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| What Dreams May Come |
Whether it's Rush Limbaugh using Williams' suicide as an example of how unhappy liberals are or some of my co-religionists saying suicide is the only unforgivable sin, it's like Stupid just went on sale at the Walmart.
Limbaugh is one thing. He jumped the shark years ago and hasn't said anything sensible or perceptive since Bush was president. The first Bush.
As for my fellow Catholics, I know the doctrine, but I refuse to believe that a Ted Bundy or an Adolf Hitler or even a Dick Cheney could repent at the last moment and scoot off to paradise, yet a depressed, troubled person could take his own life and never find his way out of Purgatory.
Ironically, one of Williams' more underrated movies dealt with exactly this subject. He plays a man who dies in an accident and goes to heaven. His wife can't cope with missing him. She kills herself and winds up in hell. He is told that she cannot be saved, that people who kill themselves are damned by the fact that they don't even know they're dead.
That's not the God I worship. In one of Stephen King's lesser books, "Desperation," much of the story is given up to thoughts of how tough God is and what sacrifices he demands of us. But the character who makes the ultimate sacrifice leaves a message behind that sums everything up in just three words.
"God is love."
I refuse to believe that the God in which I believe would punish someone who was in such terrible pain for no longer being able to cope with it.
Generally, it isn't bad people who take their own lives. The chance of someone like Dick Cheney killing himself is only slightly greater than the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series three years in a row.
Most of the people we lose are people who will be missed, people who really made a difference in other people's lives.
And the ones who live forever are the Rush Limbaughs and the Dick Cheneys.
It's a messed-up world.
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