by Jan Deelstra

Created on: February 17, 2009

What Happens To Suicide Cases After Death

Following my son's suicide I read and studied anything and everything I could find about "life after death," about spirituality, about suicide, about religions, about reincarnation, etc. Because, at that time, I owned a small "angel store" I was fortunate to have immediate access to literally hundreds of titles. Besides allowing me limitless information with which to form an educated opinion, reading was also a successful escape mechanism, a reprieve from the indescribable suffering. For several months, I drown in pages and volumes, and came up for air only long enough to find the next book, where I submerged again.

Eventually, having sifted and sorted and discarded notions and theologies and biases and blame, I surfaced with a fist full of information and an opinion. My son was not, I determined, in some horrific black space. The horrific black space rather, is the place from which he had sought escape.

Due primarily to a chance of birth, I am well aware of the Christian perspective of "heaven" and "hell" and of guilt and shame. Now that I have had ample opportunity to study the concept, I don't buy it. "Hell" is, I've determined, the place here on Earth where suicides take place. Since my son's death, I have learned that suicide is the #3 cause of death to American adolescents between the ages of 14-24. In Utah, where my 21-year-old son lived at the time of his death, the suicide rate jumps to #2 cause.

These outrageous statistics do not incorporate deaths due to high-risk behaviors, automobile accidents, or drug and alcohol over-doses deemed "accidental." Given the fact that high-risk activities are by their very nature "suicidal," perhaps those statistics should be included in the totals of suicides. When the numbers are integrated, the rate jumps sharply to suicide being the #1 cause of death to our youth. And children as young as age 5 have committed suicide. Are they, who may be too young to understand the finality of death, doomed too to "Hell"?

Because the number of adolescents killing themselves is egregious is not in itself enough to make claim that hell exists exclusively here on earth. As a mother who has joined the club of survivors however, the belief that we will be with our loved one is how we get through the day. To consider for one micro-millisecond that my son is eternally doomed to some obscure place of fire and punishment is irreconcilable, and is incongruent with his loving personality. No god that

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