My Death
Darin announced his suicide plans online, and followed through. How can I help our small town cope with his very public pain?
Keith Mannes
October 1, 2007
On a foggy morning in Maine, my wife was sleeping, and I was in the kitchen making toast and savoring the absolute freedom of having nothing specific to do. We were on vacation for our twentieth anniversary, and as I dug into the jelly jar, I was trying to decide between hiking and golfing. Then the phone rang, odd for 6:30 on a vacation morning. Within seconds, I knew the vacation was over. Darin had committed suicide. As my wife and I drove home to Michigan through that day and the next, the scope and impact came to us in waves, as in call after call over our cell phone, more of the unique and tragic aspects of Darin's death washed over us. He attended our church with his family. Darin was a brand-new high school graduate, an accomplished and decorated athlete, and a young man, so it seemed, with a bright future. Like many such deaths, Darin's made no sense, and still doesn't as I write this today. But Darin's was not like all suicides. What he did—and how he did it—forced our small, rural community to wrestle with isolation and technology, and forced me as a pastor to speak and respond differently at Darin's funeral than I had at any other. Finger at the triggers
There are grainy, faded images in my mind about the church and suicide. Years ago, suicide was kept quiet. The deceased person would leave a note that the sackclothed family would read in private. At the funeral, though people may have known what actually happened, the self-destructive element of death was kept very low-profile. With Darin, the old things had most certainly passed away. Darin was online just moments before he shot himself, "IMing" a girl from school. He was hinting heavily at what he was about to do, and she was trying to talk him out ...
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