—or signs I chose to take as being in line with my hopes. On our last long walk, Nora described her vision of becoming a death doula. She wanted to get hospice training to be a midwife for other people’s deaths. She would have been brilliant at sitting with people through the process of dying. It did not occur to me that Nora was actually in the process of midwifing her own death, or that she was asking me, as her soul friend, to be her death doula. She could not ask directly, and I was not able to think that broadly.

Necessary Things

One day, I entered Nora’s apartment and knew immediately that something was different. “I am going to take my own life,” she announced bluntly. “If you try to talk me out of it, I won’t say any more.”

A wave of grief swept over me, the sneaker wave I had been dreading. I bowed my head, my heart pounding. I knew she was serious and that to argue with her would violate our deepest shared values. Dimly, I realized that my desire to keep her alive was my issue, my problem, my path. A part of me that had to die.

I listened for two hours, trying to breathe, shocked and amazed by all the work she had done alone. Miserable that I had not been a better friend to her. She showed me the books she had found and talked me through her detailed plan. Showed me the drugs obtained through the internet. I could not touch them. Told me how she planned to say goodbye to each of her children and grandchildren, which friends and relatives she would tell, which she would leave letters for. There were piles of books and precious objects earmarked for various people, including me. She described the precautions she had taken so none of us would be linked in any way to her action, since it is a felony to assist a person in committing suicide. Nora had thought of every detail, and each of us in very specific ways.

As Nora spoke of these terrible, necessary things, weeping but clearly resolute, it slowly dawned on me that I was the one person getting the most general overall picture. In one way, this was an ultimate declaration of love and trust. But a tumult of impossible dilemmas reared up within me. I was flooded with questions about what it meant to be a friend and what it meant to be a priest. Was Nora asking me to be her priest? Was this a confession? Was she asking me to absolve her in some way? To bless and sacramentally anoint her into death?

Nora asked that we meet once more before her death, in a week. After that, to reduce any chance of complicity or legal responsibility, no one could know her exact plan. So I had at least a week. I am still profoundly grateful that I didn’t just get a phone call long after the fact. I had this precious time, but it was acutely painful. I stumbled out into the wet, winter day, unsure how to move through the world. Most of all, I was convinced Nora had given me an unspoken invitation when she told me her plan—an invitation to anoint her into death. To bless her on her chosen journey, not only as a sister friend and anam ċara, but as a priest, a representative of her spiritual community. I knew it would mean a lot to her, give her some peace.

Harrowing

I was torn to shreds by the dilemma. What do I do? I wailed to God. Fight to keep her alive? Bless her into her death? I wept and prayed. When I did sleep, I had strange dreams I could not interpret one way or the other. God was not going to give me an easy answer.

I brought my dilemma to a trusted friend who had been a priest for over fifty years. In anguish, I laid out my questions about my responsibility as a priest and described my overwhelming desire to keep her alive. Priests are mandatory reporters related to any kind of abuse, but suicide is a gray area. In many cases, priests do report serious threats of self-harm, which can save a person’s life. I questioned whether I had a responsibility to “step in.” Was she “asking for help”? Actually asking me to “stop her”? I put these phrases in quotes because they are laden with my own agenda. My personality desperately wanted to take over. I wanted to DO something—solve the problem, “take action.” Could I live with myself if I did not take action? I wailed. But I also knew that jumping in to “save the day” was often a way of avoiding feelings of pain and helplessness. My priest friend agreed that in this case, she would not thank me for stepping in or reporting her. Nora would only do it again later, and with the added burden of broken trust between us.

 I spoke to the spiritual director who had guided Nora and I in our commitment work as anam ċara. What did it mean to be soul friends when it came to suicide? What is the difference between “chosen death” and “natural death”? What did it mean for me to be a priest as well as an anam ċara? What responsibility did I have towards the larger community for whom I was a spiritual leader? Like a good spiritual director, he gave no answers. He sat with me, heard me out, validated my pain, and promised to pray for both of us.

I spoke to my counselors, asking the same questions. What does it mean to be a friend? To be a priest? To be a human being? In therapy, I could ask the hardest questions of all: How could she leave me? Why wasn’t I enough to stay alive for? No one could replace her. My heart was broken. I felt Nora was selfishly abandoning me here in the material world.

I had made my own descent into hell, and it was harrowing.

During that endless week, I somehow decided that I could not anoint and bless Nora as a priest. To this day, I do not know if that was the right decision. Some days, I wish I had been more generous. But by the time the week was up, I could not do it wholeheartedly. I certainly could not do it half-heartedly.

I met with her. It was a terrible hour. Nora exhibited no doubt about what she was doing. Perhaps I could have been more flexible if there had been doubt. If she had been torn the way I was torn. She appeared glad to be leaving all of the pain of this life behind, and excited and curious about what was ahead. She did not express regret for leaving me.

When I parted from Nora that day, I stood nose to nose with her, holding her hands, just as we had stood after that first Holy Saturday service. Looking deep into her eyes, I said the thing I felt I had to say. “I love you, and I don’t support what you are doing.” In the end I wanted to speak to her as a friend, as me, and not as a representative of anything or anyone else.

“I know,” she murmured.

“If you can reach me from the other side, please do,” I said. “If anyone can reach me, it would be you.”

“I will do what I can,” she promised.

A week later, I woke to a text she had sent in the middle of the night. She had written simply, “I love you, Christine.” That was our last communication on this side.

A Breath of Wind

The issue of death by suicide is complex. There is no way to reduce it. This is old, compacted ground that must be harrowed, broken up and tilled in order to prepare it to be planted with the new, tender and unknown thing. The harrowing of this particular hell is acutely stressful and painful. The breaking up of a buried, unexamined view of reality raises many, many questions, with no possibility of formulaic answers. I do not know and cannot know whether I did the right or best thing in connection with my friend’s death.

During the Eucharistic prayer, the congregation says: “Dying you destroyed our death,” which for some Christians means that Jesus died for us so that we don’t have to. It’s tempting to think, “Phew! That’s taken care of!”

I believe Christians must grapple with all aspects of death as part of our soul work. Nora and I talked at length about what we hoped—and feared—happened to our souls after we were no longer embodied beings. We learned from ancient wisdom, and accepted, that to be anam ċara means to be committed soul-to-soul not just during our mortal lifetime, but after death. We are still in relationship. This wisdom invites me to continue supporting Nora’s soul work, and suggests that she is supporting mine. I still feel flashes of fury at Nora for leaving me. Sometimes I want to simply let her go, sever our soul connection. But today, as I write this, I feel her enigmatic smile as I leaf through the Dictionary of Etymology she gave me for my birthday, searching for words to explain the patently unexplainable—one of our favorite activities as poets.

“That one,” I feel her murmuring. “That’s the word. For a moment or two,” she adds with her wry humor. “Until it flies away on a breath of wind.” And she blows lightly on her hand, sending an invisible kiss toward the open sky.